Credit: Uli Loskot

A jetlagged Dan Deacon has come to the UK waving a flag for the bands of Baltimore. Sporting lime green socks, scruffy cut-off shorts, Timmy Mallet glasses, a huge Yoda head key-ring and a toddler’s yellow sun-hat with a lion’s face, Dan Deacon cuts quite a figure, as if cocking a snoop at new rave. Having headed to the airport straight from a festival, he claims not to have showered for four days. Music Towers assures him he doesn’t smell as we sit in a scrap of green in central London in the sunshine.

In a few hours, club-goers at The End’s Durrr night will be experiencing his first-ever British performance. He has big plans for them; “I might try to start the audience chanting, saying a ridiculous phrase, using very elaborate nonsensical count-downs, maybe create a circle for dance contests. But a lot of it changes from night to night, so we’ll see.” In practice this is a lot more fun than it sounds. Deacon’s show is a blend of music, audience participation and hilarious comedy all presented in such an unassuming, unsophisticated, silly way that everyone joins in with wild enthusiasm.

According to Deacon who studied electro-acoustic composition and counterpoint at New York’s Purchase College, “I’m a composing performer or a composer and performance artist. The term singer songwriter doesn’t really apply. Actually I’m not really a singer but I sort of sing.” Music Towers wonders why he doesn’t just call himself a musician. “I guess I pretty much am a musician but I’m being a jerk about it,” he concedes. “When I started playing shows it was very performance driven. Most of the stuff was pre-recorded, like all of it, no vocals, so I’d have this weird elaborate stage performances where I’d pick people out and have them do weird things. But I felt like I was putting on this weird play so I got some pedals, found two signal generators in the garbage and started doing weird drone things. But that bored the hell out of me so I tried to incorporate the two; having audience interaction, some pre-recorded stuff but then focus on the vocal effects processing, vocoding and processing the sine or square wave live.”