Roy Orbison didn't show a lot of emotion, but his songs and voice were brimming with them, writes Graham Reid.
In March 1965 - with seven American top 10 singles behind him since Only the Lonely in early 1960, the most recent Oh Pretty Woman of the previous year - Roy Orbison recorded a television show in Holland with his band of Beatle-clones in sharp suits and leather boots.
Out
front Orbison did what he only ever did. He stood there in his prescription sunglasses, dressed in black and sang with no emotion visible on his pallid and puffy features.
No one would ever claim Orbison was a pop star - he was a few weeks short of his 30th birthday and had enjoyed his first success, the doo-wop influenced Ooby Dooby, a decade previous in the Elvis era - and people didn't quite know how to respond.
The Dutch audience (seen on the previously unreleased DVD accompanying this double disc of Orbison's most productive period) sat in mute politeness.
Two years later when Orbison topped the bill at the Auckland Town Hall over the Yardbirds (with Jimmy Page) and the Walker Brothers, the audience was equally nonplussed. Some walked out.
Orbison was many things - an exceptional singer with operatic control, a distinctive songwriter, and a tragic figure whose wife and two sons died in separate incidents - but he certainly wasn't an entertainer. All he did was write and sing.
But his was a style founded on dramatic narratives (sometimes melodramatic), naked emotion and melodies which could soar through a couple of octaves.
Orbison's greatest songs - Only the Lonely, Running Sacred, Love Hurts, Crying, In Dreams, It's Over, Oh Pretty Woman among them - were recorded in a four-year period in Nashville on the Monument label at the start of the 60s. In fact, by the time he got to Holland for that television show, his hit-making career, not that he knew it, was finished ... until he joined Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynn in the Traveling Wilburys more than 20 years later.
Orbison's reputation rests on these songs where he discovered not just his voice - Ooby Dooby and his pre-Monument singles bear little relationship to his later career - but also his style.
His first Monument successes - Only the Lonely and I'm Hurting - kept one ear back in close harmony doo-wop (both have "dum-dum-dum dum-dee do wah" intros), but their themes of naked pain were rare from male singers at the time.
When Orbison married that vulnerability to a rhythm borrowed from Ravel's Bolero for his 61 hit Running Sacred - an insecure guy fearful her former boyfriend might come back and want her again - he achieved a new height in emotionalism, and also pulled off an extraordinary vocal performance. It was two minutes and 12 seconds, unlike anything else in pop before it.
Because of songs like that - and Crying ("I was alright for a while ... but I saw you last night"), In Dreams (used to unsettling effect in David Lynch's Blue Velvet) and It's Over - Orbison survived the British Invasion. In fact in early '63 he toured Britain with the Beatles, then New Zealand with the Beach Boys and later the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds/Walker Brothers.
But in 1965 he left Monument, tried his hand in films like his old pal Elvis and didn't trouble the charts again until the Wilburys. He died in '88 just before the release of a new solo album, Mystery Girl.
Through the decades many have covered his songs, but they always chose from this remarkable body of work. Over two discs in widescreen mono, that voice, that drama and those songs live again on what would have been his 75th birthday.
He might not have moved much on stage, but these songs are still moving.
Stars: 4/5
Verdict: Two discs of classic, emotional pop and a DVD of the man-mannequin delivering them
- TimeOut
