Live Review

Joy Orbison – Leaf, Liverpool

• 30th Apr 2010

Fusing the first half of menacing Manchunians with the second half of a heartfelt troubadour, the name Joy Orbison suggests an understanding of how emotions, feelings and genres can crossover and create something entirely new and original, with knowing winks and nods to the past.

To this end, those whose lives have gone Joy Orbison-less would probably expect this year’s model to be a gloomy slice of lyrical disco – how wrong you were and how empty your lives have been! Instead, Mr Orbison is a wild, chiselled genius of a boy who has recently acquired various titled as “HOT NEW DJ” and “HIP NEW PRODUCER” however there is an element of cool that this hyped disc-jockey clearly oozes that makes capitalised hyperbole extremely naive and so 2009!

His set; perfectly compacted in the ultra-snazzy and delightfully chic Leaf Tea Rooms is one of euphoria and youth and with little or no words, the song’s open and shut joy manages to be strangely poetic. Images of sunsets, dawn and the everlasting glow of modernity are never far from young Peter O’Grady’s creations and the synchronised shuffle of dizzy, beautifully formed young lovers of dub step means that his place alone on a podium looks more like a political backdrop than that of a youthful producer.

Opinion polls would surely show that J.O is more favourable than G.B or D.C in any pre-election presumption, he’s a dream Prime Minister in waiting – sure to introduce a tax on anyone bored and a new scheme that provides every under 18 with headphones and decks, a book of love poems and a back catalogue of dance-floor fillers – then broken Britain will be fixed – with hypnotic sensuality, dirty trance and a new breed of electronica.

“Things can only get better!” went Labour’s victory anthem in 1997.The winning party in this year’s election should choose a song that won’t confirm a political change but suggest a revolution and a call to arms. They should chose distorted brilliance; change with re-invention, change with inspiration and in Leaf Tea Rooms, change with two sugars. And come May 7th or whenever it is, the whole country would stand and sway in digitalised romance “I Do!” they would scream, confirming that the youthful sultan of dubstep had in creating “Hyph Mngo” and the like tore up the rule book and urged on a new age in music – one that could potentially make politics interesting.

Scintillating and seminal, Joy Orbison broke my heart, stole my tongue and set alight the scene in Liverpool; he’ll be doing it again in a place near you. DO NOT MISS OUT!