Dancing Queens

Dancing is fun, healthy and good for your mind too. Which is why Nikki Spencer set up a disco night for grown-ups…

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Since my teens I have always loved dancing, but when I hit my mid-forties I realised that I just wasn’t doing enough of it. There was the occasional bop at a family wedding or significant birthday party but that was about it.

I was separated from the father of my kids and they stayed with him every other weekend, so I could quite easily go out to nightclubs. But where could I go where I could dance without feeling like I was gatecrashing one of my teenage daughters’ parties? My friends and I would often end up dancing round my kitchen table instead.

I had my “eureka” moment when Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet, the 1979 track by Gonzalez, came on the radio late one night. The idea of starting an event for people like me started to come together. Those words – haven’t stopped dancing yet – just summed up what my friends and I were feeling. We could still dance to all those feel-good 70s and 80s soul, funk and disco tunes – so why the hell shouldn’t we?

It was nerve-wracking planning my first event. I had organised a few fundraisers for my daughters’ school, but this was new territory. I fixed a date and booked a venue, and persuaded a friend who was a vinyl DJ to come down from Birmingham for the night. I enlisted the help of my daughters’ dance teacher to lead some flash mob-style dance line-ups to classic tunes like Disco Inferno by The Trammps, and Blame it on the Boogie by The Jacksons, to get everyone up and dancing right from the start.