I guess you really should never meet your heroes. Darwin Deez, with his baggy jumpers, awkward dance moves and tendrils of curly hair, was my high school hero. Me and my best friend Nancy used to skip out of school early back in the heyday of 2010 to get on the London Midland and see his band play our favourite songs. We wore kooky outfits and snuck into the afterparties of Brick Lane bars. We got things signed.
Five years later, in the green room of the O2, he seemed tired, or maybe a bit sickly. Words came out slow, and his conversational skills were a little awkward. We rattled out the regular interview questions that we had scrawled down on the way there – asking about the meaning of lyrics, the feeling of fame, the artistic process. We wanted to talk to the guy who sang to us at 15 about not feeling quite right; about sitting on the ocean floor and feeling super bored.
We both realised, though, that after a nonsensical, and also rather dull, description of a memory game that he plays on his time off, and then an inexplicably long biography of an author he used to like, that Darwin Deez is actually just soulsick. He complained that he wasn’t ‘inspired’ by anything at the moment – that nothing made him feel like dancing (not even Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’) – that girls made him bored after two years, that he was losing money on the tour and didn’t want to invest too much in it.
He was bitter about no-one buying his concept album, and resentful towards his fans for wanting indie pop bangers that they could sing along to instead of atonal abstraction. He walked out without saying goodbye, and Nancy reminded me that the last time we saw him live, he hung around for ages after his set, just perched on the edge of the stage, smiling genially and giving out hugs like they were going out of fashion.
Walking into the gig later on, we stood out like a couple of sore thumbs as we were neither 15 nor bizarre stragglers in our forties – the two demographics of which the audience seemed to consist.
Undeniably, the 15 year-olds were having a great time, while the forty-somethings were touching each other and dancing inappropriately (imagine a bear trying to shake a tree for coconuts, but the tree is a lady and this is all set to a soundtrack of ‘Radar Detector’). His trilling, plucky notes rang hollow, even though the long, self-involved guitar solos were the only times he seemed like he was enjoying himself.
So, if you want to see what the afterparty of 2010’s indie pop heyday looks like, go search out a Darwin Deez concert. He’ll still be slowly singing “I’m just wasting time away, I’m just wasting time in space”, and you’ll agree.
