Stark Raving Dad

On losing your sense of self after parenthood, and the surprising places where belonging returns.

Still from the John Lewis 2025 Christmas advert. Watch on YouTube.

This week, rumours swirl of dads across the world running to office bathrooms to get “something out of my eyes” as the new John Lewis advert sits behind them in an open tab. The UK retailer has a habit of going for the emotional jugular, with 2022’s skateboarding spot putting dad front and centre, as he channelled his inner Tony Hawk to help their adopted daughter feel more at home on her arrival. But this year, they’ve turned the dial marked “feelings” up to eleven.

The two-minute commercial tells the story of a father struggling to connect with his teenage son. It’s Christmas Day. The family move through the house, together but separate, rooms apart, space between. Dinner is done. Our protagonist kneels under the tree, cleaning discarded wrapping paper into a bin bag—Dad’s signature move on December 25th—as his son watches from afar, headphones on, a scene familiar to so many. Dad reaches under the tree, picks up a still-wrapped gift with his name on it, a familiar-shaped package for anyone with a passing interest in music.

It’s a vinyl record. He opens it, smiles, places it onto the Technics SL-1500CEB turntable—available on the John Lewis website for only £799.00, in-store availability limited—and drops the needle into the groove. A piano riff begins, instantly recognisable to anyone who came of age during the halcyon era of house music: The Classic Club Mix of “Where Love Lives,” by Alison Limerick, produced by David Morales and Frankie Knuckles in 1990, two legendary artists operating at the height of their powers.

As the track builds, Dad closes his eyes and opens his ears. When the kick drum hits, he’s instantly transported back to the dance floors of his youth. The crowd dance around him, bucket hats and knock-off Adidas jackets, the style of the day. Then, in a moment that bears more than a passing resemblance to the final minutes of the movie Aftersun¹, the father spots his teenage son from across the dance floor. The lights strobe in and out. But rather than the heartbreaking devastation of Aftersun’s denouement, instead our heartstrings are pulled gently as the son transforms into a young toddler, running towards his father, who hoists him up, and then appears as a newborn baby in his arms.

When the sharp talons of nostalgia begin to unhook themselves, Dad returns to the living room and sees his son—this no-longer-a-boy trapped in the no-man’s land between the adult he will become and the child he once was—and the walls that have hardened between father and son come crashing down. They hug. They dance. And why? In the words of a Saatchi and Saatchi copywriter, having gone through 26 rounds of client feedback, before finally being copied and pasted into the YouTube description box—the vinyl record “helps them find their way back to one another. Because, sometimes, a gift can say the things we can’t.”

Many viewers might hear “Where Love Lives” and be transported to a nightclub of their youth. My memory takes me somewhere else: the bedroom of Gary, a childhood friend who lived around the corner. Gary was sharing a room with his older brother Darren, who would soon move out to his own place. Ten years between them, Darren was a regular at Cream, the iconic nightclub that lit up a disused corner of Liverpool and, for a decade, became a weekly pilgrimage for thousands chasing transcendence through electronic music. In the days before Mixcloud, Soundcloud—before any kinds of cloud that weren’t white ones in the sky— the only way you could hear dance music outside of a nightclub was to buy a mixtape. And Cream were masters of the art: inviting big-name DJs to craft mixes that would take listeners on a journey from the comfort of their own home. Cream Anthems—the 1995 double CD that Gary and I would listen to on repeat—might have been the first place I’d hear the track, but it certainly was not the last.

Once I hit 18 (or maybe a little bit earlier, sshhhhhhhh), I started attending these clubs myself. I became a regular at a Manchester spot that hosted the world’s best DJs on a regular basis. I’d spent weekends in the club, and then weekdays frequenting the forum, where other punters would hang out and swap music recommendations, or talk about what DJs they were planning to see over the next few months. Around the same time, Livejournal and Blogger had shifted the landscape of online writing, offering writers simple tools to share their thoughts with others, and I suggested to the club owners they should add something else to their website on top of the forum where I was spending so much of my time: a blog featuring a weekly “update” that discussed everything (well, maybe not ”everything”) that had happened inside the old converted soap factory over the weekend, and building hype for whatever was coming up once we’d made it through the working week. “Great idea,” I was told by one of them. “Will you write it?” I had no idea what I was doing, but this kicked off a three-ish year stint (timeline is hazy, as you might imagine) where I had my name down on the guest list every night, and I’d attempt to file 800 words on “What Just Happened?” by the following Monday lunchtime.

That period marked a profound and fundamental transformation in who I was and how I saw the world. Every weekend, I’d spent at least two nights in the club—longer around public holidays, when they’d often open Thursday through Sunday—watching several hundred people come together to jack their bodies. In a real club—a dark basement, with a good sound system, a great crowd, and none of that VIP bottle service bollocks—the dance floor is the great leveller. People of all colours and creeds come together to dance, moving their bodies in unison as a DJ attempts to transmute feelings into music and energy through a perfectly sequenced set, guiding dancers to ecstasy. In the fantastic book Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Simon Reynolds writes about the unifying nature of the dancefloor, “[a] utopia in its original etymological sense: a nowhere/nowhen wonderland, where time is abolished, where the self evanesces through merging with an anonymous multitude and drowning in a bliss-blitz of light and noise … a kingdom of We where nobody is, but everybody belongs.”

This is not a hot new trend. As long as human beings have been able to hit two things together into a discernible rhythm, we’ve gotten together to dance. Archaeologists have found traces of ritual drumming dating back 70,000 years. Anthropologist Barbara Ehrenreich argues in her 2006 book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that communal dance and rhythm were among humanity’s first tools for social cohesion —a way to remember, to belong, and to heal. She suggested that “ecstatic rituals are […] expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity,” and that “the urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, and to embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.”

And, as artists, clubbers and even academics have noted over the years, these small rooms have become something else: places of worship. We are well into an era when church attendance is declining worldwide—in the UK, regular attendance has fallen from around 50% of adults in the 1960s to under 10% today, with the steepest drop among those under 35. Many still yearn for this search for connection—to themselves, to each other, and a higher power—with some finding their needs met within earshot of a Funktion One sound system. I’m far from the first person to make this observation. In a piece published in Harvard Divinity School, journalist Michelle Lhooq (who writes the excellent newsletter A Rave New World) talks about Berlin club Berghain as a quasi-religious experience:

“Sunday mornings tend to be the most rapturous climaxes of its all-weekend benders, with rituals reminiscent of Christianity: attendees willing to go through the torturous trial of waiting in line for hours to become one of the “chosen few” to get in, dressing in their “Sunday best,” and experiencing shaking, babbling pleasure evoking Pentecostal ecstasy.”

The history of clubland has seen the most direct application of this metaphor: traditional places of worship becoming clubs. The Sanctuary was just one—a New York disco that closed its doors five years before Studio 54 would open theirs, located in a former German Baptist church complete with a DJ booth on the altar. I’ve spent many occasions on a dance floor noticing the connections to the Catholic churches where I spent the Sunday mornings of my youth: a congregation gathers at a set time every weekend, to come together and raise their arms and voices. A charismatic leader stands at the front of the room, elevated, and preaches to the gathered group. A small circular sacrament is taken in an attempt to become closer to the divine.

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So why is this important, and why the hell are you (hopefully) still reading about it in a fatherhood newsletter? Well, it’s no surprise that the same people who once found transcendence on the dance floor now search for meaning in parenting—another ritual that remakes who we are. Becoming a parent remains one of life’s biggest transitions, and an increasing amount of research is highlighting the difficulties caused by this period of dramatic identity shift.

Psychologists have a term for the psychic re-wiring that comes with parenthood: matrescence for mothers, and increasingly, patrescence for fathers. It’s a shedding of skin and self. When that transformation is unsupported and unexpected, it can harden into irritability, anxiety, and even depression. Studies link paternal postnatal depression not just to sleepless nights or finances, but to a loss of identity—the feeling of being a background extra in your own life.

Fathers now walk the same uncharted psychological ground that mothers have travelled for decades, and are fixating their problem-solving mindsets in the wrong direction. In a 2015 American Psychological Association paper on the transition to fatherhood, researchers found that men who struggled to integrate fatherhood into their new sense of identity “opt to enact the provider role and experience a sense of competence by increasing their time spent at work,” finding that “this imbalance results in decreased involvement with their babies, along with […] a decrease in the father’s sense of self-efficacy in caring for the child.” Some researchers have suggested we’re in a cultural “catch-up” moment: men now entering the same terrain of role conflict and identity diffusion that women have long navigated, but do so without the social scripts or support structures that mothers’ networks provide.

With such structures absent, something else takes their place: loneliness. The data tells a story we already feel in our bones: men’s social circles shrink as we age; fatherhood accelerates the collapse. A new baby becomes the gravitational centre of a family—and as mothers are folded into networks of WhatsApp groups, drop-offs and casual solidarity, dads are left spinning on the edge. Of course, we don’t call it what it is. We say we’re tired, or busy, or “just need a night off.” But what we’re really missing is the feeling of being in sync with others—the same pulse we once found on packed dance floors, in five-a-side matches, or late-night conversations in the cosy corner of a pub. That reminder that we still belong, and that, deep down, we’re still there.

In a 2021 interview with Ezra Klein, Bessel van der Kolk—author of The Body Keeps the Score—shared his view that “our systems are made to move in synchrony with the people around us. When you get traumatised, you get out of sync on every most elementary level.” Klein observed that “The same is actually true for adults, that you need space to play, to move, to be in synchronicity with others, to sing, to dance, to have what gets called collective effervescence.”

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence captured what he saw as “a sensation of sacredness, when we are part of something bigger than us.” It is the sense of connection you feel as part of a shared social experience. Durkheim primarily cited religion as the setting for this collective effervescence, but it’s visible today in live concerts, football terraces, protest marches—and, of course, the dance floors where strangers brush shoulders with one another, where boundaries begin to dissolve, where I becomes we. Altered states of consciousness, often—but not always!—induced by chemicals, foster a deeper sense of connection with others, a reappraisal of the self, and a sense of something bigger than us.

Parenting drives a dramatic shift in your worldview. In a life where the only constant is change, so much tension comes from holding onto what we should learn to let go of. But the opposite can be just as dangerous: to completely detach from the person you were before becoming a father, arms flailing as you look for something to keep you afloat. We strive to make work less central to who we are, meaning that the hobbies and passions of our youth offer an opportunity to braid together multiple strands of self, giving our identity more than one leg to stand on.

Dance music is a huge part of my life. It’s important that the tense I use here is present, and not past. It’s impossible that I could have left it behind: it played such a fundamental role in my twenties, and contributes heavily to my personal narrative. I still enjoy a good night out. I’m not out every weekend, far from it. But I do enjoy letting rip on a regular basis. I’ll check in on the Resident Advisor app and see who is coming through town. I’ll try to get at least a day or two at a music festival every summer. And I’ll always try to bring fellow parents along. The recent success of Annie Mac’s Before Midnight—billed as a “club night for people who like sleep,” with festivities starting early and everything wrapping up before the clock strikes 12 and your taxi home turns into a pumpkin—is an indicator of the demand for parents who know how important it is for their body and soul to get its regular dose of collective effervescence.

I’ve lost count of the number of friends, their first time in a club since becoming a parent, who have turned to me in the middle of a night and said some variation of “I didn’t know how much I needed this.” It’s a feeling I know all too well: I think back to a night in 2019, my first time on a dance floor since my son was born, as I was heading out the other side of my paternal postnatal depression episode. I walked out of the club with a huge grin across my face, and had tears streaming down my face within minutes: grateful, alive, and finally, starting to feel like myself again.

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That’s All Folks

How did you like this week’s issue?

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This issue is dedicated to the kind soul who runs the Soundcloud account theclassicmixcdseries, which enabled me to listen to the Cream Anthems mixes of my youth whilst I wrote this essay. Go take a trip: CD One | CD Two

Are clubs now a relic of your past? Or are you still making it work? Curious to hear, hit the comment button below and let me know.

1. Advertising creatives ripping off the work of another director? Never happened before. They probably even showed the Aftersun scene in the client presentation. Warning: don’t watch that link if you haven’t seen the film. Also, don’t watch it if you HAVE seen it, as you’ll be a blubbering wreck for the rest of the day.