A Night Out at the Club, Then an Early Bedtime
The Before Midnight idea, the D.J. Annie Macmanus said, is a “definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”
It was Friday night, in a 2,000-person-capacity nightclub in London, and the dance floor was packed. A 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 yelled out: “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,” Ms. Macmanus said recently. “There’s now a generation of people who experienced clubbing in its most popular guise, and still want to do that.”
Ms. Macmanus said 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 did not mix well with their weekend activities, she said. “It felt like I had jet lag,” she added.
Ms. 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.
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 an experiment. It sold out, and, at the end of last year, Ms. Macmanus announced a 10-date Before Midnight tour of Britain and Ireland. The tour’s two remaining London dates (in April and June) are 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 popular with women, who Ms. Macmanus estimated make up 75 percent of the crowd. Jodie Brooks, 44, who has attended every Before Midnight party in London to date, was in the crowd that Friday night.
“I just didn’t want the night to start at 1 a.m. anymore,” Ms. Brooks, who works in advertising and like Ms. Macmanus has two children ages 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 Ms. 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 6. By 8 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.
The idea is not totally new. Since 2018, Tim Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London, has been running a London dance party called All Our Friends every two months. It starts at 5 p.m.
The earlier timetable allows for a different approach to dancing, Mr. Lawrence said, which can “potentially be more expressive, more interactive.”
But for Ms. Brooks, the appeal of Before Midnight was 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.”
Squeezing visits to the club between the job and the kids.