It’s enough to give you vertigo. We’ve just passed the 25th birthday of the London club Fabric, and the mind reels at the fact that millions of dancers have passed through the doors since it opened. And that’s one club: if that was a lot to squeeze into a single narrative, how do we even begin to think about the evolution of British clubbing more broadly in the first quarter of the 21st century? Can we even talk about a “clubbing scene” as 2025 approaches and dance music seems to exist on TikTok and at mega-festivals more than sweaty high street dives? Is there a common thread through an era that’s given us grime, dubstep, EDM, amapiano, deconstructed club, hyperpop and a hundred other flavours besides? Perhaps first we need to look at where all that came from.
The millennium certainly started with a bang for clubbers – but in the UK, it was more the bang of a cultural balloon bursting. Through the 90s the – literally – wide-eyed optimism and sense of unity of acid house had turned into a decade of constant growth, subgenre diversification and commercialisation peaking in the “superclub era” of the end of the decade. But it couldn’t last.
