JOY RIDER
ADVANTAGE STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME
A CONFESSION: without being overly familiar with the works of Vance Joy and not previously giving it too much thought, I had assumed that his stage name, an amalgam of two characters from Peter Carey’s novel, Bliss, was his real name. As such, I had a vague image in my mind’s eye of a modern troubadour, a larger-than-life character perhaps given to affectation and flamboyant dress.
What I find when James Keogh materialises on screen via a Zoom call from Barcelona, is a man without any conceits, airs or graces. Instead, I’m greeted by a friendly, humble and down-to- earth fellow who reminds me, both in appearance and in his air of thorough decency, of golfer Adam Scott. Nursing a mug of black tea on a couch, Keogh’s curly hair is still damp from a shower and he wears the type of hiking fleece you might pull on after a run. He looks to me like the footy player or jobbing law clerk he might have been in a different life, not a folk singer or a pop star – and not one whose songs have racked up over 5 billion streams and who has toured with the likes of Taylor Swift and P!nk. You’d have to conclude that perhaps he needed that stage name.
For Keogh, Vance Joy was an attempt to draw a line between his professional and private lives. More simply, it was a name that just rolled off the tongue a little better than Keogh. But today, the boldness of the name he’s managed to wholly inhabit reminds him of a time when he wasn’t so sure of himself. A time when neither James Keogh, nor Vance
