On Thursday 7th March, Bry set out to play The Wardrobe in Leeds, however he didn’t play it alone. He brought Orla Gartland with him too as a support act.
Orla Gartland is a singer/songwriter from Dublin, Ireland who has a YouTube channel that is six years old, full of a mix of covers and originals. As a songwriter, she makes well-written songs that are truly beautiful, as someone who does covers, she makes something amazing and unique out of something that is already great.
As a whole, Orla has an amazing stage presence, being both humorous and continuously communicating with the crowd. After asking the crowd how they were and getting a cheer as a response, she went on to make a comment about how awkward it would be if all conversations were like that. ‘Oh hey, haven’t seen you in a while.’ ‘Whooo!’ We can see how that would create problems, but the comment definitely made us and the rest of the crowd laugh.
Orla’s set list consisted of two things… Originals and covers. The cover was a mash-up of multiple songs that had no relevance to each other at all. The mash-up covered included songs like ‘Sorry’ by Justin Bieber, ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ by Wheatus and ‘Teenagers’ by My Chemical Romance. The songs may have had no relevance to each other, but they made a really good mash-up cover when all combined together and sung live.
The set list also contained originals by Orla really showing her song writing talent. One of the songs she played is the title track from her EP Lonely People. She also played a new song called ‘Overthinking’ which from we can tell is a truly amazing song. ‘Roots’ and ‘Flatline’ were also songs that she performed.
While on stage, Orla told a short story about something a songwriter once told her about writing honest songs. It was something along the lines of ‘if performing it live in front of other people doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it’s not honest enough’. This was before she played ‘Overthinking’.
While singing ‘Roots’, Orla got the crowd to clap along doing multiple singular claps and then a double clap. It took a while for the audience to keep in time, but eventually we all got in time and made something simple sound extremely beautiful. A singer singing her heart out with the whole crowd clapping the beat to the song in time.
The clip below shows the crowd clapping along.
http://twitter.com/lucimeatsix/status/718221600324206594
At the end of the show, Orla also stuck around near her merch stand to meet fans and sell things like posters, EPs, wristbands and t-shirts. She was also up for selfies and hugs while she was there.
Photo Gallery:
All photos were taken by Lucy Swarbrooke
Have you seen Orla Gartland supporting Bry on his UK/Ireland tour or plan to do so? Or did you see her supporting Gavin James in February? Let us know if you did and your thoughts below, or tweet us @CelebMix.