Dec Pierce crosses generation gap with 30th anniversary Leeside gig 

There are bold or confident moves, and then there’s using the entirety of The Ball and Chain as your intro tape for a Saturday night gig in Cork city.

For Dec Pierce and his Block Rockin’ Beats crew, a hybrid of DJing and live performance that’s been a spin-off of his wildly successful late-night slot on TodayFM, it’s a statement of intent.

More than 4,500 revellers posted themselves up at the Marquee on Centre Park Road on Saturday night, a mix of still-hardened clubbers, suburban semi-retirees, and even clutches of much younger heads — exclamations of first-gig enthusiasm could be heard as they filed in — which speaks to the enduring mainstream appeal of the tunes Pierce has been championing.

There was no messing around with deep cuts here, mind.

Much of that has been done by Stevie G, KC, and Tara Casey on the wheels of steel as the show-opening selectors.

Dance-music bangers

It was straight into wall-to-wall ’80s and noughties dance-music bangers, the kind that were inescapable radio hits, car sound-system fodder, and part of the soundtrack of countless childhoods of that age.

Pierce himself was in radio voice throughout, and in between stints of overseeing the deconstructed samples, beats, and melody lines that his band helps reassemble as a live performance, he shifted between host and hype man, moving from personal shout-outs to crowd engagement to introducing the band with ease, while making sure to take the measure of the stage from time to time.

And he was right to be in the moment on Saturday night.

As mentioned in a Downtown interview a few weeks back, it was his 30th anniversary to the day of picking up his headphones and setting about his DJing journey.

Having recovered from a brain haemorrhage in 2023, he is approaching this whole wave with an evident sense of vigour and appreciation.

It would be easy for someone of this writer’s age to say it was entirely a sense of nostalgia that moved the crowd on Saturday evening too, but it would not be entirely correct.

Many of these tunes, from Prodigy staples like Voodoo People and Out of Space to DJ Sakin’s Save Yourself (For a Princess), have had other lives after their chart peaks, from covers to interpolations to media placements that put them in the path of a wider crowd.

Sandstorm

It is telling that a rendition of Finnish producer Darude’s party piece Sandstorm is what got the younger heads moving en masse from where this writer was seated in the big tent.

Twenty-five years after its Celtic-Tiger-synonymous chart success, these kids know it as the soundtrack to memes, ‘viral’ videos, and even a recurring internet misdirection gag.

Musing on that alone is a reminder that time really has a habit of leaping forward in the blink of an eye — surely the elder-millennial equivalent of suddenly realising the 80s were being idealised as a cultural epoch.

For Dec Pierce and bandmates, though, the moment is what matters, and sharing his 30th anniversary with nearly 5,000 like minds as the sun set over the Marquee was surely a fine way to spend it.