Talking Passions: The Dance Off Soundsystem

This week on Talking Passions Adam meets the gang from The Dance-Off Soundsystem. Notorious amongst festival goers, and setting itself apart from the rest as a stage that encourages maximum crowd participation, the wonderful crew at Dance-Off never fail to get the party started, giving the crowd a shared experience and creating hilarious memories for them to cherish long after the revelry is over. I caught up with Mike and Luc recently to chat about their passion for fun and a good old fashioned dance-off.

Adam Chisman (TP): “As young boys what did you want to be when you grew up and how did you get to where you are now?”

Luc Yabsley (L): “I wanted to be a marine and I’m not. I lack discipline and it turns out I don’t like shooting people very much. Moving to Bristol changed things for me. I played a lot more music, made a lot of new friends that are even closer friends now – you know, like my family – and just doing events for quite a number of years. This is where it all led to. I haven’t had strict guidelines for where I was gonna go with it.”

TP: “Nice. And no shooting people, which is always good.”

Mike Chatz (M): “Surprisingly [I’m] not too dissimilar from Luc actually. I wanted to be a fighter pilot and fly fast planes. Then I kind of found out that that probably meant dropping bombs on people, and doing it for a very long time as well, so I changed my mind about that when they told me, ‘It’ll take seventeen years,’ or something. So yeah, I went to school, did some engineering, got a bit bored of that and started the Dance-Off with a small circle of friends about nine years ago now. So it’s been a long road to get to our ninth anniversary, which we’re really excited about.”

TP: “Awesome stuff. Well everybody loves a good Dance-Off, whether it’s at a festival, in the club or with your Dad, but you guys have taken the concept to another level. Where did you get your inspiration from when starting the project?”

M: “The whole idea of doing it at a festival came about when Sophie, my fiancée, and I went to Secret Garden Party for the first time in 2007. We went as litter pickers and ended up camping in the backstage bit next to a bunch of people that had been given some money to do an egg painting workshop. We were like, ‘That sounds a lot better than picking up litter! And they’re getting a little bit of money to do something really cool.’ So we left the festival thinking, ‘Next year we’ll think of something and we’ll do that.’ We all grew up in a little town called Fleet. Not a lot going on there. We used to get the train up to London and go raving a lot, all together as a big team, and for whatever reason whenever we went to the club together we always ended up getting involved in dance battles and pulling out these ridiculous moves, always trying to one-up each other – just really manly stuff – and thought that would be a really fun thing to do at a festival. We developed the idea a bit more, and thought a boxing ring would be a great little area to do that, and the idea was born. Luckily they loved it.”

TP: “And here we are nine years later. Now you guys make this look easy but I’m sure it’s not all fancy dress and fantastic hair. Can you tell me about the hard work that goes on behind the scenes?”

M: “Yeah, there is a fair amount of less glamorous stuff that needs to be done. Back in the day it used to be easy. You’d turn up with a few pallets and some rope and you could kind of do whatever you want. But now, because it’s the size that it is, you’ve got to do things in a responsible way and make sure no one’s gonna get hurt and everything’s safe and built well and all that sort of stuff. That takes a lot of time and consideration. It is like running a small business as well, so there’s that aspect, and working with new festivals and old relationships with festivals take time but it’s all really enjoyable and really good fun, so it doesn’t really feel like work. But there is a lot more to it than just going to a festival and having a rinse-out.”

TP: “But you do get to bust out some awesome dance moves. Have you guys ever been out-danced?”

M: “Me personally, yeah pretty much every time.”

L: “I’m gonna second that. Unless it’s getting naked, which nobody likes anyway, I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost every single one. But I did beat Dave, I beat our other DJ… and then I snogged him, so it was kind of a mutual win, I guess you could say. We tend to stay, as the DJ’s, up in the booth and give you guys the opportunity to do it for yourselves. It wouldn’t be right if we came down there. Who knows what would happen.”

M: “Back in the early days we used to have to battle each other quite a lot because no one knew what the hell was going on. ‘What are these idiots with a boxing ring doing shouting in a mega-phone?’ So back in the day there was a lot more Dance-Off, inter-Dance-Off stuff going on. I don’t know who won, but me and my brother Jamie had a Dance-Off. He was wearing an old woman suit and I was wearing an old man suite and we pretty much had incestual sex on the dance floor. That led to the birth of a beautiful baby, as well. It was a nice theatrical piece.”

L: “Drama at its best.”

M: “The whole thing was on video, I showed it to my grandad and he cried.” 

TP: “Well, you’re renowned for getting the party started no matter what the crowd. Can you tell me about one of the funniest moments you’ve had whilst on the road?”

M: “Well nudity’s always funny, but we’ve kind of become a bit desensitized because we’ve seen so many naked people over the years…”

L: “For me it’s the year that we built the Mayan temple and we passed Ollie through the DJ booth, down the… it was an auditorium built staging, so you had a Mayan temple and then one, two, three blocks leading down to the ring. And Ollie had a rocket costume on, a really big cardboard papermache Blue Peter grade costume, and we passed him through the booth, down the steps and into the ring. That was pretty funny. Ollie Robertson’s always at the centre of something ‘show piece’. We turned him into our meat eating gimp when he ate rotten meat that had been in an un-working fridge for quite some time.”

M: “Yeah, over the course of a weekend he ate a whole roasting joint of beef raw…”

L: “That had been in a questionable fridge. There’s no way it was ok…”

M: “Yeah, it was grey, but it was all in the name of fun.”

TP: “That’s pretty funny. So If you could take the Dance-Off stage anywhere on the road where would it be and why?”

L: “I’ve got a certain answer for this, and I think it would be to do a Dance-Off tour. So in answer to your question it wouldn’t be to go to one particular place; we’d have the facilities to do a tour of numerous cities throughout the UK with a crew bus or small-scale tour bus and all of our stuff and be able to take a month out. That would be amazing because we’ve done quite a few cities, and there’re a lot of people who are receptive to it, which is great. But just having that tour, not stopping and going to the next one, as we’re always open to taking it somewhere new.”

M: “For me, one big ambition is to take it to Burning Man, because I’ve been a couple of times now, just gone and enjoyed it there. And just taking the UK party team of Dance-Off crew to the States and going to Burning Man would just be so good. I think they’d warm to it eventually…”

L: “Like everybody…”

M: “I think it would be incredible. It’s just the perfect place for it, really.”

TP: “Yeah, maybe you could get air-lifted into the desert.”

M: “Well, the dream is to make a mobile Dance-Off.”

L: “Burning Man would be great, wouldn’t it? I’ve not actually been but I know what she’s about.”

TP: “Amazing. Well finally, what do you guys have in store for us over the next few months?”

M: “Well, summer’s round the corner. There’s a lot coming up but not all of it’s confirmed so I can tell you what we’ve got confirmed, which is the usual big hitters. We’ve got our home from home, Secret Garden Party, Love Saves The Day, which is just around the corner on May Bank Holiday. We’ve got Boomtown, and there’s a handful of other festivals that we did last year and we’re hoping to do again. It’s looking good but we can’t say 100% because it’s not sealed yet. It’s gonna be a busy summer and you’ll see us around.”

TP: “Fantastic, and some new fancy dress on the go I’m sure.”

M: “Yeah, we’ve got a good theme for Secret Garden Party this year. The over-all theme is gardens of the future so it’s futuristic sci-fi and we’ve already come up with our twist on this but we can’t say too much just now. But there might be a potato mashing contest… that’s all I’m gonna say.”

Here’s a feature on Bristol24/7 called Talking Passions. It’s a Bristol-based interview series that hopes to inspire your creative side by interviewing passionate individuals in Bristol’s arts and music scenes. The driving force behind the series is a belief that within each of us is a creative soul with untold capabilities. It’s not always easy to follow your dreams and try to make it work, and it should be celebrated!

Started by local journalist Adam Chisman, and with links to various Collectives in the city including Liquifyah, The Coconut Collective, as well as Irish online magazine Ceol Caint, Talking Passions comes in two weekly parts, with brand new written interviews on talkingpassions.com and Bristol24/7 and audio interviews on BCFM’s The Bristol Music Show and Soundcloud. 

If you’d like to get in touch with the guys at Dance-Off you can contact them via Facebook or through the Hotcakes website.

Words: Adam Chisman (Talking Passions)

Pictures: Jonny Taphouse.

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