Confessions of a middle-aged clubber - an unused Guardian feature

What on earth was I doing, apparently respectable, and certainly middle-aged, punching the air with a crowd of shaven-headed, labelled up teenagers, most of whom were probably on drugs? At approaching 50 I was supposed to be smoking cigars in a gentleman’s club or worrying about my health at the gym, not deafening myself to a hard house beat.

Friends thought it must be me who was on drugs. It was the only sensible explanation for somebody my age suddenly developing an overwhelming passion for dance music. Okay, so I’d just come back from a holiday in Ibiza, but I was hardly the Uncovered type, prone to mooning and vomiting in the street.

Better known for my sadly encyclopaedic knowledge of seventies rock music from prog to punk, I’d barely been to see two live bands a year for the past decade. Clubs were places to fall into for one last drink at the end of a leaving do when the pubs had stopped serving.

That Ibiza holiday was supposed to be a week’s convalescence to help my wife to recover from a couple of serious operations – a peaceful hotel by the beach, a few romantic meals, nothing more energetic than that. Then on our penultimate night we were offered free passes for the superclub Amnesia.

Now, a trip to Ibiza without a visit to a club seemed a bit like going to Paris and missing out on the Louvre. Or something like that. We expected to stay for half an hour or so, long enough to be able to make a few anthropological observations about the state of dance music over dinner on our return.

From the outside the club didn’t look promising. It was slightly more attractive than a B&Q superstore, albeit with a few palm trees and a bit of neon. But inside was a different story.

Lasers and strobes flashed, dancers with beautiful honed bodies gyrated on podiums, giant cannons blasted dry ice into the huge, packed dance floor. And everybody was on their feet to the driving beat. It couldn’t have been further from my teen disco memories of girls, handbags and me trying to look cool at the bar.

Now I wanted to join in, much to my wife’s surprise. She’d struggled, and failed, at various wedding receptions to get me to do more than a drunken Mick Jagger impersonation to Brown Sugar.

But here I was giving it my all on Amnesia’s dance floor. The only time I’d ever experienced anything like it was on the football terracing, but this time a goal was being scored every few minutes. The whole crowd was ebbing and rising as the music reached one euphoric, joyful crescendo after another. Everybody was smiling. Perhaps they were all off their heads on Ecstasy. I have no idea.

I didn’t want to leave, even though dawn was breaking. But I knew I wanted to repeat the experience, even though I knew it was going to be somewhat different at home in Scotland.

For a start I knew nothing about dance music. Everybody I knew who was of an age to educate me came back with the same vehement response: “Dance music? That’s shit.” Vaguely embarrassed, I set off to teach myself. It was easier said than done.

By the end of the 1990s the whole scene was fragmenting. I could take an educated guess about most of the 57 different varieties of house music - hard, euphoric, funky and so on. But other terms were totally confusing. “Garage,” I had assumed was rough and ready. Wrong. It’s smooth and tuneful. “Trance” was even more baffling. I expected calm and hypnotic, instead I got the most basic sort of thumping dance music guaranteed, presumably, to drive clubbers into a trance.

For several months I lacked the courage to go clubbing in the UK. And, in the end,I took the soft option and decided to go and see a deejay I’d heard to on the radio. Today I know Judge Jules is not the man for the hip clubber, but I didn’t then. And neither did the small group of pals I’d persuaded to come along.

Their first question, to a man, was: “What do we wear?” I tracked down one of the promoters who would only tell me that anything smart and not in football colours was acceptable. It wasn’t a great deal of help.

So there we were, five of us in the queue, all dressed in our best casual wear. If anything had a designer label, it was carefully concealed inside the collar. Not so the crowd around us, labelled up and proud of it. And then there was the hair, or the lack of it. Not a tuft protruded from the mass of baseball caps surrounding the four of us. Only slaphead George was in his element.

Inside, we felt even more conspicuous at probably twice the age of the average participant. It seemed we were starring in “Last of the Summer Ecstasy” or “One Foot in the Rave”. Pick your sitcom. The only time we achieved invisibility was when we tried to get served at the bar. And that was where the rest of my mates stayed.

Alone, I threw myself into the sweat and rhythm of the dance floor. The club lacked the sophistication of Ibiza, but the feelings of euphoria and togetherness were the same. More than once I landed my size twelves on the designer trainers of the sort of tattooed, shaven-headed youth I’d normally cross the road to avoid. But the only response was a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

That night was the last time I tried to drag a bunch of my contemporaries out clubbing. Instead I turned to the internet and the bulletin boards where clubbers gather. I found I was not alone. There were some like me who’d discovered dance music late. Others had been involved since the start in the mid-eighties and were now the other side of 40. A few even went with their kids. But I bottled out of actually joining any of them at a club. “We met on the internet” was just too scary a thing to say.

More recently I spoke to Paul Oakenfold, probably the biggest name at the hard, trance end of dance music. “The people who come to see me are getting younger,” he says. “There’s a new breed of clubbers coming into it for the first time. I reckon every three years there’s a complete turnaround as peoples’ tastes broaden.” So I should be about ready for a change.

But three years ago I was searching on my own, not just in Edinburgh, but in Glasgow, Newcastle and Manchester. Each night it was the same. I loved the music, but the pre and after-club experience left me like a fish out of water.

In London it might have been different. With something for every minority, middle-aged clubbers or “Macs” are probably already a demographic, subdivided into those who are happy to flash their credit cards or “Plastic Macs” and impoverished old crusties or “Dirty Macs”.

In fact Lohan Presencer the managing director of Britain’s best-known clubbing brand Ministry of Sound told me almost as much. “Our Chillout Session CDs show there is a huge older audience who have grown out of going to clubs but who still love dance music.” He says, however, that although the brand has grown beyond just house music the people coming to the club remain predominantly young.

Elsewhere, Sintillate (correct spelling) - promoter of the year at the 2004 London Club and Bar Awards - has specifically targeted a mixed age audience. Set up five years ago, when the promoters Gary Sewell and Kevin O’Shea were 29 and 49 respectively, the club has expanded from London to Marbella in Spain and soon opens in Manchester.

Revealingly, Sewell asks me: “Can you talk in the clubs you go to?” I reply: “Basically no. People come to dance and the music’s too loud.” If I want to chat I’ll go to the pub. It’s cheaper.

If there is a halfway house – and no that’s not a dance music genre, by the way – it comes from brands such as hugely successful Hed Kandi that play good-time dance music with vocals that clubbers can sing along to. Deejay and label boss Mark Doyle says: “Part of the reason we’re doing so well is because we don’t try to be challenging. We play tunes people know. And, especially outside London, that means we appeal to a wide age range.”

I was talking to Mark in Ibiza, where I now live. It’s the only place I’ve ever been to where nobody thinks I’m weird going clubbing at my age. Anyway, to hell with it, you only get time for one midlife crisis and I’m going to enjoy it.