Decius at Studio 9294, Hackney (20/01/23).

Dan Addleman reviews Decius’ pulsating live show at Hackney’s Studio 9294 in January.

Jun 08, 2023

Three middle-aged men - two clearly balding, one with cap on head - take to the stage at Hackney’s swanky (and slightly wanky) Studio 9294. The crowd, featuring a mix of finger-on-the-pulse 6 Music dads and younger, trendy London folk make an excitable cheer. The lights remain low as the men on stage position themselves behind one long, elongated stand. It's not entirely clear whether they all have decks, or whether any synthesisers or drum machines are present. Or any other mysterious musical machinery, for that matter.

After a brief delay, a jittery acid house beat begins, still finding its place in the live mix for a few bars. Another man stands at the side of the stage, face painted white with black eye make-up, clad in a vest emblazoned with a slightly incriminating German eagle, and leather hot pants. As the groove gradually sets in, this man slowly and meticulously moves to the centre stage, and begins singing a shrill falsetto refrain into the microphone.

The men providing the beats are Trashmouth Records brothers Liam and Luke May (formerly acid house duo Medicine 8) and Paranoid London/Warmdsucher’s Quinn Whalley. The man at the microphone is Fat White Family and Moonlandingz frontman Lias Saoudi. Collectively they are Decius, a project best described as a bastard techno love-child of their respective members, creating sleazy and hypnotic electronic music. Saoudi provides vocals that bear familiarity to his other projects - wailed, shrieking falsetto and paranoid whispers, which are at their most captivating and transfixing when performed live.

Releasing music sporadically since 2013’s Come to Me Villa, Decius finally released their debut album Decius Vol. I in November, a heady concoction of acid house, heavier techno and warped disco. The release pays notable homage to the early house music of the gay clubs of 1980s Chicago and New York, from the likes of Lil Louis and Frankie Knuckles. The album highlight Show Me No Tears (featuring Maggie The Cat) channels the libidinal and unashamedly queer sound of this era - the genre in its most sensual and danceable.

This also comes through on the aesthetic level, as is evident in the rhythmically charged music video below. It’s plainly a long way from the UK’s contemporary mainstream techno scene, where the likes of Bicep, Overmono and Fred Again dominate big stages with noticeably asexual crowd-pleasers. Decius provide a more stylised, unsettling alternative, one which feels infinitely less sterile.

And so, with the obligatory background-info and uncalled-for-hot-take-on-the-current-scene complete, back to Studio 9294. The jittery beat and shrill refrain begins to transform into album opener Ain’t No Church, and the crowd begins to move, to warm up, a collective energy building among it. Even some of the 6 Music dads start to get in the groove, spurred on by an increasingly animated Saoudi, although some remain in the odd pocket of rigid resistance. Maybe they’re more of your Steve Lamacq IPA flavour.

This opener is followed by Look Like a Man and I Get Ov, as a tangibly more debauched show gets underway. Whistles and whoops come from the crowd as the Fat Whites frontman engages in some trademark shamanistic theatricality. The falsetto Look Like a Man refrain (“I may look like a man, I may walk like a man, I may talk like a man, oh but I’m not a man”) establishes an essential sexual ambiguity to the character Saoudi presents on stage: a confused contradiction in hot pants that is at once sexual and sexless, potent and pathetic, dominant of and submissive to its audience, a quivering techno gimp you might find getting loose in Berlin’s KitKat. It’s a compelling spectacle that accompanies the musical backdrop perfectly, as the dark, unrelenting synths and drum machines come into full motion, echoing the rolling, industrial sound of the German capital.

Though the transitions between the instrumentals prove a little stuttering (the group's live show is in its relatively early stages), this doesn’t halt the cumulative energy of a show that has less to do with precision and perfect execution as it does energy and atmosphere. Macbeth, Masculine Encounter II and the above mentioned Come To Me Villa work to galvanise the audience, save for the odd look of bewilderment at the more eccentric on-stage antics. Particular highlights are the album’s closing two tracks, the hypnotic and unnerving U Instead Of Thought, and healthy slice of sleazy Euro-disco Roberto’s Tumescence, the latter sounding like Giorgio Moroder’s sordid sauna fever dream with a kind of parallel-universe, sexually deviant Daft Punk, their stupid helmets the only thing kept on in the sweaty mélange. “Each of us must twist”...

In a set that feels like it could have gone on for far longer, Decius close with Show Me No Tears, joined on stage by Maggie the Cat, the fellow Trashmouth Records artist who features on this track as the dominatrix in the dynamic. It’s a pulsating, writhing acid house gem that sees Saoudi and the guest vocalist in a brilliantly wayward duet, like if Shane McGown and Kirsty MacColl had spent that year’s Boxing Day in New York’s seediest nightclub, full of turkey, amphetamines and poppers. Serving as a fitting conclusion to proceedings, the crowd at Studio 9294 are left wide-eyed and cheering at the energising and uncanny spectacle of Decius. With their next gig at London’s Village Underground on 9th June, I’d recommend anyone with adequate curiosity to go and check them out. With this in mind, as the group themselves often warn: “Bring a towel…”