Beyond the rave: How Gen X are saving clubland (and showing their kids what they’re missing)

It was four in the afternoon. I walked into the club and actually felt a wave of euphoria wash over me, with the lasers going and the music pumping and feeling the bass going through me,” says James Davis, 54, recalling his first steps back into partying at Nineties club Strawberry Sundae’s reunion event in 2023. “Seeing everyone with their hands in the air, I was like, OK, this is great.”

Davis has a critical eye. He used to be out four nights a week as Ministry magazine’s club editor in the Nineties, then found himself deep in corporate life working for companies like Vodafone and Samsung, before heading out to Ibiza to run wellness retreats. After moving back to London post-Covid, he discovered that all the old names – and all the old clubbers – were back.

“I know people who are really senior lawyers at big law firms, but secretly they go raving as well,” he explains. “It’s not even about reminding us of our youth: it’s being back in that inclusive, happy culture. That’s something that’s missing in the modern world.”

Davis’s experience is backed up by the reels on TikTok and Instagram showing archive footage from clubbing days when no one had phones and everyone was in it for the good time. And new research from Liverpool University shows that clubbers in their forties and fifties make up a significant part of the city’s underground club culture. Sometimes the majority of those at underground events are over 40.

Richard Anderson, author of a thesis titled “The Persistence of the Underground in Dance Music Scenes”, researched clubs that he says were trying to create evenings where people could lose their inhibitions and be friendly in an unfriendly society. He was surprised to find that many of those who attended were members of Generation X.

“These clubbers have a limited aspiration to grow and become the biggest thing ever,” he explains. “The intention is just having the best night, not to necessarily see the biggest-name DJ. It could just be someone who’s going to play the music that they like; whether that’s music made 35 years ago or 35 months ago, it doesn’t really matter.”

Anderson’s research covered businesses that weren’t aimed at older clubbers specifically, and he found that dancefloors were happily mixed, attracting people from both younger and older generations. This seems to be borne out by the behaviour of some dedicated Generation Z clubbers, too, who will happily share a space with people their parents’ age.

“In mainstream clubs like Academy in Leeds, you’ve got people in their twenties who are going more to hit on people than for the music, so you just get young clubbers,” says Leeds-based designer Tess Gladwell. “But if you go somewhere more underground like Beaver Works or the White Hotel in Manchester, where they have good house, techno or jungle club nights, there’s a wider age range. People are going for the music, and the community, not to snog some random.”

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A survey by Eventbrite in 2019 found that 3.7 million Britons over 45 went clubbing once a week. One promoter, Phil Marks, believes this number is likely to have increased significantly since then. Marks, 57, worked in recruitment for 30 years, then sold his consultancy at the beginning of 2023. After years sitting at a desk, he looked around for a day rave to go to and couldn’t find anything he liked, so he launched a one-off in July 2023 called Studio38.Club, at a venue in King’s Cross.

“It’s like Studio 54 but we’re open from 3pm to 8pm,” he explains. “I thought I’d sell 20 tickets to some mates, but I sold 150 and filled the place up.” His second party, at the Roxy in Soho, sold 350 tickets, and last year he ran 40 parties across London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol at an average of 400 punters per party. He says the competition has exploded in the past two years. “When I started in London, I was selling out maybe four parties ahead, but suddenly there are 15 club nights aimed at older clubbers in London alone, and if you go to any major UK city, you will have between three and seven companies doing something similar.”

Studio38.Club isn’t an underground event, he stresses – it’s Eighties and Nineties club classics – but he knows people who’ve attended one of his events as a kind of gateway club and are now back clubbing all the time. “The venues are happy to see us,” he explains, “Youngsters don’t drink any more, so the clubs can’t make any money. There were 36,000 clubs in the UK in the Eighties, and now there are fewer than 1,000. One owner told me footfall is down 70 per cent and they end up having to do student nights with shots for a pound, so they’re lucky to make £5 per head, but with our clubbers they do £25 a head easily.”

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The legendary DJ Fat Tony, who started out in the Eighties and has played clubs around the world, began his own day parties at the end of lockdown, DJing Saturday afternoons in a shop in Notting Hill Gate. His Full Fat day raves have been going for five years this summer, attracting 2,500 Gen-Xers who come at midday, leave at 6pm, and get home in time to put their kids to bed, as he puts it.

“I think that the demographics in clubbing have changed so dramatically because Generation Z choose not to drink, and pubs and bars and nightclubs are opening up to that older generation just to stay open,” he explains. “Then they’re thinking, ‘OK, we’re not going to be judged any more when we go out. We’re not going to be looked at like we’re the old-age pensioners in the club.’ When their children grow up, the nice parents from that culture want to take their kids out raving, and, dare I say it, give their children their first pill. That’s rave culture. That’s what they grew up on. I see it all the time.”

The demand from older clubbers has been matched by the return of Nineties club nights like Peaches, God’s Kitchen and Clockwork Orange. The latter was something of a pioneer in this, says Danny Gould, aka Danny Clockwork. The club started holding events in 2014 after years of silence that followed Gould’s decision to quit to get sober in 2001. “I had years of drug-fuelled lunacy, until my brain just went, ‘You have to stop,’” he explains. “When we reopened in Print Works, we sold 6,000 tickets in 20 minutes. We finish at 9pm and I’m in bed by 10pm. I’d say it’s two-thirds an older crowd and a bunch of twentysomethings.

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“Older clubbers have had jobs, lost jobs, their parents have died, their kids have grown up. They’ve got nothing to prove any more, so everyone’s respectful and just enjoying themselves. I think that’s why the youngsters come – the positivity and the safety.”

For Anderson, this is “in itself explicitly political, in that even if you’re not thinking about it consciously as a critique of modern society, somebody said that the first time they went into a club, they couldn’t believe everyone was nice, and they’d never experienced that before. It’s a desire for tolerance.”

We live in complex times, and the UK is on its knees in so many ways, so it feels right to have a boom in dance music and dance culture – a place where you can just, for a few hours, forget about everything.

And of course, this chimes with the Gen X way. “We think of the Sixties as free love and psychedelics, but the majority of that generation were brought up in postwar austerity and were very sensible and got a job, stayed at the same company until they retired, and then got their pension,” says Davis. “But Gen-Xers had that explosion of acid house music in the Eighties and Nineties” – something, he suggests, that provided them with an escape from the pressures of modern life in a way that they really needed, and still need now.

“Social media is very divisive and fracturing, but being in a real-life environment that’s all about coming together... there’s something very attractive about that.”

Marks has already opened a night in Amsterdam and had an Australian friend franchise Studio38.Club in Brisbane. Clockwork Orange holds nights in Thailand, Dubai, Ibiza, “and we’re doing parties all over the world again”, says Gould. Even New York is succumbing.

Jared Skolnick went to a few raves in Florida in the Nineties, but then moved to the Big Apple and worked in tech marketing for years. In 2015, his spin class was promoting a festival where the Chemical Brothers played, and he rediscovered his taste for UK dance music. His next club night was Above & Beyond, the UK electro trio.

“This was one week before Donald Trump’s 2016 election, so there was a lot of tension around politics,” he explains. “The event was spiritual in a way I didn’t expect. They put messages up on a screen, like, ‘If you love someone, tell them now.’ And during this politically rife time, one of the messages was ‘Look around you. You are also colourful.’ I had this moment realising that we might have completely different beliefs, but right now we’re all sharing something.”

Skolnick now works clubs and festivals in a role that focuses on harm reduction – testing drugs for the presence of fentanyl, or helping people who are experiencing a bad trip. When I ask him why he thinks older clubbers on both sides of the pond are back clubbing like they were 30 years ago, he thinks for a second.

“In the US, Gen X is called the lost generation, and I think these events are what we need to not be lost.” He gives a slow, sad smile. “It’s the idea that I feel like I belong somewhere. I think our generation, for a very long time, never felt like it belonged anywhere. Now I’ve found my place.”

Clockwork Orange is at the Steelyard, London, on 6 September. See here for details. Fat Tony’s Full Fat Season 9 is at The Anthologist, London, from 13 September. See here for details. Studio38.Club is at Popworld, Bristol on 27 September, and touring through the winter. See here for details