The Dare, Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds review • DIY Magazine

“You guys like Charli XCX?” shouts the hazy silhouette of Harrison Patrick Smith - aka The Dare, suited and booted like NYC’s indie sleaze answer to Alex Turner - backlit by half a dozen white, jittery beam lasers. As he zips around, swigging beer and fiddling with decks, a pulsing house remix of Charli’s Billie Eilish-featuring, Smith-produced ‘Guess’ remix (which catapulted him into the zeitgeist) blares. “I like her too,” he teases, hurling himself around alongside the crowd. As empty beer cups are thrown, a bra flies towards him through the air - which, judging by his reaction (or lack thereof), may not be the first time this has happened. All this devotion to reckless abandon is, suffice to say, at a 350 person capacity venue in Leeds.

On a bitterly icy Thursday in November, this is actually the perfect alternative crowd for relative newcomer The Dare’s debut record ‘What’s Wrong With New York?’ - a hedonistic alt-pop bible that intercepts the Brat-summer baton for a nihilist audience that doesn’t want it to end. In the relative intimacy of Belgrave Music Hall & Canteen, the crowd sardines themselves towards the shallow stage, fingers outstretched towards the scuzzy pied piper as he flirtily introduces himself: “My name’s The Dare, but you can call me Harrison if you want.” The women not prepared to throw their bras on stage have instead donned matching uniforms of slim-cut suits with pencil-thin black ties, and a few men do the same (though, with their jackets removed, it’s less The Dare and more The Book of Mormon).

This isn’t the type of concert with interludes or intermissions; it’s non-stop, ear-bursting catharsis. The swaggering Smith, an impassioned modern pop rock-star, hangs from the mic right from wiry introduction ‘Open Up’ to the set’s closer, the Bloodhound Gang-like fan-favourite ‘Girls’; and near-constantly, the crowd jumps in tandem like a singular possessed entity, chanting lyrics to hyper-sexual ragers like it’s serious sport. His command means there’s no interrupting their devotion to his party - which at one point he refers to as “an orgy” - and even when the sound system cuts off (twice, mind, which Smith says he’ll make use of by having a few more beers off-stage), they wait with baited breath before returning to their airborne pursuits.

Occasionally, it’s a bit much - Smith reminds them: “if you’re pushing people, don’t do that […] this is just fun, nothing crazy, it’s just music”. At other times, he checks in on the crowd like a trip-sitter: “Hey, how do you guys feel now? Me too, me too,” he answers with a beer-indebted drawl. The only lull is the Coldplay-like ‘Elevation’, a well-earned reprieve that sends a few people to the loos. Returning with ‘You Can Never Go Home’, it’s back to business.

There’s no shortage of The Dare’s on-brand post-irony, either - a world where “everything’s too serious and nothing matters, but like, it’s not, and it does actually,” so says DIY - and despite all his animation, in the end Smith plays the whole thing off deadpan, refuting any passion that could come off as uncool. Flouting the standard concert script, at the back end of the show he announces: “I’m gonna walk off stage and drink seven or eight beers, then you guys are gonna cheer so loud that I’m forced to come back, so, thank you.” Yet, before the crowd has time to raise their decibels, those white lasers strike up, and Smith’s back with ‘All Night’, the room's chanting fueling this unrelenting sleaze-fest. He latches arms with a fan and drags them on stage, but they’re fast removed by security - much to his regret.

This is the kind of show the crowd seems to have craved. Smashing a cymbal towards them, Smith - still barely visible, the silhouette of any cartoonish metrosexual lothario - embodies and inspires a still-beating post-Covid hedonism, a willingness to go batshit and resist introversion. The Leeds audience, not wasting a second, persists, aware a return to normality awaits. After Smith’s sunnies fly off his head, the track closes and, straight-faced as ever - as if none of this ever happened - he says simply: “Thank you so much. I’ll see you later.”