I’ve been half-planning a party. It takes a while to commit, for me – I need a bit of a run-up, four or five conversations just before sleep, two or three reasons to celebrate, the casual dangling of the possibility to a handful of friends, before I set a date and make a playlist and finally, with great ceremony, put out the nice crisps. It was midway through this process, a tickle of anxiety at my throat, that I learned about the rise of fake house parties.
These are club nights designed to look and feel like guests are drinking in someone’s dim front room, with wallpapered dancefloors and spaces done up like suburban bathrooms, lit for selfies. Stormzy is behind one of these clubs – in a press release he explained the concept: “We all know everyone wants to go to a house party, nobody really wants to host one – and this is exactly what this house is for.” It’s an attempt to conjure the feeling of a house party, but safely, in a club in Soho with 10-quid drinks.
In the Financial Times, Róisín Lanigan unpicked the death of the house party, the primary reason for its demise being the fact that you can’t have a house party when nobody owns a house. The precarity of renting means young people can’t risk pissing off their landlord with noise complaints or a broken toilet, and those that do own a home feel awkward about parading that privilege to friends. “The house party, in all its sweaty, drunken, bombastic chaos,” wrote Lanigan, “is a dying art.”
When I think of house parties, my first thought is not the parties we threw in our teens at art school, hair still being bleached as the guests trickled in, a large prop coffin lingering by the fireplace, rolling down to the stony beach at dawn, or even the later parties I’d be invited to back in London, in glamorous squats or flats stacked precariously above shops. I think instead of sitting at the top of my parents’ stairs aged maybe six, a film of perfume and cigarette smoke distorting the faces of guests below, and the sound of mixtapes that we’d listen to on car rides for years afterwards. In the morning the air would be still and thick, half-drunk glasses in unusual places, my mum and dad squinting cheerfully over black coffee and I’d be allowed to live, very quietly, for a morning or more among the happy ghosts of adulthood.
Today a house party is a rare and beautiful thing and should be approached with energy, reverence and appropriate nostalgia. To do so we must respect its interior architecture, to understand and explore each of its cruel and perfect spaces. Like the bathroom, untouchable after 11pm, its door permanently closed and it’s better that way, the only sign of purpose a white triangle of light on your waiting shoes. Inside, the faint murmur of a man giving himself a brutal pep talk in the mirror – you can listen for a second before the experience is too intimate, too powerful, and you must retreat, perhaps to the garden, its weather always beautifully arctic after the wet heat of the house.
Here, you are the athlete between rounds, the cold air or cigarette taken like an orange segment. Here’s where you will wander into a conversation too deep for your pay grade, but if you nod a little, your breath warming the air, you’re allowed to stay and sober up as the wisest story you’ve ever heard slides into your ear and finds somewhere to camp out for three to eight years until the quiet day you need it.
Inside, there will always be one empty room, even at the busiest party, and this is fine because it reveals where the demon dwells. There is no logic to it. In daylight this might seem like a cosy little living room, but when tested by 40 excitable or slightly stoned visitors, a static horror will be revealed by their inability to linger. There’s nothing you can do about this; it’s demon stuff and none of our business.
The kitchen, however, is always plump and satisfied – even with the big light on. This is always the best room in any party. The secret: there is nowhere to sit. All you can do is lean, trying to avoid turning on the gas. The flow of bodies is slow and welcome, the atmosphere generous and silly-billy. Cocktails are born here, from tequila and the dregs of lonely squash bottles, as are 2am snacks, as are relationships – this is the last place on Earth left to meet somebody in real life, to actually lean in and touch their arm, and still, still house parties are dying?
Perhaps you, like me, have read the eulogies to the house party and been moved to plan your own, regardless of landlords, regardless of anxiety. Do it. The best parties revel in their own pageantry, nostalgia and lust, using three rooms to contain and create a lifetime of friends and exes with infinite constellations of connection. It’s not just fun, throwing a party, it’s a duty, and we must save them from extinction, as if rhinos or bees. So: your invitation is in the post.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
