The crowd emits a loud cheer as two musicians climb onto the small stage at the front of the tackily furnished cruise boat. Tonight will be special, the keyboardist, a beefy young man in a pink Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt, promises, but first everyone must turn off their cameras.
The audience instinctively understands why and complies. It's a signal that the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran are about to be bent, if not outright broken. Nobody wants there to be evidence of what happens next.
For 2½ hours, the two-man band does a reasonable impersonation of an Iranian Hall and Oates, strutting and sweating and pounding on the synthesizer through a selection of Persian pop tunes, including songs from the days before the Islamic revolution. As the duo sing, the delighted crowd of perhaps 200 people gyrate wildly in their seats, and occasionally right into their neighbours' chairs, cheering madly as though the cheesy dinner cruise were a musical event equivalent to Woodstock.
Men disappear to the toilets and come back walking a little tipsier, amid rumours that illegal alcohol is available on board. Laughing women throw their arms around each other and let their obligatory head scarves slip dangerously toward the back of their heads.
Through it all, the Chinese-made catamaran spins in the dark waters of the Persian Gulf, keeping well away from the Iranian mainland before returning to its berth at Kish, a tiny island 20 kilometres away from, and just beyond the full control of, the rest of the Islamic Republic.
Twenty-nine years after the Iranian revolution brought in the tight-laced social restrictions that transformed a Western-backed monarchy into a strict Islamic republic, Kish provides a rare outlet for Iran's booming population of educated young people who are frustrated with the regime.
There is no fun in Islam, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini once said. It's hard to guess what he would have thought of Kish. Live music is frowned upon in Iran, anything resembling a discothèque is banned outright. Alcohol is completely illegal, as is the mingling of unmarried members of the opposite sex. But in this one corner of Iran, it's as if the Islamic revolution never completely took hold.
"Kish is the best place in Iran. You can feel the air on your head and breathe more easily here," said Mani, a 21-year-old sales clerk at one of the myriad of duty-free malls that are the island's main attraction beyond the beaches. A Tehran native, her own black head scarf barely clung to the back of her head, revealing a combed-back mane of dark brown hair.
In reality, Kish is hardly sin city. Despite the occasional forbidden tipple, the island's restaurants openly serve only fruit juices, soft drinks, tea and coffee. Those who live and work here say that Kish is less freewheeling now than it was before hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005. Even during the dinner boat musical performance, head scarves remain on and no one goes so far as to stand up and dance.
Nonetheless, Kish remains a place where Iranians, as many as one million of them annually, come to let their hair down - and let it show - a little bit. Ninety-two square kilometres of sandy beach and palm trees, and home to just 16,500 people, Kish is at once the Hawaii of Iran, its Las Vegas and its Hong Kong. It's only a short flight from Bushehr, the city at the centre of Iran's controversial nuclear program, but to Iranians, the island is a rare escape from their country's economic woes, turbulent politics and repressive restrictions.
The once-obscure island shot to notoriety during the 1970s when Iran's last shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, turned the backwater fishing outpost into a playground for the country's elite. A luxury hotel and a grand casino were built, as was an airport big enough to handle the shah's private Concorde jet, which legendarily would fly in planeloads of prostitutes and meals prepared at Paris restaurants.
