Maddi Cassell: Clubbing as Community

There’s something very special happens when communities come together. People from all different walks of life, with different life experiences. It’s even more special when the space where it happens is safe.

Our latest blog post comes from Maddi who talks about finding a sense of community on the Good Clean Fun dancefloor. Maddi has been a regular at Good Clean Fun for a couple of years, and runs Lex Scotland, an organisation working to support people with lived experience of marginalisation to have their voices heard. You can find out more about Lex Scotland at https://lexscotland.org.

There’s something very special happens when communities come together. People from all different walks of life, with different life experiences. It’s even more special when the space where it happens is safe.

In my younger days I loved going dancing at clubs and gigs. The dance floor was my escape, a place to move and be immersed in music. As a queer person, clubs were the centre of the community, but I also found a community with the 90s ‘party & protest’ scene, combining a love of dancing the night away under the stars with my political activism. In my 20s I was making a living playing with live bands and going to dozens of festivals every summer, finding a huge family through traveller, festival and squat scenes. It was a place where everyone was accepted: the freaks, the weirdos, the ones who didn’t fit in anywhere else. The music was what held everything together, whether it was techno, punk or acoustic folk. Everyone helped each other, everyone chipped in. While there was an occasional sober event, alcohol and drugs were endemic. Sadly there were plenty of friends lost along the way to drugs and alcohol. They were grieved like family, but the party carried on, because it was the one place we all belonged.

By the time I got to my 30s, chronic health problems that had started in my teens were starting to really impact me. I couldn’t physically manage the touring life anymore, so I came off the road. I started working in community mental health and substance use work, inspired by the many friends I had seen struggle in my years travelling. I came across multiple ‘sober socials’ when looking for places for clients to go, and honestly, they were sooooooo boring!

Meanwhile my own relationship with the dancefloor was changing. Chronic pain meant that being bumped and jostled was no longer fun, and as a femme person, I was exhausted by fending off drunk dudes on a night out. I just stopped going out as much, but that meant I got more and more isolated, and I missed the sense of belonging, and just having fun, that clubs and festivals had given me. I also discovered I was Autistic/ADHD, which totally changed my relationship with alcohol, as I realised I was mostly using it to tolerate places and noises that made me feel overwhelmed if I was sober. I didn’t want to drink just to stop the overwhelm, so I stopped going out, and started to live a much more lonely life.

When I landed in Glasgow 7 years ago, I didn’t know anyone, and at first went back to old habits of going out drinking and dancing to find new friends and feel part of something, but I couldn’t manage enough socialisation to actually feel any sense of making friends or building a community the way I had when I was younger. The first time I went to Good Clean Fun I wasn’t sure what to expect, as my experiences with sober events hadn’t been exactly inspiring. How wrong I was! All of a sudden, I was somewhere where I felt safe, where I could dance and not worry about getting jostled, where everyone was friendly. The lights were low, the music was awesome, the sound system clear and not too loud, and the mix of people on the dance floor from old punks to young sober hippies reminded me of the 90s raves of my youth.

I was buzzing so much I barely left the dance floor all evening. The fact I hadn’t had to stay up until midnight before I even started definitely helped the energy levels too. I’ve been back many times now, I’ve made friends, love seeing familiar faces, and just having a place where I can once again feel like the people on the dance floor are my people, my community. I know how hard the people involved are working to try and make Good Clean Fun even more accessible, even more inclusive too. Dance music has always been part of creating places for outsiders, counterculture, for those of us who are “other” to come together and create our own families, and Good Clean Fun is a fantastic part of building that important sense of community.

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