I have a reputation for being long of limb. My arms and legs are gangly to the point they're disproportionate to the rest of my body, and during photographs it's not uncommon for my wrists to bend back in awkward positions, capturing the more mongoloid nature of my person.
I also have a reputation for dancing. As one could imagine, these two reputations work together to render me a flailing mongoloid.* When I was younger, I steadfastly refused to dance at all oun account of I was prone to throwing shapes with my mommy to Depeche Mode and the Cure in our kitchen and my sister had a caustic tongue. Having no co-ordination was a curse. I couldn't learn off any dance routines in the playground when I was younger because I'd been known to fall simply by tripping over my own feet. I couldn't dance seductively in nightclubs when I first started going at the age of sixteen because having arms that are twice the length of your entire body is not seductive. Also, I had no breasts. I remember the first time I ever got into a nightclub without any ID, it was dark and damp, the floor was sticky, the smoke machines were broken and emitting a grime-inflected wheeze. If only I'd have sunk a few pineapple bacardi breezers and bust some moves on the adhesive dance floor. But no. I sat quietly in a shadowy corner the whole night and had a terrible time and my friends probably thought I was a boring bitch.**
And then one day, something miraculous happened. I stopped caring about whether people would laugh at me (because they inevitably would) and started dancing. It was like a poignant and soaring moment from a Julia Stiles ballet based romantic drama. I danced around my kitchen, I danced in my bedroom, I danced around the lake near my house that overlooks a church (until members of the congregation having a fag break saw me), and I danced on nights out. It didn't matter whether I looked like I was having an epileptic fit, or accidentally knocked drinks out of peoples' hands who were standing meters away; I was having fun.
Day nine is a song you that you can dance to.
Everything about this song invokes in me the power of clumsy dance. The sporadic percussion, the shuddering guitar, the descending bass line, Luke Jenner's high-pitched vocal quirks, the call and response gang shouts. And of course, the cowbell.***
* I've used the word 'mongoloid' twice now. For anybody who thought I was going to pick a Devo song I apologise sincerely for leading you up the primrose path.
** The veracity of this description is completely up for debate.
*** I'm starting to think I have Christopher Walken-like levels of obsession with cowbell.
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