Visitors to this year’s Edinburgh fringe will almost certainly have encountered one of the many silent disco tours. On paper, these gatherings are harmless fun. In practice, large groups of boisterous revellers fill the streets, clogging up the roads as they loudly sing along to Greased Lightning. It’s a recurring problem that has drawn numerous complaints from people. The city council even considered banning them last year.
“It’s a nightmare. They’re completely inescapable,” one Edinburgh resident, Angus Duncan, told the Times. “It’s like they think they’re in Disneyland.” But are silent discos really that bad?
The case against
Look, nobody loves to have fun more than me. I once bought a hooded top on finance from a designer store and spent 11 months paying it back. That’s fun. But a silent disco? I mean the clue is in the name. Having just finished my own run at the Edinburgh fringe, I know the silent disco walking tour is the worst offender and makes me wish a freak sinkhole would appear and pull us all to our untimely, but totally deserved, deaths.
Much like the bubonic plague of 1347, silent disco is a blood-curdling infection that spreads across the city, carried on the back of headphone-wearing fleas! Fleas! Its biggest problem is the performed transgression of the whole experience, for which you pay a princely sum of £15. I’m not mad at the individuals taking part, for they know not what they do.
I’m incensed that we live in a society where stumbling through the streets of Edinburgh half-yowling the words to YMCA (because nobody knows all the words) is someone’s idea of a good time and a rebellion. Whatever happened to imagination? Tom Rasmussen
The case for
The problem isn’t silent discos. Silent discos aren’t bursting into private spaces in Edinburgh and singing Abba songs. Silent discos aren’t foisting their irritating behaviour on those who don’t want it. The problem, as always, is people. Inconsiderate, selfish, rude people. Because in the right place – a confined space, where others aren’t disturbed – a silent disco is a beautiful thing.
Each year, I am one of the DJs at the silent disco at the End of the Road festival, and I watch a couple of thousand silent disco dancers doing their thing. The great thing about a silent disco is that it’s not really silent – which is why it needs its own space. Although the music is played through headphones, being immersed in this way causes people to behave differently from how they would at a conventional disco. They sing along. As loudly as they can. Because they can’t hear themselves, they forget themselves. And slipping off your own headphones to hear a couple of thousand people, so wrapped up in the music that they don’t realise they are all simultaneously shouting: “I BLESS THE RAINS DOWN IN AFRICA!” is oddly moving. There’s nothing performative, no showing off, just the joy of being lost in music. Michael Hann
