A love letter to Bugged Out, the people who make community happen, and the millennial mums who rave.
Recently I was handed a VIP ticket to Bugged Out at Drumsheds, celebrating 00s electro. A club night that's been an important part of my life, from somewhere between 2003 and 2006 (it's hazy!). For me, the equivalent of finding the golden ticket in a chocolate wrapper.
Thousands of people, the headlining DJs who soundtracked my life, and the chance to do what I love: dance, smile and switch my mind off, surrounded by people who were there for the same reasons. Somewhere you can just be yourself, with no agenda.
I went for the tunes. I came away with something else.
Bouncing around with my friends, I was fascinated by Johnno, the man behind Bugged Out, taking in the sheer joy of thousands of people having an absolute blinder. There was something about the way he watched it all unfold. Genuinely delighted, not just at the scale of the event, but at seeing people so completely in their element. I could tell it made all the hard work and background stress worthwhile.
At various points, I'd catch him smiling as we threw our arms in the air. He seemed genuinely pleased to see us having such a good time. Small moments, but they stayed with me.
In the days that followed, memories started to percolate. All those nights out, all those people, all those places. Some of the best nights of my life. And as I started joining the dots, I realised why that night had meant so much.
We need to go back to two much-loved nightclubs that have long since closed: The Cross and The End, somewhere between 2003 and 2006.
An unspoken kind of safety net
I was a regular at three nights at The Cross: Serious, progressive UK house; Vertigo, glamorous Italian house; and Fiction, a gay night where I first heard electro come in, and only because the resident DJ got me into under the radar. Then The End: as an 'after-party' to The Cross one friday night, I danced straight into Bugged Out without even realising.
Every Friday, my DJ friend put me on the guest list at The Cross. I'd keep him company at the decks, dance about, make friends with the gay guys and listen to their stories. When the night was over, he'd drop me home. If he couldn't, one of the promoters would, or sometimes we'd head down to The End.
No drama. No hidden agenda. Just quirky little night-time platonic friendships that lasted for years and got me through a cut-throat career in fashion advertising sales. My weekends got me through my working week.
In many ways, the clubs were safer than the office. I'd had chairs thrown across boardrooms, a glass door slammed in my face and years of competitive backstabbing to contend with. One of the saving graces was a quiet network of clubbers who found each other at work. We kept each other sane, had each other's backs in the industry and looked out for one another when we went out.
That sense of responsibility extended into the wider clubbing community.
If you lost your mate at The Cross, you didn't worry. You'd ask around and someone would know she was in the chill-out room, where four complete strangers were looking after her. She'd be getting a pep talk, a cigarette, a mint and the sort of shoulder rub that could only come from someone who'd known you for 2 minutes.
If you needed to cross a packed dance floor, a bloke would take your hand, tell his mates to make room and help you through. Girls got lifted over the crowd in a respectful way. And if some idiot was bothering you, his mate would intervene with a "Sorry about him, he's been drinking. Just ignore him."
You could accept a cigarette, a mint or even a drink from a stranger without feeling you'd signed away your freedom. But people had their eyes open. You were part of something, even if you'd only met the person beside you ten minutes earlier. It was a strange kind of freedom: you could disappear into the crowd without being entirely on your own.
Then The Cross and The End closed.
The A Team
The music and the people didn't disappear with the clubs. We followed the DJs to other venues, like Fire in Elephant and Castle, and into underground rave spaces. But the familiar safety net wasn't always there. Things felt edgier. There was zero chance of me and a female friend going down there just the 2 of us.
So, in the days of email and BlackBerry, I started the A Team. Anyone going raving that weekend was added to the group. I got enough of us together that we could be our own eyes and ears. A couple of the guys wore caps so we could find each other in a crowd.
One night, there were thirty of us. I wandered off to the bar and got sidetracked dancing and talking to a couple of blokes, strangers. At one point two random guys approached them, kicked their heels and sent them scarpering.
Then they turned to me."Where are your mates?" "The guys with the caps," I said. And I was delivered back to the dance floor. Think about that for a second. Two strangers had intervened, because they didn’t think it was okay, and made sure I got back to my people. They didn't know me. They weren't looking for anything from me. They just took responsibility. That's community. People paying attention, stepping in and looking out for one another.
Looking after one another was part of the night, not an optional extra. Freedom meant feeling safe, especially as a female.
The night Boy George walked in
There's another memory from The Cross that's been sitting in my head for years and only now I realise why…
One Friday my friend was finishing his DJ set, Boy George appeared beside me. He was dressed like an ordinary punter, helping a mate set up. I left him alone. He was just there to enjoy himself, and I thought he deserved to have a bit of normality.
Within ten minutes, people had gathered around him. I was busy thinking ' this is very uncool guys, leave him alone'. But I overheard what they were saying - people were thanking him for changing their lives.
At the time, I didn't understand what I was witnessing. I was young, straight so hadn't had to navigate the world as a gay man. I saw a celebrity being mobbed. They saw someone who had helped make it possible for them to live more openly as themselves. Freedom.
It took me years to join those dots. It’s made me think about the people who create the conditions for others to feel free. Sometimes they challenge the world outside. Sometimes they create a space inside it where people can be themselves.
And sometimes, they throw a very good party.
The millennial mum has entered the building
There's one party demographic I want to give a shout-out to: the millennial mum.
We grew up with clubbing in our DNA. We were at the clubs on the high street as soon as we could get in, then at secret raves in fields in the middle of bloody nowhere.
We had our years of dancing until sunrise. Then came the careers, relationships, mortgages, babies, school runs and the rest of adult life. We knew we needed to make the most of the infamous ibiza hen do, or in my case it was an electro weekend festival on a beach on an island in Croatia that I don't even remember the name of. All evidence was destroyed for various reasons…. but mostly because I was at a point in my career, and in a time that was very different from today - when that would have been used as ammunition.
Someone at work asked why there were no photos on facebook from my hen do. Which still makes me smirk.
For a while, we wondered whether that part of our life was over. Whether the good days were behind us.
Then something unexpected happened. The clubbing community kept growing, the generations started mixing, and the dance floor opened up again. Women who'd been raising a baby were back out dancing, alongside the people who'd never stopped and a new generation discovering it all for themselves.
We're not pretending to be twenty-five or trying to reclaim our youth. We're still the same people who loved this music before the rest of life piled in. And that's the thing about dancing. For a few hours, no one needs anything from us, and the body remembers something it never forgot.
We're just there.
I can't wait until my son is old enough to go out with me. My nephews are already old enough, so the generational bridge is beginning to form. Our retirement homes will have to be in Ibiza. We'll be going out on a high.
Someone has to make it happen
Someone savvy said to me once that "Community only happens when dedicated people in the community decide to make community happen."
We talk about community as though it's something that just appears when enough people turn up. But it doesn't. Someone has to make the space in their life - and that comes at a cost of other parts of their life. Someone has to bring people together, but first they have to take the risks and give people a reason to keep coming back.
That's what struck me at Drumsheds.
Here was Johnno, who's been behind Bugged Out since the 1990s, when it was underground and clubbers couldn’t openly talk about it, to club culture in a 15,000 capacity venue . And there we were: people in their twenties, fifties, old friends, new faces, all there for music that had travelled with some of us for decades.
Freedom!
