The Yacht Club DJs are a force to be reckoned with.
They wield a special power, infusing dance music with a primal intensity that pulsates through the bodies of their audiences. You could say it’s a tribal experience. Their mission statement is to turn even the tamest, best dressed of crowds into a rampant, sweaty mass, thus the name.
Having seen the influence of these two Ballarat boys live, the only was to describe their energy is as unnatural. OUTinPerth spoke to Yacht Club DJ Gaz, the one who crowd surfs on an inflatable raft, about dance music and nudity.
‘There’s such a culture of everyone being super serious and holding down the show, being completely still and being spot on perfect,’ he said.
The boys come from punk and metal bands – a factor Gaz said helped explain the wild on-stage antics of their live shows. It’s often unclear who is enjoying these sets more: the DJs or the crowd. Despite their roles as party overseers, they tend to rage at the same velocity as their audience.
Gaz admitted he had done some ‘pretty rare shit on stage’ with all the scars to prove it although he ruled out getting naked on-stage.
‘I was always the fat kid at school so I was always a bit scared of getting my shirt off but it seems that I just embraced it. I’ve forgotten I’ve had any fears.’
‘We’ve had a lot of people get naked, like fully naked at our shows but I don’t think I’m going to be one of them.’
He recalled one particular gig in Brisbane where a fellow musician took it upon himself to rock out with his cock out, as the saying goes.
‘He got completely naked and somehow got a bass guitar and was on stage with this – it was back when we were getting everybody on stage to dance with us – and he’s butt-naked except for one black sock and a bass guitar, hanging around pretending to play with the music.’
The DJ credited this phenomenon of repeating radical shenanigans to the sense of humour they take to their craft. Taking the piss is totemic.
‘Essentially all music is pop…’ Gaz elaborates ‘there is a tongue and cheek element about it, we sort of want to take the piss out of everyone being so serious, and it’s the same with the craziness on stage.’
‘You’ve got this awesome metal song that you’re going to get right into, so we’ll put Beyonce on it and piss you off really hard but we’re going to have a dance at the same time.’
And that was how the Yacht Club DJs were formed: ‘…we were sitting around in cafes on computers making each other laugh with these ridiculous combinations of songs. And then someone one day was like “you should do that on a stage at a festival†and its all taken off from there.’
‘You’ve got to have a sense of humour about it… I don’t understand the concept of having to take dance music really seriously. It seems really backyards to me. You’re there to have a really good time and let your hair down, like you can have a laugh and you don’t have to go there and get really into a bass line for 20 minutes. I love making that sort of music but I can’t get into the mindset of being really super serious about it. I must have missed it somewhere along the line when DJs became super serious musicians.’
‘I’m not taking anything away from them, I just missed it; I don’t think I was born with that part of the brain.’
Don’t miss the Yacht Club DJs when they come to Perth for Parklife this month.
Benn Dorrington
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