I missed Dan Deacon at last year’s Electric Picnic, where the human spiral he whipped the crowd into was a surprise hit of the festival. So when he returned to Ireland in Andrews Lane Theatre, I ignored the fact that I had a nasty chest infection and attended with two friends. I didn’t know a single Dan Deacon song, but that didn’t matter.
Deacon’s ensemble included fourteen musicians (three drummers, a host on keyboards, weird synthesizers and decks etc.), all uniformed in white jumpsuits, who stood facing different angles on the stage. Dan, who looks a bit like Comic Book Guy’s hipper, younger brother, stood in the center beside a strange tower of lights. A tune or two was played, then the first participation exercise took place.
Deacon instructed the audience to pretend to ride galloping, imaginary horses. Then we were instructed to neigh and halt, kill the horse, and devour the imaginary horse’s guts. He kicked in to a few more songs, all fast and moshy electronic. The energy was pretty high. When the music stopped, we all had to converge and touch a certain audience member’s bottle of beer held high above his head, which, on reflection, warmed us up nicely for participation exercise number three (a couple songs later): everyone again stood converged and turned to the centre of the room. We were asked to close our eyes and place each hand on a head in front of us, so the audience formed a sort of flat human cone. Then Deacon asked us to imagine we were floating down a river under pink clouds and through orange groves (…or something to that effect, I can’t quite remember). Everyone did it. Everybody did exactly what he said. When the music began again in earnest, everyone went crazy. A friend shouted to me – “This is how cults start!”
The exercises built in scale and extremity as the evening went on. For the next, the audience had to make a giant circle with one person in the middle, whose dance moves everyone was to copy from a kneeling position, till we gradually melted into each other. Next the audience was halved and two people, one from each side, had a dance-off. They tagged people in one-by-one until the floor was full.
It all led nicely to the climax. Again the audience was divided as Dan got down into the crowd. A few people formed a human tunnel with their arms and hands held high. The instruction was, when the music started, to go through the tunnel and add to it at the other end, till everyone apart from the band was outside. By the time I got to run under all the arms and come out the other end, I was outside the venue with several hundred others, all whooooing. A few people did wonder out loud – why did we all leave the venue? It makes one think hard about crowd psychology and prehistoric instincts.
Back inside, it was all rounded up with a very basic sing-along. The entire set of lyrics was – “silence like the wind overtakes me – oooooh ooh ooh ooh,” repeated over and over. Such was the atmosphere, that everyone got wrapped up in it. Members of the band took turns to crowd surf, and the song stretched out for a good ten minutes, until it all broke down with a hard punk finish. I left the gig entirely covered in sweat. -Bryan Butler
