Every Dan Deacon gig is a screaming playground of dancing devotees, wildly bopping to his wonky pop. What's his secret? Get off the stage, he tells Jim Carroll
THERE'S no show like a Dan Deacon show. Just ask the many who are still buzzing about his visit to these shores earlier in the year. Playing from the midst of the audience, his equipment scattered on a table and a pair of oversized glasses taped in place, Deacon's extravagant performance and euphoric, gleeful barrage of sounds turn every live trip into a screaming riotous playground.
It's not what we usually get from an electro-acoustic composer, but that narrow term doesn't begin to explain Deacon.
After graduating from New York's Purchase College, Deacon landed in Baltimore. "Some friends who had lived there really pumped [ the place] up and a few people went down to visit and really liked it. It just seemed like the right place at the right time, especially when we found a really cheap warehouse to take over."
That space became home to the Wham City arts collective, which was formed by a clutch of Purchase College grads who found themselves availing of cheap rents. Their new digs quickly became a centre for many of Baltimore's art and music scene-makers and was used for theatrical shows, video productions, club nights and dozens of other happenings, such as a collective performance of Beauty and the Beast.
It was in B-More that Deacon's wonky pop music began to flourish. While he'd done some instrumental electronic shows in college, it took time for his own sound and musical flights of fancy to emerge.
"I wanted my music to lack any sort of pretension, which may be pretentious to say. But I wanted to make it as fun as possible, but also not change my compositional style. Lyrics made it a lot easier to do that and that's when the show started taking shape. Adding lyrics, that meant less time to do gadget twiddling, and I didn't want to stand there so I started dancing. And the audiences just loved it."
As Deacon began to play more and more shows, he found that the stage had become something of an obstacle.
"When I was on the stage, it felt weird and uncomfortable and I couldn't connect to the audience. After I set up on the floor, I got used to people being right up front. After that, when I set up on a stage, people wouldn't dance as hard, so I just sort of made 'no stages' a rule."
The buzz from those live shows took Deacon far from Wham City. One tour of the US saw him using Greyhound buses to get from city to city after his car gave up the ghost in the middle of California.
"That tour and the bus really changed how I did things," he says. "My shows were never very formal to begin with, but they became so much more informal. I found that it was just fun to talk to the audience, maybe because I was just so happy to see people. At most shows, there's no interaction between the artist and the audience.
"But after spending all day on a bus, my only real time to communicate was when I was performing. So I just started talking, and that's when the show started taking this song-and-dance routine. That tour has formed what I do now."
Deacon has released many CD-Rs on tiny indie labels, but this year's Spiderman of the Rings album brought new multitudes to his fan club. From party anthems such as The Crystal Cat to the absurd wallop of Wham City, the album ensured a stream of newbies to thrill along to Deacon's madcap pop music.
"I grew up listening to the Beatles and Kinks and Led Zeppelin and stuff like that. I think pop is the music of our century and I think it would be foolish to shy away from it. Spiderman was the most fun to make, maybe because it's an album which has been a long time coming."
Spiderman of the Rings is out now on Carpark. Dan Deacon plays the Pavillion, Belfast (November 29th); Roisin Dubh, Galway (November 30th); Model Arts, Sligo (December 1st); and Whelan's, Dublin (December 2nd)
