Will the real Sasha and Digweed fans please stand up?

Will the real Sasha and Digweed fans please stand up?

25 April, 2008 | 2.44PM

• Section: Music News Topics: Sasha & Digweed Tour 2008
• Written by: Industry Boy

Last night, Sasha and John Digweed’s gig at the Roseland Theatre in Portland, Oregon was a little odd.

“It looks like a very old venue,” John Digweed said as the boys loaded up the equipment into the venue, and admittedly, the Roseland did have a Happy Days school gymnasium feel about it.

With the entire top floor full of rows of wooden pull down seats I had expected no one to go upstairs, but a couple of hundred actually took their seats in time for the 10.30pm Sasha and Digweed show to begin.

Some bobbed their heads, others toe tapped, a few took photos - it was one of the strangest sights of the tour so far.

Dance music is music designed to make you dance, and Sasha and John are two of the best DJs in the world when it comes to encouraging a crowd to get their knees up collectively.

So it’s curious then that some of the Portland punters saw the need to sit down and watch the show, rather than take part in the activity.

Clubbing is a social dance, inclusive and infectious, and the entire show depends on the collective energy of the crowd.

The DJs role then, is to join individuals together through music, with the aim being to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

But because some of its punters were spectators rather than attendees, Portland lost some of that collective energy.

That’s not to say that the show wasn’t rocking for some - downstairs was the standard Sasha and John Digweed story with sweaty, excited clubbers dancing their asses off - but it could have been better had everyone joined in.

Real Sasha and John Digweed fans don’t sit down.

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