Music review: Roy Orbison In Dreams, Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow

Roy Orbison In Dreams is not the first example of the resurrection shuffle in the concert arena. Despite passing on in 1977, Elvis Presley has been touring for a number of years with a live band synching up perfectly with concert footage from his Vegas years, while the most assuredly late rapper Tupac Shakur manifested as a 2D hologram to duet with Snoop Dogg at the 2012 Coachella Festival.
Roy Orbison as a hologram in Roy Orbison in DreamsRoy Orbison as a hologram in Roy Orbison in Dreams
Roy Orbison as a hologram in Roy Orbison in Dreams

Roy Orbison In Dreams, Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow ***

But this was a whole new level of technologically enabled grave-robbery with the Big O beamed up through the floor as a 3D-effect image, the fringes of his jacket fluttering in the imagined air conditioning, his transcendent voice chiming out as a pinsharp recording while members of the living and breathing Royal Philharmonic Orchestra exquisitely rendered his melodramatic masterpieces with symphonic pop precision and a

couple of backing singers cooed on cue.

There was no denying the deathless quality of the music – from the wonderfully overwrought Running Scared via the eerie In Dreams to the urgent scurrying strings of I Drove All Night – nor the novelty of witnessing such an accurate sci-fi depiction of Orbison for the first time.

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There were disappointed sighs whenever the hologram took a comfort break and one wag in the crowd even ventured a request. But holograms don’t do encores and neither can they generate the rapport that comes from flesh and blood engagement – just ask the kids bedding down for the night outside the venue, hoping to be first in line for the following evening’s concert by Harry Styles.