Hot summer nights: ‘I took my dad clubbing – and it brought my family back together’

After the death of my mother, I wasn't sure how my father, brother and I would knit ourselves into a unit. Could a sweaty nightclub in Lisbon hold the answer?

We should go to the Ibiza closing parties," my dad blurts out, driving through the rain in Hounslow. It is 2015; I am 21 and for the past few months he has been mentioning the phrase Ibiza closing parties" as if it were a Buddhist chant. The radio is tuned to Magic, playing Fat Larry's Band's Zoom, and I mumble yep, sure" so I don't have to listen again.

I had been to Ibiza three years before, on a 72-hour school leavers' bender - a series of hot summer nights" of their own - and was awed by the tiny island's cavernous clubs and the fact that they could charge 8 for a pocket-sized bottle of water. It was the trip that cemented my love for the dancefloor. In those warehouse spaces I realised that there is something deeply soulful about being surrounded by bodies locked into the communal groove, each of us moving to our own personal rhythms, unencumbered by the day's worries and instead - hopefully - free to be how we want to be in this darkened space.