How Alcohol Lost Its Cool
A third of pub visits are now alcohol-free, but drinking has been losing its cred in pop culture for a while now.
by Daisy Jones
“Wake up in the mornin’ feelin’ like P Diddy / Grab my glasses, I’m out the door, I’m gonna hit this city / Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack / ‘Cause when I leave for the night, I ain’t comin’ back…”
If you’re over the age of 25, you probably remember the very catchy and silly opening lines from the Ke$ha song “Tik Tok,” released in 2009. The song was everywhere – on radios, soundtracking uni halls pre-drinks, blasting onto sticky dancefloors while people with side fringes and denim shorts over tights snogged each other before the DJ cut to “Tipsy” by J-Kwon.
This was also the era of Skins – a TV show that announced itself with an advert of teens looking fucked off their faces, vomiting one after the other. It was a time when you couldn’t open the pages of the NME without encountering an ex-Libertine swigging from an old pirate-looking bottle of rum or someone from an electroclash band in glittery jeggings glugging straight champers. And when Rihanna rounded the decade off by releasing “Cheers (I’ll Drink to That)” in 2010, most of us thought everyone would spend the years ahead doing just that. Just as they always had done. Cheers to the freakin’ weekend. I’ll drink to that.
But over ten years have passed and look around you: booze has all but dried up. According to a 2022 survey from Drinkaware, 26 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are now “fully teetotal”. In August, a report from KAM and Lucky Saint found that almost a third of all pub visits are now alcohol-free. This isn’t a new or sudden shift either: The non-alcoholic beverages market has grown by over 506 percent since 2015, and Google searches for “sober curious” peaked in 2021 following the pandemic. Stories about Gen Z and even millennials becoming sick of drinking have barely left the news cycle.