Two hundred people dancing to completely different songs at the same time, in total silence, in a public park. It is either the future of nightlife or a very expensive way to feel briefly insane.
A friend talked me into a silent disco in one of the bigger London parks last weekend, and I want to be upfront that I went in fully prepared to hate it, in the specific way you prepare to hate something you’ve already half decided is a bit silly, and came out the other side with feelings considerably more complicated than straightforward mockery.
For anyone mercifully unfamiliar with the format: everyone wears wireless headphones tuned to one of two or three channels, and you dance, as a large silent crowd, to whatever song is playing in your own individual headset, which means the actual audible experience for anyone standing nearby without headphones is simply several hundred people moving with real conviction to absolutely nothing.
The first ten minutes were, I will admit, genuinely disorienting. You catch yourself watching other dancers and trying to guess which channel they’re on purely from the specific way they’re moving, a kind of amateur forensic music detection that becomes, against my own better judgement, weirdly absorbing.
Somewhere around the second song, something shifted, and I stopped noticing the silence at all and just genuinely enjoyed dancing, unselfconsciously, in a way I don’t think I would have managed with actual speakers blasting the same song at everyone simultaneously and the accompanying sense of being watched by a shared, judging crowd.
I left with slightly sore feet, a mild headache from an hour of headphones, and a genuinely surprising willingness to go again, which is not the outcome I expected when my friend first sent the link with three exclamation marks and no further explanation.
For a proper history of how the silent disco format actually developed and why it caught on in outdoor London events specifically, there is a solid piece at The Onion UK.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.
