SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO

I believe.

My friend Chris Mcneill made a fine point last Friday. We were at the Mezzanine, a warehouse-style performance space just south of Market Street. The English duo Simian Mobile Disco finished a tremendous set and a cadre of DJ’s were rounding off the night playing all forms of dance music. Old-fashioned techno melted into dance-pop remixes, and plenty of faceless, outsider electronica kept the floor shaking and the sweat pouring.

Mr. Mcneill suggested a certain buried denial: “How bad do these guys want to play a New Order song?”

The Mezzanine looks like a set piece from the film 24 Hour Party People, the movie that tracked the rise and slide of Factory Records, the Manchester-based label that gave meaning to proto-rave dance bands like Happy Mondays, New Order and more. The interior of Mezzanine is dark and angular (like Joy Division!). Pipes and ducts and vents and seven disco balls cover the ceiling. The walls are black. There's speakers and woofers everywhere. The real stage is the dance floor—not the awkward little triangle in the back of the club. Our mottled, culture-soaked, post-Day-Glo generation congregate and pulse.

24 Hour Party People trailer.

We’re overexposed and loving it. The Mezzanine is a new nest; both the club and its audience didn’t exist five years ago. Mr. Mcneill’s point is that they did exist 30 years ago, back in the late 1970’s in England when Tony Wilson built a magnifying glass so the world could zoom in on what was going on. There were synthesizers and drum machines, robotic vocals and noise swells. The experience of the music was half the performance and half the audiences reaction—the the party itself. The performers and DJ's touring through the Mezzanine often owe much to these forefathers.

The audience at the Mezzanine.

Inevitably, this music creates decadence and hedonism. On a busy night at the Mezzanine there are five bars. Though the Simian show was full, “only” three bars were open, not including a fourth in the V.I.P. The floor was packed and sticky. The crowd seemed knowledgeable, singing along and reacting to Simian’s James Ford and James Anthony Shaw. The group’s album, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is one of my favorites this year. The songs take Justice’s metallic simplicity and make it more elemental, mixing tempo's and genres and hooks and riffs. There’s more sass, for one, but also a bit more referencing. If Justice is like the summer vacation of the electro-pop surge, Simian is summer school. If Justice is Def Leppard, then Simian is Billy Idol. Point being: there’s a lot going on in Simian songs. I'm a fan.

The duo brought a great light show with the great tunes. The mixing boards, computers, samplers, and other sound machines were built into a Starship Enterprise-like lighting bay. Mr. Ford and Mr. Shaw jogged around the equipment bank, facing the audience every so often to create waves of thunderous narcissism—I mean applause. Large black torches, which looked like strange, abandoned runes during the opening DJ sets, lit and swiveled, creating thousands of dramatic camera phone photos.

Simian Mobile Disco in San Francisco. Dramatic camera phone photo by me.

Still. Mr. Mcneill makes a point. The music never stops at Mezzanine: it pauses briefly while Simian warms up it’s lights and gets 500 people to clap and scream, then it pauses an hour later as Simian waves goodbye and the DJ’s come back out quick as they can to spin records they hope Mr. Shaw and Mr. Ford approve of. It shouldn't be a requirement, but it would be nice to hear a New Order song in there, to hear the performers and the venue all grooving together in the name of posterity.