It was Friday night, in a 2,000-person capacity nightclub in London, and the dance floor was packed. A heavy-duty sound system pounded out house music and a huge disco ball turned overhead. Only one thing was off: It was 9.30 p.m.
A woman in the crowd gleefully yelled to the throng of people around her: “I’m 15 weeks postpartum and I’m in the club!”
The party, called Before Midnight, is organized by the Irish D.J. Annie Macmanus, who plays under the name Annie Mac: It promises all the thrills of a club — just with an early bedtime. Starting at 7 p.m. and wrapped up by 12, Before Midnight is one of several recent variations on the hedonistic all-night sessions in which dance music is usually enjoyed, aimed at older fans juggling children and careers.
“There’s an inherent belief that clubbing is for young people,” Macmanus said recently by phone. “There’s now a generation of people who experienced clubbing in its most popular guise, and still want to do that, but don’t feel like they belong there anymore.”
Macmanus explained that Before Midnight was born out of her desire to fit a music career around her duties as a mother of two children, ages 6 and 9. Late-night D.J. sets didn’t mix well with their weekend activities, she said.
“It felt like I had jet lag,” Macmanus said. “It just wasn’t accommodating for where I’m at in my life right now.”
Macmanus said this reckoning coincided with her decision, in 2021, to stand down as the presenter of the BBC’s flagship dance music show, on BBC Radio 1 — a gig she had held for 17 years and which cemented her name as a musical tastemaker in Britain.
Before Midnight was her next act, she said, a fresh project to restore some work-life balance. The premise was simple, she added: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”
The first night, held last year at the Islington Assembly Hall, a London music venue, was a one-off experiment. It sold out, and, at the end of last year, Macmanus announced a 10-date Before Midnight tour of Britain and Ireland. The tour’s two remaining London dates are also taking place at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End that is the largest live events space built in central London since the 1940s.
Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd. Jodie Brooks, 44, who has attended every Before Midnight party in London to date, was in the crowd this past Friday. “I just didn’t want the night to start at 1 a.m. anymore,” Brooks, who works in advertising and like Macmanus has two children age 6 and 9, said later by phone. “I never wanted parenthood to change me in that way, but, inevitably, it just does. You have to get up and do the Saturday-morning football practice at 9 a.m.,” she said.
The coronavirus lockdowns of 2022 and 2021, which took clubbing temporarily out of the mix, made many people in their 30s and 40s re-evaluate how they wanted to spend their weekends. Some, like Brooks, emerged determined to get back on the dance floor, but on new, more wholesome terms. With Before Midnight, she said, “You can go for a really lush dinner at six. By eight you’re in the club,” and “by 12 you’re out.”
Others realized that they liked dance music, but not nightclubs. Adem Holness, who leads the contemporary music program at the Southbank Center, a central London arts venue, said that many of the venue’s offerings suited electronic music enthusiasts at a more mature life stage: Performances are seated, and finish in time to catch the last Tube home.
“We have a menu of different options for people,” he said. “It’s about making the model work for all kinds of people.”
In the last year, D.J.s and dance music performers including Fabio & Grooverider, Erykah Badu and Peaches have all played gigs at the Royal Festival Hall, a concert hall managed by the Southbank. “I’m seeing people wanting to experience really great music that you might think or assume belongs in a club, somewhere else, or in a different way,” Holness said.
Before Midnight was also influenced by the experience of bringing club culture into a more rarefied space, Macmanus said. In 2019, she recalled, she played in New York at MoMa PS1’s Warm Up, the art museum’s summer series that sets experimental and electronic music alongside contemporary art and design. There, she saw a multigenerational audience dancing together, she said. “It had a big effect on me as a D.J.,” she added. “I’m always going to try and reach that type of a dance floor.”
Macmanus added that an early-starting dance party wasn’t a totally original idea. Tim Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London who researches nightlife has been running a monthly London dance party that starts at 5 p.m. since 2018; in an interview, he said that events like Before Midnight were a way to “pluralize the culture.” During a 2017 tour of the United States to promote his book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” Lawrence recalled, he attended an invite-only party in New York called Joy that started around dinnertime.
Lawrence brought the concept back to London with him and co-founded his monthly dance party called All Our Friends. “It’s about confounding certain ideas that come with the all-night or late-night thing,” Lawrence said. The earlier timetable allows for a different approach to dancing, he said, which can “potentially be more expressive, more interactive and go a bit deeper on a social level.”
But for Brooks, the advertising worker, the appeal of Before Midnight was much simpler: It was an opportunity to dance to the music that she loves, in a club like any other, and be home in time for bed.
“You get all the joy and the love,” she said. “You get to be a part of something again. And you don’t feel out of place.”
