The drive from my kids’ school to my house is elite, which is to say it’s quiet, scenic and sufficiently familiar that I can enjoy listening to my music without the satnav rudely interrupting to tell me to take the second lane and turn left at the roundabout. I hate when the satnav interrupts my music. I hate when anyone interrupts my music. On my living room wall, there’s a framed poster that says “DON’T TALK OVER MUSIC”, a Karen-esque piece of art, for sure, but still a sound rule to live by.

Some people might listen to Adele at 8.20am, but I’m listening to Skrillex. Before that, I was listening to Fred Again.. and before that I was listening to Underworld, until my kids protested and I turned it off. There is never a bad time to listen to dance music, even if not everyone agrees. “How can you get enjoyment out of this?” my 14-year-old daughter will ask. “It’s just one loud beep over and over.”

I’ve written more words than I can remember about being stuck in a style rut. But nobody ever talks about being stuck in a sound rut, that perplexing psychological state that has you reaching for the music of your youth with the same knee-jerk familiarity that you might reach for your favourite jeans or a variant of the navy jumper that you wore at school. No matter that you’re no longer raving the night away at Turnmills and are now a middle-aged mum of two whose only exposure to repetitive beats occurs when the microwave bleeps. So potent is the Proustian allure of dance music that one bar of Lil Louis’ French Kiss can have you straight back on the dancefloor like it’s 1992.

With age comes responsibility and diminished leisure time, but I still try to listen to dance music in more places than my car, on my run or in the kitchen when I’m cooking. No doubt there’s an army of women getting off on the bleeps of their microwaves before regretfully loading Ed Sheeran onto the Sonos as they plop vegetarian nuggets into a stew. But there’s also an army of women getting off on the dancefloor, in an actual club, like it’s 1995 and childbirth never happened.

Laura (left) at Pussy Posse in the 1990s

You only have to look at the success of Before Midnight, Annie Mac’s night that does exactly what it says on the tin, in that it’s a rave that ends promptly as the clock strikes 12, so that the predominantly middle-aged attendees can go home and get some shut-eye before their kids/dogs/hormones wake them up at some preternaturally early hour. The last one I went to at Brixton Academy (near where I used to go to a very different night called Daisy Chain at defunct club The Fridge) had a queue so long that it took 40 minutes to get to the entrance, upon which we were diverted for another 20 minutes around the back of the venue. Happily, the ravers had come prepared with their stashes of tinned M&S cocktails and the party started long before they set eyes and ears on Annie. Midlife women are nothing if not experts at maximising their leisure time, wringing every millisecond of enjoyment from the clock.

I love the sequin and leopard-print bonhomie of a night out with Annie Mac and the crowd’s dogged, unwavering commitment to the rave. But I equally love going out-out in a different way, one that doesn’t involve the strange hall-of-mirrors sensation of being surrounded by 4,921 variants of myself, all of whom are wearing slightly different trainers, jeans and a fancy top. Comforting as it is to know you’re not the only Mrs Can’t Give It Up out there, it’s equally nice to spend the night chatting to wildly different people. Like Gareth and Bob, two twenty-something electricians. We met in the queue for Pikes, which was longer than usual on account of a power cut that had plunged the storied Ibizan landmark into near darkness. “Is there an electrician in the house?” I yelled, upon which G&B presented themselves, wide-eyed and eager. Strangely, the Pikes doorman was having none of it. So G&B suggested going to Pacha and off we went, three women and two men young enough to be their sons. Turned out that David Morales and Little Louie Vega were playing, and a good time was had by all. But not in that way. Jesus.

Ibizan clubs have a reputation for being open-minded, but that’s not always the case. Only in Ibiza has a bloke ever come up to one of my friends and screamed “Mummmeeeee!” in her face, before telling her that she should be tucked up in bed. The irony of this happening at a night celebrating deep house and disco was lost on him, a straight white man who either didn’t know or didn’t care that the music he was dancing to had its roots in the LGBTQ+ community and communities of colour, and was meant to unite people and encourage tolerance and love.

In late-’70s Chicago (where house music was born) dancefloors were the only places that queer Latino and Black men felt safe and accepted. My friend is neither queer nor Black – all she did was age out of this twat’s perceived clubland demographic. Apparently, it still needs saying that dancefloors should be places of acceptance for everyone, regardless of race, sexuality and a-g-e. Fat Tony understands this, and delights in his Full Fat nights being a magnet for older women, whether by curious accident or design. That he rounded out 2024 getting punched in the face in a homophobic incident while DJing at another club is proof that prejudice can strike anyone, at any time.

I had misgivings about going to Reading Festival last summer, which in its 50-odd year history has morphed from a dusty rock festival into a rite of passage for 16-year-olds high on life (and the rest) after finishing their GCSEs. But Fred Again was headlining, and since Spotify informs me I’m in the top 0.1 per cent of listeners, I guess that means I’m a fan. My teenage daughters, who mainly listen to rap, think this is hilarious and tragic. But the heart wants what it wants and the ears are equally obstinate rulers. I’ve only seen Fred live three times, but I’ve watched his Glastonbury, Boiler Room and Coachella sets umpteen times online – and Reading was his best. It was life-affirming to be surrounded by teenagers, even if some of them talked the whole way through. Only the elder millennials stood silently, faces front, eyes trained on Fred and his DJ mate Tony.

I’ve been going to nightclubs since the ’80s and I’ve seen the dancefloor change so much, though also not at all. Younger clubbers record for posterity; older ones let the memories live on rent-free in their heads. Do I wish I’d had an iPhone at Body & Soul, Love Ranch, Carbolick Frolick, Pussy Posse or Trash? Yes and no. When I’m tooling around the care home on my Zimmer (earbuds in, listening to Fred Again’s Delilah (Pull Me Out of This) yet again), who knows which fragments I’ll have shored against my ruin? Will Honey Dijon’s April 2023 Printworks set mean more to me because I recorded the bit where she dropped an a capella version of Robin S’s Show Me Love and mixed it into LNR’s Work It to the Bone?

Of all the nights imprinted on my memory, New York’s Body & Soul has probably lodged itself most deeply. I only went twice, but the joy in the room could never have been captured by a camera. And maybe that’s the thing. You can record joy, play it back and watch it at your leisure, but it will only ever be a facsimile of the real thing. Dancing to house music is all about being in the moment, that awful daring of a brief surrender that can only really happen when you lose yourself.

But you have to choose to lose yourself. This doesn’t mean drinking alcohol or taking drugs. You can be sober, just as you can be older. Life is short, life is a gift, but life can also feel really hard and relentless. The older you grow, the more there is to remember and the more there is to want to forget. When nothing else blanks out the existential hum of existence, and things seem insurmountable, my advice is to take yourself out clubbing and dance it off. And if you can’t do that, get in the kitchen or the car and sluice off that crap with the crisp, cold repetitive beat of your chosen house track. It may well be one loud beep over and over. But sometimes, words are very unnecessary. Sometimes, you don’t want Beyoncé to echo how you feel. You just want to feel it.

Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 25 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now.

@lauracraik