I first heard of ’silent discos’ at Glastonbury Festival a few years ago and was immediately intrigued. Party goers wear radio headphones and dance to a choice of at least two different DJ’s. If you take your headphones off, there is no music; it is literally silent. I was, therefore, very happy to see it make it onto the Brighton Festival and reach a wider audience.

Although it was advertised at the Udderbelly, a large purple tent shaped like a cow lying on its back, it was actually at a smaller tent at the side; ‘an extra cow tit’ as one of the door staff graphically described it to me. The space inside was quite basic but functional, with no fancy lights or effects and a stage with two pods from where two DJ’s controlled the music.

The two stations that you could set your headphones to were both quite similar and quite eclectic. One seemed to be a mixture of European electronica and dance music from the ‘80s and ‘90s, the other seemed to be the same but interspersed with crowd-pleasing favourites such as the Fratellis, the Greece soundtrack, Michael Jackson numbers, Nirvana, Fatboy Slim. The DJs seemed to be broadcasting, bizarrely, to a radio audience in Holland, and would occasionally declare with a Grolssch man accent that they ‘love dee English girls, jah’ or ‘dish byootiful schitty Brighton’. When we tired of the dancing, we went to the heated tent outside, drank cider and mingled with the crowd coming from the late night comedy event.

Dancing with the headphones did not feel intrusive or unnatural. Apart from a slight sweatiness in the ear, I found it much more pleasant than a normal nightclub as I was able to control the volume of the music and, when I wanted to talk to my companions, it was easy to take the headphones off and converse at a normal volume. What I think I enjoyed most about the night, however, was not the technical innovations, but the old fashioned and holiday atmosphere of the event; the DJs talking and dancing to the crowd reminded me of bad Spanish DJs at resorts on the Med, the fairy lights of clubs in Thailand and the mixture of people similar to what you might find at a wedding reception.