Are you ever too old to go clubbing?

Growing up, going out and coming down

I stumbled into my first Good Night Out the month after my 18th birthday. We stood outside in the damp autumn night, clacking tipsy tongues and laughing as my friend took her lipstick and drew a heart around The Smiths name on the poster.

When, at last, the doors were flung open, we were the first people inside. The room was dark, smelled like sweat and spilled Jägerbombs, and felt like the beginning of everything. We sat at the edge of the dancefloor nervously sipping our drinks waiting for the club to fill up. The night tasted like rum and coke and being this young forever.

By the end of it, I had promised myself that I would never, ever stop going out.

How old is too old to go clubbing? 40? 29? 32? 27? 27?? Last year, when Screenshot magazine asked young people in the street, these were the answers they gave. The comments were outraged by the suggestion that 27-year-olds were too old to be in the club. Yet the view that clubbing is something you naturally grow out of by your mid-20s is widespread and deeply ingrained. We talk about getting it out of your system while you’re young before you start the inevitable decline towards decrepit old age that apparently judders into motion at 27.

When older people go clubbing in films and TV shows it’s often a punchline. It’s the frazzled wine mum or the sleazy old man and they’re both blindly, desperately clutching for their youth. They realise that the clubs they used to love are actually intolerable and leave them feeling like shrivelled up shells of their younger selves. They rarely just like the music or being around people. It’s always symbolic of something more, something tragic.

I like the idea of being an older woman on the dancefloor. If I saw someone in the club in their sixties or seventies, it wouldn’t seem sad or desperate. It would be legendary. I aspire to care so little about what other people think of me. We are so obsessed with looking younger, but what’s the point in maintaining a 12-step anti-ageing skincare routine if you don’t keep living a youthful life?

FKA twigs was 36 when she wrote her new album, Eusexua, as a transcendent love letter to the club dancefloor. “I felt quite healed in a lot of ways,” she says of her experience at techno clubs in Prague. “I felt how amazing to be in this place and for my body to feel this way and to be dancing and this music and to be so inspired. I felt lucky.”

The way Twigs talks about clubbing as a source of ascendence and creative inspiration feels at odds with the idea that staying in is the ultimate form of self-care. She speaks of clubbing as expression, as inspiration, as connection, as subculture, as discovering a secret, as a sacred environment. These are things you never become too old for, even if you do – probably, hopefully – grow out of snogging weird strangers and throwing up in bins.

Like theatres and art galleries, we shouldn’t silo nightclubs into our youth. Because we all know nightlife is in crisis. Everyone is lonely. Dating apps are abysmal. Our phones are rotting our brains. Of course, going out isn’t the only way to remedy some of these issues and there are many valid reasons why someone cannot or may not want to go clubbing. Like everything else in life, partying can follow the same tired routine if you do it too much. Filling your body with things that are bad for you and then feeling like shit the next day can be as soul-destroying as dull 9 to 5s and one-sided situationships.

Yet nightlife can be a gateway into the random serendipity that so many of our lives lack. When everything is scheduled and optimised and only ever a swipe away, I yearn for the unexpected. When you get older, life seems to happen a little less. You have to seek it out. Clubbing is one way to embark on this quest. A side quest, if you will.

This might be true

I know I will age out of clubbing eventually. Most people do. I can already feel it steadily slipping away. I am 27, after all, and hardly a card-carrying club rat. I’ve been a hypocritical hermit all winter and the only time I left the house this weekend was to run a 10K. My job revolves around music and nightlife so that has slowed the decline, but it’s still there.

I feel it in the hangovers that last for two days now. In the lingering frustration that the weekend is never quite long enough. In the moments when I realise I might be the oldest person in the toilet queue. When the students in the smoking area stop talking to us abruptly and turn away when they find out how old we are. There’s a niggling pain in my back that won’t go away and people keep pushing into me. The weekend falls in on itself, swallowed up by exhaustion from the working week. Staying in and watching a film feels like the path of least resistance. Why risk the hangover and exhaustion and back pain?

But then I remember the promise I made at 18 when all the future nights out sprawled infinitely ahead, no age limits or guard rails. Just spilled beer on denim. Music loud enough to smash tomorrow to smithereens. Graffiti-scrawled walls & glitter-smeared cheekbones. A little bit of heaven in that song that plays at the right moment when everything falls into place. Breeze through the window on the taxi ride home….

The best thing about clubbing as you get older is you learn how to be better at it. You know where to go, what you like, when to leave, how much to drink. Nights out become less frequent so the magic returns. Perhaps clubbing as you get older requires reframing the experience and what you want to get out of it. Be more intentional. Feel present in your body. Speak to someone new. Get inspired. Transcend.

Too old for clubbing? What’s next? Too old to desire? Too old to love?

Some things I’ve been enjoying this week:

The new Horsegirl album, Phonetics On & On, sounds like it’s straight out of a twee coming of age film and I’m so here for it.

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death by John Kelly has triggered an obsession with dark medieval history. Too old for clubbing? I’d probably be dead already if it were the 1300s :)

The song Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez has been on repeat for the past few weeks ever since I saw A Complete Unknown. Is it better than most Bob Dylan songs? Maybe…