The Concorde 2 audience remembers Trailer Park. They probably have opinions about Central Reservation. What they got instead was something harder to categorize and considerably more interesting: a musician who has spent a decade systematically dismantling the sound that made her famous and replacing it with something stranger, more abstract, and — this is the part that keeps you honest — better. Orton spends most of the show seated at a keyboard rather than reaching for a guitar, and the shift in posture maps directly to a shift in intent. The Ground Above's title track moves ambient synth clouds over drums that refuse to commit to either jazz or drum'n'bass. Cigarette Curls migrates mid-song from laidback soul into dubbed-out space with the casualness of someone changing lanes. This is not a singer-songwriter playing with texture. This is a musician using texture as the primary argument. The band matters here. Bassist Tom Herbert and pianist Sam Beste are rooted in jazz and comfortable at London's Cafe Oto — that particular combination of musical address tells you everything about the register Orton is now operating in. But the show's defining instrument is Christos Stylianides's trumpet, which ranges from breathy Jon Hassell-esque colouration to densely effected white noise. The ensemble doesn't accompany Orton; it surrounds her. What's remarkable is how she handles her own voice in this context — treating it as another instrument in the mix rather than the focal point, mangling lyrics until intelligibility becomes optional. The comparison to John Martyn's vocal approach on Inside Out (1973) is apt and not casual: that was a record that understood distortion and decay as expressive tools rather than production accidents. Orton has arrived at a similar position from a different direction, via folk, trip-hop, and something the mid-2010s reboot unlocked that hasn't been fully named yet. The emotional register is unambiguously adult — sleepless nights, illness, loss, time's acceleration — but it never tips into melancholy. Otherside, the closer, collects itself into something that earns the word 'anthemic' without cheapening it: Orton's voice shifts register, opens up, and the song expands with it. Battered optimism is a more sustainable emotional position than easy uplift, and Orton has clearly decided it's the one worth building on. The audience's reaction tells you something true: they came expecting a certain kind of evening and got a different one, and they didn't feel cheated. They went nuts. That almost never happens when an artist abandons their early work for a later, more difficult mode. It happens here because the new work is genuinely better — not more sophisticated in a way that flatters the listener's seriousness, but better in the sense that it actually does more, takes more risk, and arrives somewhere the earlier records couldn't have reached. Orton is currently on a UK tour through 22 October. If this set is representative — and by all accounts it is — this is a rare live opportunity: an artist operating at the peak of a career that has significantly restarted itself. The people who went to hear old hits and left evangelical converts are the proof of concept.
