If modern musical originality were a brand, Lior would be the ultimate marketing campaign. With his utterly unique blend of melodic pop, rootsy guitar riffs and traditional Middle Eastern influences, Lior captivated an audience and amazed even himself that such music so engaged his fans. His support act, iOTA, was interesting and certainly creative, but left little impact by comparison.

Welcomed to the stage by an electric audience, Lior set the mood for the night with his enormous grin and clearly irrepressible excitement, declaring his love for the Tivoli as “the best venue in Australia”. A typical enough claim, but no one could doubt this singer’s sincerity. Opening with the title track to his debut album, Autumn Flow, he immediately transferred his nervous energy into his music, producing a beautiful and dynamic performance of a song that was already a gem. The complicated guitar melody flowed effortlessly from his fingers, while the story of the lyrics washed over the audience via his charming vocals. Ending the song with his now trademark skat, Lior was met with a unanimous roar of approval.

What followed was an absolute pleasure to experience. Every song was an emotional journey into the psyche of the writer, as he quite obviously relived the pain, awe and sheer jubilation that had inspired each respective piece on his face, in his voice and through his many guitars. A particular highlight was his live reworking of ‘Building Ships’, a touching allegory of the breakdown of a relationship, as he let his voice lead the band and the song to a brilliant crescendo, the climax of which seemed to focus the consciousness of the entire audience onto the exact feeling that had spawned such a magnificent creation. His tone somehow both tender and brutal, Lior captured the paradox of love and loss in a single, heartbroken note, and the poetry of the lyrics added yet another level of beauty.

Despite the occasional faltering of the sound system at the venue, and a head cold (which was undetectable to most), Lior held everybody captive and delivered a truly powerful performance, running the remarkable gamut of his ability, both for music and storytelling. His tried and true material from Autumn Flow was obviously well known and loved by all, and the sampling of new songs that he provided, including a Mexican ballad of life and death and a poppy song driven by a Beatles-esque beat, left everyone well and truly excited about a potential new album. Lior’s decision to close the show, in his second, by-demand encore, with a Hebrew prayer for compassion, summed up the true ability, attitude and awe-inspiring nature of the man. The prayer was truly beautiful, and remarkably difficult. It was a brave but original move. Lior had no trouble with the vocal heights, but it was his use of these to reach emotional peaks that left each and every person stunned. To summarise the reaction of the crowd in two overhead comments: “I can say I was there when he was small, in an intimate theatre”, and “I want to be Jewish.”