One and done: what happened to Cajun Dance Party?
Being a teenager is a microcosm of drinking cheap booze in empty fields, first crushes, and the existential feeling that your entire life must be sorted by the time you set foot out of your high school’s doors. There are the hedonistic dreams that come along with that – fantasies of fame and fortune or ‘making it out’ of wherever you happen to be. Of course, for most of us, the coming of age also brings the slightly depressing realisation that we’ll never fulfil our adolescent self’s ambitions, and we laugh wryly at the naivety of it all. Except – what happens if they do come true, and before you’ve even made it to university? Well, that’s exactly the story of Cajun Dance Party.
Cajun Dance Party, a five-piece teenage London indie band, consisted of members Robbie Stern, Max Bloom, Daniel Blumberg, Will Vignoles, and Vicky Freund. Having started as a group of mates who, like so many, would meet up when school was out to write songs together, they were signed to a major record label within a year of their inception and catapulted into a land of professional recording artists.
Bass guitarist Bloom treated the process “like a fun after-school club”, he admitted retrospectively in 2016. “I was not aware of the fact this was actually a big deal. We were getting to record an album,” he added. That album, 2008’s The Colourful Life, was a critical success but proved to be Cajun Dance Party’s first and only musical offering.
In many ways, it’s understandable why the band never lasted beyond their initial shot in the industry. They were, frankly, entirely too young to fully grasp the gravitas of their position; the album was recorded in the midst of them sitting their A-levels and its lyrical content, about awkward encounters and rose-tinted romance, wouldn’t have resonated in their lives beyond a few months, never mind in their twenties or thirties.
That’s not to say they couldn’t quite plausibly have done it – the album’s sound is everything you stereotypically think of in late-noughties British indie that was commercially popular. It’s not out of place with early Arctic Monkeys, The Libertines or any of those laddish, over-enunciated cockney accents that filled the charts at the time, so there’s no doubt it would have been viable.
But the reality of the teenage dream was, in all probability, too much too soon. “The band wasn’t given much time to develop in any way, but I don’t regret that time,” said Bloom. “After The Colourful Life was released and before we broke up, there was some really interesting music being made. I would love for people to hear it. It was very different, and actually really good, I really liked it.”
Where are they now?
All was not lost; however, because each of the band’s members went on to follow new paths, the majority was still within the music industry for a time. Bloom and Blumberg left Cajun Dance Party in 2009 to form part of the lineup for the band Yuck, who were together until 2021, and the others fronted a smattering of further musical projects before moving into different careers or veering into production.
It’s an intoxicating thought for any teenager that you could be plucked from obscurity and thrust into the world of the rich and the famous. Often, that does turn out to be too idealistic a fantasy, but as the short-lived tale of Cajun Dance Party demonstrated, it doesn’t always turn out badly either.
