When I arrived at Villa just after midnight, James Francis already had the dance floor jumping with some banging breaks tunes. Ordinarily I would have headed to the dance floor myself, but this was my first opportunity to access the V.I.P area and I went straight upstairs to check things out. The view down into the DJ booth with both levels of Villa stretching out before me was very impressive and for a brief moment I contemplated quitting my lucrative reviewing hobby to become a superstar DJ.

I lingered upstairs enjoying the ready access to the VIP bar and chatting to other people who were waiting for Hybrid’s set to start. Hybrid have crossed a few genre boundaries during their career and have quite a broad and ardent fan-base, including one young lady who told me she had every Hybrid release except for their first single. Such dedication! Still, I was a little surprised that there weren’t more people in attendance and it would also be fair to say that the males far outnumbered the females in the crowd on this occasion.

Although Hybrid are a duo, it was only Chris Healings performing on Friday night and he came on at 1am, continuing on from James Francis with some strong beats. Around 1.30am the haunting introduction to Moby’s Porcelain (sorry – unknown remix) could be heard, and I decided that I’d had enough watching and dragged my friends down to join the crowd on the dance floor.

Unlike some of their more avid fans, I’m not an expert on all of Hybrid’s releases but my friends informed me that the set featured a lot of their own production. The emphasis seemed to be on slowly building the melodic intensity of the set rather than bashing out big name tracks. The beats were strong, mostly 4×4 with the occasional breaks track and they totally kept the crowd moving. Sometimes I would recognise snippets of tracks, such as an obvious Thom Yorke acapella (no, it wasn’t their Everything in Its Right Place remix) and also a bit of Rob Dougan’s Clubbed to Death (Hybrid Remix) but really I was too busy dancing and enjoying the music to worry about train spotting track names for this review.

When I heard Finished Symphony just before 3am I was expecting that to be the big finale to the set, but to the delight of the crowd, Chris kept playing well beyond the advertised finishing time. It was unfortunate that more people didn’t stick around to hear the end of his set because as numbers dwindled, the size of the room made the place feel quite empty. This detracted a little from the atmosphere but not from the quality of the music that was being played. For the second time in 18 months Hybrid delivered a fantastic set to an appreciative Perth audience. Hopefully we will see them back out here again soon!