My family call it Old Lady Clubbing, but my giddy ‘nights out’ have lit up a dismal 2024 | Gaby Hinsliff

4 days ago 4

Last Saturday night, I went clubbing with friends. Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have been a remotely odd sentence to type, because it was what I did pretty much every weekend. But a lot has changed since then – let’s just say that in my peak raving years there was a Labour government in power, only it was actually popular – and like most people whose happy place was once on the dancefloor, inevitably with time comes the feeling that you no longer belong. Deep down, you still come to life when the bassline kicks in. But you morph from hardened raver to the kind of person who’s always up for dancing at parties and weddings, and then finally into the kind of person whose friends aren’t getting married any more and who spends their Saturday nights giving their children lifts to parties. So eventually you tell yourself sadly that those days are over now, and that clinging on would be a bit mutton-behaving-as-lamb.

Well, not any more. Enter what was almost certainly the cheeriest thing about an otherwise lousy 2024: the rise of what is now regrettably known in my house as Old Lady Clubbing, AKA daytime events specially laid on by music promoters for the over-30s. It’s like going back in time, but better: partly because this time round you have learned to wear the big coat, instead of going without and shivering glamorously to death in the queue, but mostly because it starts in the afternoon. The secret of middle-aged socialising, it transpires, is to do roughly what you always did – but earlier: hitting the club at 3pm means being home in time for the 10 o’clock news, and blissfully asleep by last orders. (Though the truly multitasking could do as one of the DJs at Day Fever, the over-35s night set up by the actor Vicky McClure and her promoter husband, Jonny Owen, reportedly sometimes does and cram in a big supermarket shop on the way back.) Even the bar staff love it, one told me, because unlike most nights there’s no hassle: everyone’s just too thrilled to be out of the house.

You could think of it as clubbing, but for people who still need to be up early to walk the dog. Or you could see it for what it really is, namely one last giddy chance to let go of everything for people whose lives no longer allow for much of that.

There’s a reason gen X has gone wild for Abba Voyage, refused to give up on Glastonbury, and proved suspiciously keen to escort their tween daughters to Taylor Swift at Wembley this summer; a reason too for the rise of nights such as Day Fever, or the veteran DJ Annie Mac’s Before Midnight, or the peerlessly named Age Against the Machine (with its tagline “come and have a go if you think you’re old enough”). It’s not just nostalgia or some misplaced delusion that we’ve still got it, but more an acute sense of exactly what we no longer have.

By middle age, most of us are carrying around some form of loss, some weighty responsibility, some measure at least of exhaustion, disappointment or dread. This year, I’ve been to three funerals and a wedding, a fairly average midlife ratio of grief to joy, which has left me with the overwhelming feeling that life is too short not to go to all the parties. Any residual guilt over muscling in on what feels like a young person’s game, meanwhile, is long gone given the desperate state of the nightlife industry.

Last summer, I interviewed a string of disconsolate club promoters bemoaning the fact that gen Z don’t party like their parents did. They’re too skint, for a start: they’d rather stay in and save up for the occasional splurge on festival tickets. But they also don’t need to go out on the pull when dating apps let them hook up from the comfort of their sofas, and many of them don’t drink with sufficiently wild abandon to reach that messy stage when finding somewhere else to stagger on to when the pub shuts suddenly feels imperative. Throw in lockdown and a cost of living crisis, and about a third of nightclubs in the UK have shut since 2020, according to the Night Time Industries Association – while the survivors now face a painful budget double-whammy of rising national insurance plus an otherwise welcome hike in the minimum wage.

Though clubs have deliberately moved up the age range in search of punters in their late 20s and early 30s with more cash to spend, even that won’t be enough to keep some much-loved venues open, or to stop some towns potentially withering into places where everything seems to shut long before midnight.

Hence the sudden surge of commercial interest in an older crowd, who took a break from going “out out” while the kids were growing up but could be redrafted to preserve British nightlife for posterity: a gleeful flotilla of the middle-aged and definitely not done yet, riding to the rescue like some kind of mad sequin-clad Dunkirk.

It’s the job we gen Xers – the generation everyone forgets, to the point nobody can even be bothered to hate us properly – were frankly born to do. You can thank us when we’re dead, kids, which thanks to all this unexpected midlife exercise will almost certainly be later than you think.