“It’s just rock ‘n’ roll, you won’t die!” If there’s one thing The Dare, also known as Harrison Smith, knows how to do, it’s open a show. On the night of his 29th birthday, Smith walks out onto the stage with snippets of ‘Open Up’ ringing out through the venue, he’s greeted with screams and cheers, as if the crowd is witnessing something religious happening in front of them, and honestly, I get it… I’m screaming too. He’s wearing his signature outfit, a full suit and tie with a pair of black sunglasses on for an added ounce of coolness. It’s no wonder why people say the indie sleaze revival is in good hands.
The lights are flashing as he grabs his microphone stand and ‘Open Up’, ironically, opens the show with a huge surge of energy through the infectious lyrics and a pumping bassline you can feel in your chest, a feeling that lasts through the 50-minute set. This energy somehow increases during ‘Good Time’, the crowd jumping and singing their hearts out, and that’s exactly what they’re all here for, a good time!
The electronic beats of ‘Sex’ pulse out through the room, the crowd having no chance to recover from the previous songs. “I want to call your mom and tell her you’re the bomb!” they all scream and point at Smith on stage who does the same back. The first ‘big’ moment of the night came next with ‘Perfume’ and ‘I Destroyed Disco’, arguably two of his biggest songs and the latter of which was dedicated to Calvin Harris. The crowd erupts for these songs, screaming every single lyric while Smith dances wildly around on the stage in front of a set-up of many expensive looking Marshall amps and an impressive lighting rig. You can feel yourself being pushed around for the number of people jumping and dancing but that’s all you can do during this moment. I’m sure if Smith was smart and put the iconic ‘I Destroyed Disco’ lyric “What’s a blogger to a rocker, what’s a rocker to The Dare?” on a t-shirt, they’d sell out in seconds.
An electrified cover of The Sound’s ‘I Can’t Escape Myself’ follows and it allows the crowd to have a few minutes of calm before being treated to two unreleased songs, ‘Cheeky’, which Smith introduces by saying “This is what you are Manchester!”, and ‘Lights, Camera, Action!’. The latter transitions beautifully into ‘Bloodwork’, the closing track from The Dare’s first EP, “This one has no lyrics,” he says before taking a sip from his water bottle and then throwing the rest over the part of the crowd he’s stood in front of, a magnitude of excited screams coming from those hit by the water. It’s during this track that Smith pays homage to ‘Guess’ by Charli XCX, which he famously produced last year, by mixing lyrical elements of ‘Guess’ into the song which the crowd go wild for as if Charli herself was on stage performing.
“Mind if I sing for a minute?” The Dare asks before singing ‘Elevation’, a slow electronic ballad about yearning for a partner and the mental challenge of not seeing them in your life anymore. The energy in the 1300 capacity venue mellows out for a few minutes before the song transitions into ‘You Can Never Go Home’, another slower song in comparison to everything before it.
Walking off the stage, fans scream for more, no one ready for the night to end, but before they have chance to chant out the usual “One more song! One more song!” as most crowds do, The Dare quickly comes back on stage for the final three songs of the night. ‘Movement’ is up first, one of the fastest songs of the night and it gets the crowd screaming, jumping and dancing once more. Before long it’s time for the penultimate song of the night, ‘All Night’, one of the biggest songs on The Dare’s debut album ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’. Between the crowd-pleasing lyrics and the wild yet enticing cymbal smashing solo, the performance has every single person in that crowd hooked and drunk on the anticipation of what was about to come.
As the final song begins, the electronic beat slices through the crowd’s eager anticipation and bodies are jumping around to the infectiously good, ironic and sleazy hit ‘Girls’. You can hardly hear Smith over the noise of the crowd, a frenzy erupting amongst fans. The entire night has been building up to this moment and as Smith sings “I like the girls that do drugs, girls with cigarettes in the back of the club,” it’s hard to believe that this man used to be a substitute teacher at a private school, but I suppose the world works in mysterious ways.
As the show comes to an explosive end, Smith walks off stage blowing kisses and waving to the crowd. The lights come back on and it’s hard to believe that it’s a random Wednesday night in March and not a Saturday night in a New York club in the middle of summer. The Dare is slowly making moves to redefine a genre whilst not taking himself too seriously – and to quote his infamous name drop on Charli XCX’s ‘Guess’ – “Yeah, I think he’s with it.”
