Spankify Wrapped 2024: {insert name of disco-locating app here}

Am I a dancer?
Let's get it clear,
my father was a dancer
and his dad before him
So... am I a dancer?
Yeah now you see
that it finally percolated
through the old DNA

- Young Boy, NOËP

The fourth and final part of Spankify Wrapped 2024: and unlike the previous three chapters built around the stats collected by the apps Spotify, Untappd and Letterboxd, this one was inspired by a book. That book was Living For The Weekend: 2024 Diary, published just over a year ago by The Belated Birthday Girl. (Copies still available to buy.)

Towards the back of the diary, The BBG set her usual project for the year. To quote from her introduction: "The new project for 2024 may be a little ambitious, but let’s give it a try. This year the plan is to go to at least 12 club / DJ nights in the year. Although there are plenty of clubs to choose from, finding at least 12 that suit us is maybe where the ambition comes in."

The phrase "that suit us" is key, and part of what made this project the farthest outside my comfort zone of all the ones she's set. But we achieved it, and I'm here to tell you all about how we did it.

This project didn't just come out of nowhere. In the past, The BBG and I have been to a couple of Mr Scruff late-nighters, which are generally low-key affairs where they don't mind having a couple of oldies on the dancefloor. And late in 2023, we spent a rather enjoyable night jiggling around to records at Dead Wax Social in Brighton. This was notable for an unexpected thing that happened part way through: two young women came up to us and said something along the lines of how they hoped they'd still be dancing when they were our age. A couple of weeks later - still in 2023 - the same thing happened to us at a Mr Scruff set in Manchester. So when we set out on this project at the start of 2024, my main fear was that we'd be patronised to death by youngsters at every event we went to.

That didn't happen. Not at every event, anyway. And we should have picked up the clues from the club we went to on December 31st 2023, which we're taking as being just outside the scope of the project. Age Against The Machine is a regular clubnight which refuses to let anyone under 30 into the building, and plays a wide range of music from the 1960s to the 1990s. We were comfortably within the demographic they were aiming for, and that seemed like an unusual thing for a dance night. As you'll see, it's no longer unusual at all, and if there's one regret we have at the end of all this it's that we largely played it safe by going to nights directly aimed at the older clubber. But here's how the twelve nights we went to broke down.

January 26th: Raff’s House Throwback, Paradise By Way Of Kensal Green, London
Looking back, we actually started with the riskiest venue of the bunch: no nostalgia or irony present in the music choices, just a bunch of youngsters in the upstairs room of a bar grooving to current hip hop and R&B tunes. Plus us. In terms of how they reacted to us, the highlight has to be a group of young guys who literally came up and shook my hand. I don't blame them, she's quite a catch.

February 24th: Lost In Disco, Bush Hall, London
It turns out that if you look hard enough, there's a lot of this sort of thing about: nights that don't have a specific age barrier, but are so heavily focussed on 70s and 80s disco tunes that the audience is effectively self-filtering. Lots of cheese, but presented with some style, including guest dancers and some neat segues in the programming, with an obvious-but-nicely-executed crossfade from Good Times to Rapper's Delight and back again being the highlight.

March 30th: Unknown DJ/drummer combo, Lemmy, Reykjavik
Previously discussed here. Lemmy was a highlight of our first trip to Reykjavik two years ago, and we were curious to see if their recipe of DJ plus live drums still held up. Not quite as well this time, sadly, with much more rock being played as opposed to the overdriven classic pop we enjoyed here two years ago. Still made it onto the dancefloor, though, and danced like lunatics to Whole Lotta Love.

April 19th: Gimme Gimme Disco, Signature Brew, London
A similar sort of vibe to Lost In Disco, with a little less showpersonship and a bit more Abba than was strictly necessary. But whenever you looked up you could see massive tanks of beer, which automatically makes things better. (In fact, we had an identical reaction in this room in the past when we came here for a gig, and a comedy night, and an opera. Signature Brew was also where The BBG and I had our combined stag and hen do, with the main party on the rooftop, and the brewery itself becoming the crèche for the kids.)

May 25th: Shit Indie Disco, Electrik Warehouse, Liverpool
Previously discussed here. A gigantic venue with about five afternoon dance events happening simultaneously, but the indie disco - no under 30s allowed - seemed like the best fit for us. Notable for being the first of a couple of these events where The BBG was propositioned by a predatory lesbian. No handshakes for me this time.

June 1st: Day Fever, HERE@Outernet, London
Previously discussed here. The oldie disco that got all the headlines this year, with shows all over the country, including a monthly residency at one of London's newest and most cripplingly unatmospheric venues. Once you got over the culture shock of having to go four stories underneath a Charing Cross Road office block to get to it, you got an event that was laser-focused towards its target demographic, notably in its music policy of 70s-90s solid floor fillers and its back projection reel of TV ads and opening title sequences from the same period. I certainly haven't seen the Smash advert so many times in a single day before.

August 24th: LUCKYME Festival Closing Party, Summerhall, Edinburgh
Previously discussed here. Our last night at the Edinburgh Festival, and we spent it at what was effectively a late night student disco, despite having to be out of our flat at 10 o’clock the following morning. The main incentive for being there was that at the time, it looked like it would be the last ever Fringe event held at Summerhall. Thankfully that no longer seems to be the case, though that concern was almost immediately replaced by the concern that they weren't paying Fringe artists.

October 12th/19th: This Are 2-Tone/Frontin’, BFI Southbank, London
Previously discussed here and here. A pair of London Film Festival tie-in events that we’re treating as a single item on our list of twelve, because one was much better than the other. Don’t get me wrong, the 2-Tone night was fine, but it was basically a bunch of people our age trying to pretend they were rude boys and girls again. Frontin’, an evening of the songs of Pharrell Williams and associates, pulled a much younger and livelier crowd, and reminded you that when Williams isn’t murdering mink with his bare hands he’s capable of turning out absolute bangers.

November 9th: 30 Years Of Bugged Out, Drumsheds, London
Previously discussed here. As the 30th anniversary celebration for a club, we at least knew there’d be people there who’d been clubbing for 30 years, and some of them definitely looked like it. Easily the biggest one of these we went to all year, in a 15,000 capacity venue that used to be my local branch of IKEA a decade ago. I was mightily impressed at the time with how efficiently Drumsheds managed the whole event, from entry queue through food and booze service to the cloakroom lockers. So I was a bit alarmed to find out some time later that they're not always that efficient.

November 23rd: Annie Mac: Before Midnight, Brixton Academy, London
Previously discussed here. Drumsheds was certainly a paragon of venue management when compared against the nightmare queues at Brixton Academy two weeks later (and yes, I still call the other place Hammersmith Odeon too). To be fair, the Academy's security staff are probably still walking on eggshells after that whole business with the deaths a couple of years ago, so they can't really be blamed for the delays. And once we got inside and you'd got used to the massive crush on the dancefloor, it was pretty much everything we were looking for: an all ages crowd doing proper clubbing early enough that you could still get the last tube home at the end. Assuming, of course, that your definition of 'proper clubbing' encompasses stopping the music for five minutes so that Zadie Smith can read a poem out loud.

November 28th: Jarvis Cocker & Alexis Taylor, Dingwalls, London
Previously discussed here. There's a growing movement to stop people using mobile phones on the dancefloor. Yes, I know what you can see embedded at the bottom of the page, but I appreciate that it cuts both ways, and there may well be a picture of us on a Facebook post somewhere titled Ha Ha Look At These Old People Trying To Dance. There's definitely an argument to be made that phone usage stops people being present on the dancefloor, which was certainly the case here: most of the crowd were either taking pictures of the two pop stars on the decks, or trying to Shazam what they were playing. Those of us who were actually dancing got treated to a set that was as eclectic and eccentric as you'd expect from these two, starting slow with the theme from Twin Peaks and building over a couple of hours to the likes of Love Is In The Air.

December 21st: VroegZat, Melkweg, Amsterdam
Previously discussed... actually, I still need to write about this one, so we'll come back to that. But it turns out that the idea of a disco for people too tired for proper clubbing is international - the tagline for VroegZat is 'partying early, sleeping long'. Very much operating along the same lines as Day Fever, the music policy is largely seventies and eighties cheese, with the added bonus that a proportion of it is Dutch cheese: some of it familiar to us foreigners, some of it less so. And it's all wrapped up by 11pm, hence the whole 'sleeping long' thing.

And at 23:59 on December 31st, 2024, we were back at Dingwalls again for another Age Against The Machine. It hadn't changed much in the twelve months since we were last there, apart from now having a Day Fever-style video backdrop for people who couldn't get enough of the Smash advert.

So... am I a dancer? Probably more now than I was twelve months ago, I guess. We won't be giving up going to these sort of things - we've already got one booked for later in the year - but we'll certainly take our foot off the gas pedal in comparison with 2024. In the meantime, here's the video summary you've come to expect at the end of these things. Let's focus on unwrapping 2025 now.