Hourglass is bringing climate activism to techno dancefloors

PHOTOGRAPHY Richie Barker

Britain’s dancefloors have long been spaces where people come together. Before clubbing became a carefully curated lifestyle, warehouses, DIY parties, and queer clubs functioned as community infrastructure. They were places where people found each other, organised, protested and imagined different ways of living. For Caius Pawson and Gideon Berger, that history isn’t something to romanticise, but something to rebuild.

The pair have come together to launch Hourglass, a new series of parties that sits at the intersection of music and climate action. The project debuted with a day-to-night takeover of the Southbank Centre with Harry Styles’ Meltdown Festival, pairing a free daytime disco with a late-night techno event, powered entirely on battery technology charged through renewable energy. 

But the parties themselves are only the beginning: everyone who signed up at the event has been invited to an Hourglass Meet-up on 9th July, where organisations including Green New Deal Rising, Parents for Future UK, Possible and the People’s Emergency Briefing will meet attendees in a speed-dating-style setting designed to help them find meaningful ways into climate organising. It’s an unexpectedly practical model, creating new pathways from interest to participation to action. That distinction is central to Pawson’s thinking. Through his work with Young and climate charity Murmur, he’s spent years considering how culture can help people engage with the climate crisis. But he doesn’t believe the problem is a lack of awareness.

We’re not here to persuade people who don’t believe in climate change – we’re here to help those who want to get more involved in finding a solution to find the people to do it with.

Caius Pawson

Instead, he argues, people feel paralysed. Climate anxiety has become so all-encompassing that many assume they’re powerless to change anything, despite the overwhelming number of people who share those same concerns. According to People’s Climate Vote, UNDP & Oxford University, 4 in 5 people globally want stronger climate action from their governments, yet just one in ten Britons regularly talks about their views on the climate crisis. “We’re not here to persuade people who don’t believe in climate change,” he explains. “We’re here to help those who want to get more involved in finding a solution to find the people to do it with.” For Pawson, meeting people “where they are” – in this case, on the dancefloor, rather than inside traditional campaign spaces – feels like a far more natural starting point. With record-breaking temperatures reported across the UK once again this week, he argues that people don’t need convincing that the climate crisis exists; they need practical ways to respond.

Berger arrives at the project from the opposite direction. As the creative force behind Block9 at Glastonbury, the artistic director of Together For Palestine, and with years of activist-led sound system projects, his relationship with dance music has always been political. “The ravages of capitalism,” he says, have transformed dance culture into something increasingly transactional. “People are often purchasing a ticket… and expect to purchase an experience and be entertained.” He contrasts today’s “business techno” culture with the free party scenes he grew up in, where attending a rave often meant helping to carry speakers, drive trucks, feed people, or clean up afterwards. “My heart lies in a communist pipe dream of dance music for everybody,” he laughs.

Even the follow-up meet-up has been deliberately designed to feel social. Instead of lectures or presentations, attendees will meet grassroots organisations in an informal environment, speaking directly with campaigners to discover where their interests, skills and passions might best fit. The aim isn’t perfection, Pawson says, but connection. “We don’t need every single person on the planet to do this,” he explains. “We just need a lot more of us.” If artists begin talking about climate, audiences begin participating, and communities begin organising together, he hopes the project can quietly start “sowing some seeds of change.”

I think people are sick of going to an event which is the world’s largest LED screen and has the vibe of a fucking shopping mall. I actually think there’s a massive appetite now for getting involved with things that feel gritty.

Gideon Berger

For Berger, that optimism is rooted in lived experience. He recalls growing up surrounded by protest movements where activism wasn’t separated from culture, but woven into it. Greenham Common peace camps, anti-Criminal Justice Act demonstrations and early rave culture all shared something in common: people came together because they genuinely wanted to be there. “If there’s really sound people involved in any kind of cause,” he says, “and they’re having a great time in the process of doing it, and it’s soundtracked by killer music… what more could you ask for?”

That same philosophy informed everything from the event’s programming to its equipment to its atmosphere. The late-night techno lineup naturally evolved into an all-women bill, something Berger insists was driven first and foremost by the calibre of the artists involved. But, he acknowledges, the lineup also arrived at a moment when allegations against several prominent male DJs had prompted renewed conversations around misogyny and accountability within electronic music. Meanwhile, the renewable battery systems powering the stages acted as live demonstrations that climate solutions already exist. “The technology is here,” says Pawson. “People just don’t know.”

Ultimately, neither founder expects a single party to solve the climate crisis. Instead, Pawson speaks about climate campaigners who feel burnt out and isolated, and how meaningful it can be to celebrate the people already doing the work. “I do a lot of work with climate activists outside of this, and I can say they feel very alone and ignored,” he explains. “If we can bring them into a raving environment that recognises them and gives them a bit of capacity, that would be a simple win.”

I do a lot of work with climate activists outside of this, and I can say they feel very alone, burnt out and ignored. If we can bring them into a raving environment that recognises them and gives them a bit of capacity, that would be a simple win.

Caius Pawson

Berger, meanwhile, hopes Hourglass can remind people that nightlife has always been about more than entertainment. “I think it’s the other way around now. I think people are sick of going to an event which is the world’s largest LED screen and has the vibe of a fucking shopping mall,” he says. “I actually think there’s a massive appetite now for getting involved with things that feel gritty.” 

The real ambition behind Hourglass is not to transform every raver into an activist overnight, but to remind people that culture has always had the power to bring strangers together around a shared purpose. In an era increasingly defined by algorithms, isolation and passive consumption, this idea is radical in itself.

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