Thank you John Lewis, old-school raver dads like me finally feel seen

The most-anticipated Christmas advert of the year has reduced grown men (and women) of a certain age to tears. Here's why for Gen X-ers like Stephen Armstrong it feels so personal

One look at my social feed and there is no mistaking the love for this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad. “My husband has been crying all day. The rave synapses were deeply triggered.” “Hear hear, cried like a baby.” “They should have kept the song as it is – absolute banger. Still, I did shed a tear.” “I’ve just seen it described as ‘first E with dad, so moving’. Lol.”

If you haven’t seen it, this year’s ad is a typical family Christmas Day with Dad grumpily tidying up the present wrapping paper and Mum a little tense. There’s some serious lack of communication between father and son going on – “Adolescence vibes” – and then, as the boy heads up to his room, Dad finally spots he’s left a present for him under the tree.

He opens it, it’s a 12” vinyl extended mix of the monumental 1990 hands-in-the-air rave anthem “Where Love Lives” by Alison Limerick. Suddenly, Dad’s back in 1990 on a packed, sweat-soaked floor, surrounded by gurning punters in those stupid hats with the ecstasy of life coursing through his veins.

The new ad for the department store chain features a man travelling back in time to his hedonistic youth (John Lewis)

Then he pauses and sees his son across the dancefloor like a ghost of Christmas yet to come. The dancers fade and vanish. He reaches for the boy, who’s suddenly just a few years old, running with faltering early steps until Dad scoops him up and he’s a baby, newborn, laughing and tweaking his dad’s nose. The first day of that new adventure.

The music slows, and it’s Labrinth’s soulful version, the Hackney singer-songwriter who was just a one-year-old when the original came out. Dad’s back in the present. He holds his son like he fears he’ll be taken away, and the boy hugs back.

Christmas Day is saved – and I’m ruined. John Lewis always makes people cry. But this year they got personal, for me and every other 45-plus former clubber who now has kids.

I remember my last Christmas Big Night Out – nearly 20 years ago, when my eldest daughter was just six months old. Her mother told me to enjoy myself and come home whenever I wanted and I took her at her word. I’d been clubbing through the Nineties and I had it down to an art. The first buzz on Waterloo Bridge – meet the gang by the Angel and on to The Cross in Coal Drops Yard – the jousting yard of champions, home of Glitterati, Milk n 2 Sugars and the mighty Renaissance.

Through the door, no need for the cloakroom, just inside the third arch meet the guy up against the wall and a naughty little deal will see you through until morning.

So this time round it was 6am Sunday morning and I’d been in bed barely an hour when my wife brought in our baby daughter, a bundle of innocence who was laughing, and reaching out to me. And what did I do? I growled at her through my hangover and pulled away, surprised and sad.

The ad begins with the dad grumpily tidying up after his teenage kids (John Lewis)

The guilt that swept over me was worse than any morning of comedown gloom, and that was the end of that. I was a dad now. My clubs would now be places called Tumble Tots and Zoom Around. Gone was queuing for Trade at dawn, my weekend mornings would be spent at farmers’ and flower markets. Standing on a Saturday night, feeling the waters of the River Hedonism flow around me and the blue flashing sirens of London howl at the darkness, were replaced by cosy film nights and parents-like-us kitchen discos and dinner parties.

My music changed, as all music sort of changed. I mean, that snare drum roll still hasn’t left the charts, it’s just they call it EDM these days. Singers stopped singing about me and my friends and wanted love just for themselves. No more free to be what we want to be, peaceful in the valley, such a good feeling. And my teens didn’t like my music anyway, so the car stereo wasn’t mine anymore.

I learned. I accepted and I moved on. As they got older, I did make my kids fall in love with Gorillaz and 50 Cent, but Josh Wink turned the crowd against me. I could have been sad, but there’s a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.

Sadly, my dancing days were over unless I was alone at home or at a school parents’ New Year’s Eve party. Kings Cross and Coal Drops Yard became home to Google and over-priced Tapas bars that you can never get a table at. While The Cross reopened in 2022 in a “multi-use venue, reimagined as a six-storey haven of entertainment, complete with Mediterranean, bar, club, cocktail lounge and roof terrace boasting a 360-degree vista across London’s skyline”, it wasn’t the same.

John Lewis Dad, I feel you.

Then, last year, my own personal Christmas ad came in the shape of a text in our dad-and-teens WhatsApp group chat Mad Bants (not my choice of name). Now living in Berlin, my youngest dropped a Spotify track, “On a Ragga Tip” by SL2. I was, wait, what? “Have you heard this?” She had the tone of the owner, the discoverer, the girl giving a track to Dad like all the others she thought I might like. “Know it? I owned it!” I almost wrote.

And then came: “We’re going to an Underworld gig, want to come?”

I had no desire to truly party with my daughters. There are some worlds that were never meant to meet. But it did make me feel seen. For years, I was just the “old duffer dad” bumbling around and moaning about homework and getting up for school, but suddenly, they maybe saw something else. The glimpse of twentysomething me partying like it was 1999 – because it literally was. When my eldest came back from Reading festival for the first time with that gleam in her eye and that set to her jaw, I told her what she’d been doing last night and she couldn’t understand how I knew. Now, maybe she understood.

The father-and-son bonding moment has provoked a big response from men of a certain age (John Lewis)

I didn’t go in for the hug like John Lewis Dad – but I did have flashbacks to holding them when they were born and watching them toddle over to me from the climbing frame in the park. How fast this time has gone. How did I go from worrying about whether they would ever be potty trained or read and applauding that one big line they had in a school assembly, to panicking about what they were up to in Berlin nightclubs and Hackney Wick squats and clapping at their graduation? John Lewis Dad would understand.

Some people, of course, don’t like the ad. “I swear the John Lewis ads get worse every year, it’s barely Christmassy in any way,” some X user who’d never known joy tweeted. “Very boring and disappointing. Expected something more cute,” another tweeted in despair.

Well, maybe their time for weeping will come. Me? I cried like a baby. And I know thousands more cried too as the dad hugged his lad as if he was some random stranger one Saturday night as the first big rush came up.

The ad is not for you. It’s for Gen X and old school ravers everywhere. You’ll never understand unless, in the spirit of Christmas and the summer of love, you come with us as we take your hand and show you where love lives.

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