The Rise of the Over-25s Club Night: 'Children Have No Taste'

Thudding bass, stank face, bodies writhing together on the dance floor, hoarse voices screaming along to lyrics. What constitutes a perfect club night? Recently, some revellers have decided that the answer is simple: cutting out Gen Z.

Just recently, Annie Mac’s early rave Before Midnight was explored by New York Times and praised for its consideration of ravers who “don’t feel like they belong” in clubs because they are aging, enjoy getting to bed early, have demanding jobs or kids, and in the case of one attendee, are literally with child. In a gal-dem interview, Amsterdam-born DJ Jyoty explained that her night Homegrown caters to people who are “fading out of the club scene” as she declared she wants to see “more old bitches in the club” whose lower backs hurt from dancing, but still want to enjoy great tunes. 

While these nights welcome older generations, others are going one step further carving out spaces that specifically state the desired age of the attendees. Take Pxssy Palace, whose recent Valentine’s Day party in London was explicitly advertised as a 30+ event. Guests were hand-fed treats like edible flowers from a menu curated by Healthy Filth, a queer Black plant-based kitchen, enjoyed stripteases and could retreat to chillout zones, all of this against a sophisticated Shoreditch townhouse backdrop.

“There was a couple in their 50s who hadn’t been out for 10 years,” explains Nadine Noor, the founder of the queer event collective. “We definitely started earlier and ended earlier – by 3AM, it was a very small crowd.” 

The age-restricted night was advertised after the success of Pxssy Palace’s 25+ Halloween party. Noor says that their mantra of inclusivity made them seek new ways to prioritise underserved groups within their community. Now, they say, the aim is to do at least two over-25 and two over-30 nights a year. “People were very appreciative and desperate for spaces like this because they still want to go out, but don’t want to feel old,” Noor tells VICE. 

One function of nightlife for single clubbers, obviously, is to grind up against someone and maybe even have a little cheeky kiss. If you’re an age-anxious person, it’s probably lot easier to lose your inhibitions if there isn’t someone who looks like jailbait in the room. Noor, 34, laughs: “The confidence of some of these younger people. People have hit on me who are 19, and I’m like, are you fucking serious? Stay away from me.” 

Comedian Sophie Duker, who founded the comedy night Wacky Racists and appears on Mock the Week and 8 out of 10 Cats, regularly attends Pxssy Palace but favours the older nights for their romantic potential. “It makes things easier if you're open or single,” she says. “No part of me wants to share my early 30s excellence with someone still figuring out how to hold their liquor. I don't wanna be part of a baby gay's queer origin story or to catch a whine with someone who needs to catch a night bus back to their parents' house.”

Recess founder Jojo Sonubi, who is also behind the No Signal radio station and black photographic archive Black in the Day has a long resume of finding different ways to show reverence for Black culture’s past and present, which is what has driven the success of the club in the Black nightlife scene. He feels age-restricted events leave more space to pay homage to formative genres, while Noor made a point of hiring DJs in their 30s and 40s for their nights, “because there’s a lot of ageism in the booking for popular nights”.

The shift in musical choices is a key motivation for some attendees. Writer Aniefio Ekpoudom praised Recess’s 25+ edition for paying homage to the “music that raised” his generation, with DJs picking crowdpleasers with more precision. “Sneakbo’s ‘Jetski Wave’ goes off at all of these events without fail,” he tells VICE. There’s also a difference in atmosphere: “People are a bit more relaxed, it almost feels like a mass house party. I think as you get older you go out less than your early 20s, but [you] go out with more intention, too.”

So how are these clubs policed – is anyone who can’t remember the sound of dial-up internet kicked out at the door? It’s mainly self-selecting. Noor says they aren’t going to aggressively check the IDs of everyone who enters as long as the majority are the advertised age. “Enforcing it seems extra,” they add. 

Instead, these nights have carved out space for seasoned ravers to party with their peers, extending the clubbing shelf life of a generation who feel like they can really let loose around their age mates. “When someone has had multiple eras of partying they might not necessarily want to be around someone in their first era of partying,” Sonubi says. “There’s a chasm between them.”

There’s also a difference between how these crowds engage with the music. Noor recently saw a video filmed in Ministry of Sound of the DJ dropping “Insomnia” by Faithless to a static crowd holding phones. “Of course, viral moments can be great,” Noor muses. “A lot of people in their early 20s have only ever known the internet. But it was important for the over-30s night to have a place where everyone had their phone cameras covered. Not everyone wants to be on someone’s Stories.” 

Now that these promoters – who started the nights in their early 20s – are now transitioning into their 30s, their core supporters are also aging up. “The legacy people say it’s younger so they don’t want to come. When I was 19 I would look at older people in the crowd and think, ‘Rah, why are you here’,” Sonubi laughs. It’s perhaps this fear of feeling out of place that has secured Recess’s popularity. “There’s definitely a higher demand for the older nights – the waiting lists are longer and we have to do bigger venues for the older ones.”

The first Recess 25+ happened in 2020 when “the demand for partying was really high”, he says. People missed out on those two valuable years of socialising and debauchery in their 20s emerged feeling significantly more haggard (thanks, COVID) and like they had missed out on something. Even I’ve noticed that my friends are more conscious of the age of those around them on the dancefloor. 

Noor has seen the same thing play out: “Every month we kept hearing the same thing about it being so young, even though there were always people coming to Pxssy Palace who were 18. There just seems to be a further divide due to that two years with a lack of mixed socialisation.” 

Duker is more straight-talking about it. “I love certain under 25-year-olds – some of my best friends are still shaking off puberty's chokehold – but as a community, they truly suck,” she says. “Children have no taste, zero quality control, they chug bad drinks, tolerate terrible music and make questionable clothing choices. But around the time of your Saturn return, natural selection kicks in and the ravers left standing are truly elite.”

Both Sonubi and Noor are also clear that they aren’t anti-young people, per se. In fact, the team behind Recess is a mix of millennials and Gen Z putting on a now-varied events calendar and learning from each others’ tastes and needs. Noor says the ongoing appetite of people in their 30s and beyond for Pxssy Palace is great for its longevity. Mostly, age-restricted nights seem to be for a generation who fear that their clubbing life is about to expire, but want to go out with a bang anyway. 

“Grandmas,” as Duker puts it, “go hardest.”