I went to Joy Orbison and all I got was a great sense of joy, good music, and fun times

Joy Orbison at Decks // China Meldrum

Walking past the slightly uncanny midnight pickleball league in a mostly asleep Entertainment Quarter, I wondered if anyone else was aware of the musical significance of what was going to happen inside Liberty Hall. Joy Orbison, the London-born and based DJ and producer, was about to play his first show in Australia. I reached Liberty Hall, pretty set in my conviction that there wasn’t a good chance many pickleball players knew about Joy Orbison. I was pleasantly and incredibly surprised. 

What struck me most about this night was the immense and diverse community that were buzzing to see Joy Orbison. A 50-something lifetime raver had been waiting years for this day, a father-daughter combo were having a great time, a legion of old school ravers stood in the mezzanine, and a guy on gap year from Leeds seemingly made friends with half the crowd, dancing with everyone who engaged with him. People held hands, danced together, and pointed at each other when they recognised the next track, carrying a sense of a genuine community throughout the show. Despite all of the memes and videos of the sheer level of phones swarming around the decks at many shows, the vast majority of the audience were locked in to the bass-heavy madness of the night.

While genre-defying is a deeply oversaturated word in the music scene today, no one embodies it quite like Joy Orbison. Genre, BPM, key, and style were all mixed so fluidly by Joy Orbison, until eventually, all that was left was different musical threads, all weaved through sometimes minutes-long transitions into a sonic tapestry. Jungle, Brazilian Funk, Tech House, House, Drum & Bass, a rare ambient track, Techno, and Jersey Club, were all weaved together seamlessly, keeping the crowd on their toes. Joy Orbison describes his DJ philosophy as always wanting to try something new, not just play his hits, but expose the audience to something they wouldn’t usually expect, and this was made clear throughout the set. Insane pairings and transitions sent the crowd wild. Most memorable was a completely rogue yet entirely well-received Brazilian funk mix of Charli xcx’s ‘b2b’ mixed directly into hard techno. 

After a breather, in the form of an unreleased Four Tet edit of Mazzy Star’s ‘Into Dust,’ the last hour of Joy Orbison’s set was truly a speedrun of his greatest hits and where experimentation gave way to pure madness. The one Joy Orbison track on everyone’s minds, ‘flight fm,’ was given special attention — the crowd going completely mental the second we heard its distinctive bassline being mixed into the previous track. Joy Orbison moved through not only ‘flight fm’ but also playing the Fred Again edit ‘flex fm’ and moving from that into a jersey club-esque remix of the original song. From there, we were taken on a tour of Joy Orbison and the UK’s greatest hits, speeding through an absolute masterclass of grimy UK production. Interplanetary Criminal and Blanco’s ‘Races’ sent the crowd spinning, and it only got wilder when Joy Orbison, Overmono, and Kwengface’s ‘Freedom 2’ played. Notably, I caught at least three people showing their phone screens requesting the song — while I’m unfamiliar with whether this is standard practice, I noticed Joy Orbison glimpsing up to make sure that the requesters were having a good time. They were. 

The set ended with around 15 minutes of pure jungle, a welcome change of pace and cooldown from the largely bass-dominated set. As the crowd realised this was the beginning of the end, the chants of ‘one more song’ grew feral. But all the songs had been played, and what songs they were. As we walked through cups and cans with the house lights on, Joy Orbison and Fold stayed back to shake hands, chat, take photos, and talk. The air was buzzing with post-set joy or maybe just tinnitus, but I walked away with a genuine sense that Joy Orbison’s Australian debut couldn’t have gone any better. A genre-defying, completely rowdy set turned a group of strangers into a community, even if it was just for a few hours — an experience that I’m unsure most could pull off. Overall, the sentiment of the crowd was that we were truly lucky; lucky to experience the debut of an artist well and truly in their element, and lucky to be around people who were wholeheartedly invested in every second of music. Joy Orbison will not be one to miss when he comes back to Sydney again.