It’s the opening night of Punky Disco and the house poet is about to come on. Some, such as the shoe designer Beatrix Ong, are expecting this — they like a bit of highbrow in their low life. Others are stunned, cross, almost scared by this thoughtful interruption to their mindless nightclub debauchery. The poet is Kirsty Allison, and her Alexander McQueen leather skirt and spike heels help her fit in. Soon, her words do too.

Allison is just one of many adding their voices to a new, smarter club experience. Clubs are “experimental havens for the avant-garde”, she says, and this avant-garde streak is entirely compatible with “the sleaze: the drugs, the sex, the underbelly of society you normally find in clubs. Art and sleaze melt together at night”.

For growing numbers of clubbers, a cerebral aspect is an important part of a good night out. The DJ and musician Adam Freeland says: “For whatever reason, it has been cooler to say ‘I got wasted’ or ‘I just got out of rehab’ than ‘I’ve been meditating’ or ‘I’m working with an antiwar group’, but I feel a change. The world wants more art on every level. For a long time, the only lyric you heard in dance music was, ‘I wanna take you higher’. Nowadays, I feel a lot more comfortable wearing my hippie values on my dance-music sleeves.”

The artist Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society parties encompass all levels of pleasure, including talks by Sir Roy Strong on gardening and Dan Cruickshank on sex and architecture. Hendrick’s, maker of the cucumber gin, sponsors the parties. Its marketing department sees the value of giving booze away to people who enjoy their martinis served with a talk on “Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent and glorious excess in 1970s Paris”.

At this year’s Valentine’s Ball, Wynd dressed the venue with velvet, dead flowers and slightly rotting fruit and vegetables for an “evening of exquisite misery”. The idea was to re-create the Onion Cellar, the nightclub in the Günter Grass novel The Tin Drum where people came to cry .

“My guests may have tried the pills, the vodka, the jumping-up-and-down formula and found it vacuous,” says Wynd. “These people are looking for more from a night out; they’re bored with watching bands, where you just stand and nod your head. I put on bands where you get into it, you dance.”

“What Wynd does is encourage people to interact and participate,” says one regular, Fiona. “The music is conducive to dancing in couples, which takes you out of your own little ego space. All the different things happening at a Last Tuesday party shake you up a bit if you are used to normal clubbing; it is not the usual night out. And that’s really exciting.”

Daniel Lismore calls himself a “social chemist”, and at his parties, the smarter and more performance-arty drag artists and trannies provide the entertainment. Yes, the more spectacular among London’s club kids come dressed up to dance and drink, but silent dinners are also held, where people communicate entirely through the written word. “People are asking more of a night out,” says Lismore. “There’s a great emptiness in just going out and getting drunk.” Zac Holland, a Japanese interpreter by day and a poet by night, is a Lismore regular. “There is nothing more hollow than a generic night out,” he says. “I like to feel I am learning.”

In more traditional arenas, cultural commentators and box-office figures point to a greater thirst for the serious, the challenging and the contemplative. So the Hayward Gallery can put on a night of techno visuals and music, and a band such as Crystal Fighters can write an opera intended to be performed in nightclubs for people to jump around to.

Nowhere is this high-minded hedonism more evident than at the east London pub the Macbeth on the first Wednesday of every month, when the classical composer and dance producer Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of Sergei) DJs a rare mix of dance music, vintage electronica and contemporary classical music. Throughout the evening, which starts long after your average classical concert has ended, and finishes well after bedtime, there are live performances. Nobody, probably, will dance. But neither will they sit in neat rows, clapping in the right places and feeling terribly self-congratulatory.

“When you say the words ‘contemporary classical’, people think, dry, chin-rubbing and painful on the ear,” says Prokofiev. “That’s not the truth of it. The thing with our club is that once people come, they don’t leave; they’re mesmerised.”

He describes a smart and open-minded person unbothered by genre or, indeed, getting home for an early night: “Many people are used to clubbing and going out late; they’ve had crazy drug- or trance-induced experiences, they have woken a part of their brain that can tune into deep, longer pieces of music, and they’re looking for something more intense than a good four-minute melody.”

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