Eccentricity was, and remains, central to her appeal as an artist. It seems perfectly right, in the desert today, that her outfit should admit no surrender to the conditions. It’s 99F (37°C) outside, but Lorde wears an oversized black T-shirt, a complicated tangle of necklaces, Adidas Superstars, and blue jeans so wide in the leg that, when she moves about, she has to be supporting about a kilo of denim. “One of my favourite things,” she says slowly, watching me scribble notes about her outfit and no doubt anticipating this paragraph, “is reading in magazines what I wear from the perspective of a male journalist. Always interesting.”