For a couple who met at the University of Sussex’s breakdancing club, there’s was only ever one option for the first wedding dance – and Jasmin Carcary and Ben Barnicoat certainly did it in style.
After the bride and groom tied the knot near Ben’s family home at Nancarry in Cornwall on Saturday, Jasmin swapped her Irregular Choice bridal heels for a pair of trainers before joining Ben for the energetic routine to Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk.
And after thrilling their guests, they are now enjoying watching it reach an even wider audience via YouTube (with a little help from ITV, the Mirror, and now of course, Brighton and Hove News)
Jasmin said: “It took us quite a while to come up with the right song and we went through quite a few different ones, but we both really love Uptown Funk and we can’t help but dance to it. One day we looked at one another and said this is our first dance.
“The routine took us a couple of weeks. We had most of the moves planned in our heads anyway but it took a couple of weeks to organise it.
“We practised in the back garden and I think the neighbours must be quite sick of the song by now! The cats were our only audience and they must have thought we were quite mad and wondered what on earth we were doing.
“On the day it was brilliant. Our friends and family have never seen us dance like that and so it was quite nice to see. This is something which has been a large part of our lives and we really wanted to share that.
“They didn’t know what we were planning, but they may have had an inkling when I changed into my trainers.”
Jasmin and Ben met in 2009 when she was in her second year of a politics degree, and Ben in his third year studying neuroscience.
Jasmin had danced before, but Ben was more of a rugby player before he was persuaded by his housemate to join the breakdancing club.
They stayed in Brighton and then Hove until 2013, when they moved to Sompting, the same year Ben proposed on Brighton beach. Jasmin now works as a project manager for East Sussex County Council and Ben is a science teacher at Peacehaven Community School.
They are setting off on their two-week honeymoon to Canada tomorrow.