In her kitchen, two saucepans and a whisk are all she needs to turn the place into a DJ booth. Wrapped in her bathrobe, with a sly smile, Crazy Auntie Ann transforms her everyday life, and that of millions of followers, into a dancefloor. At 64, she’s a genuine TikTok phenomenon. But behind the character and her proudly embraced eccentricity lies a whole lifetime: from hitting rock bottom to finding the light and sharing it. This is the story of England’s most iconic aunt and of a beat that never left her, the beat of house music.
When kitchen pots became turntables.
You may have already seen her pop up in your TikTok feed. Yes, that auntie, that grandma, that mum: the wildest, coolest woman on the app, lip-syncing to house classics like her life depends on it. You can’t miss her. Her energy is limitless.
In the latest video we caught, Crazy Auntie Ann isn’t in your favourite club or festival. No, she’s in her kitchen, turning two saucepans into turntables, lip-syncing to “Tease Me” by 4Andre. And she really is teasing you with her grin, her warmth, and that spark that makes you want to dance. But the real question is: who is Ann when the phone is off ?
@crazyauntieann ♬ Tease Me – 4andre
Some lives deserve to be told. Ann’s is one of them. It may have started out ordinary, but her choices never were. At every turn, she chose to be fully herself: ambitious, generous, and unapologetically alive. And in her second act, she’s become proof that a fresh start has no age limit. It’s not about faith, it’s about her determination that highlights an entire generation.
Before becoming Crazy Auntie Ann, she was Ann. She didn’t set out to become this character, she didn’t wake up one morning and decided to go viral. Ann grew up in an ordinary family, yet sensitive to music “ (…) I grew up like a normal child really. (…) My oldest brother was in a band, not a famous band and one of my other brothers DJed in the 60s, but it was all the Beatles and all that sort of thing.”
Before she got divorced at 38, she was a wedding planner, married very young, Ann didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy the Saturday night fever. Even if she had that seed of a rebel:
“I was brought up in a very, very strict Catholic household. My mum was very like, you know, and all my friends all used to wear lipstick and mini skirts and I wouldn’t have loved anything like that. So when I used to go out, I used to walk around the corner from the house and I used to roll my skirt up and put lipstick on and then go out with my friends and things like that. I remember once running round the corner of the house and I just left the house (…) what I mean is, I got on my skirt and my mum walked round the corner from the shop and just like that she was there in front of me! And I was grounded for about, I don’t know, about six weeks I think.”
This small scene already says a lot: Ann has always had that quiet taste for stepping outside the lines. And then, in her late thirties, the ground shifted, maybe in a good way, because it’s where Ann met house music. “When I got divorced at 38, that’s when I kind of let my hair down. I used to go to an over-30s singles night in Bradford” Ann remembers. “And that’s when all the house music came out.” Today, if the crazy aunt shines and transmits her pure joy through on her phone screen. It wasn’t always the case. It’s certainly the afterglow of a life that went very dark before it found the beat again.
“I kind of went a bit wayward,” she admits. “I had a bit of a rock bottom in my early 40s.”
So, behind the gimmick there is a woman who could have stayed stuck in the fallout, instead, she fought her way back: “And the thing with it is, it made me who I am today. It’s important to talk about it because it changed my whole outlook on life because there’s nothing like a rock bottom to make you appreciate life and make life feel better, you know (…) obviously I believe it’s all to do with mental health as well. And then I restarted my life right from the beginning again and now I’m 20 years sober”
And for her, it’s not something to hide, she talks about it openly as a key to find herself, the thing that “made me who I am today, really.” After that dark period, there’s no dramatic overnight transformation. After 2 years working in a cafe and being sober, she realised :
“I can give something, I can give here, I’ve got a lot to give.” Says Ann
In the quiet mess of solitude and confusion, Ann found her calling, one that had been there all along, at the core of who she is. She decided to go back to college to study mental health, starts working with people who were struggling, and volunteers for years in the Samaritans – the UK suicide Helpline. There is no doubt, for her, it was the best decision of her life : “I got my teaching qualification when I was 48, so you know and it completely changed my life. It took a different plot altogether so the best thing that happened to me.”
At first glance, when we get to know about her life path, Ann did a lot of things which have nothing to do with each other : weddings, club nights, quest for sobriety, volunteering, teaching, TikTok. In fact, if there is one thing that we can’t help but notice : the common thread between all this is care and bravery. Ann cares about people, about connection, about lifting others up. It’s definitely her dedication to others that led her to impart her knowledge: “I got a job in a college actually supporting students and then that’s what led me to teaching”. And when the pandemic hit, that same instinct just found a new platform.
TikTok as a way to care
One day, her niece decided to create a TikTok account for Ann, and her nickname doesn’t show up by chance. Ann describes herself as “a bit bonkers really, but in a good way, in a nice way. (…) that’s why “crazy” at the end because I’ve always been a bit eccentric.” Then when she was teaching, the world went into COVID. It became very hard to capture the attention of her students, who were 16 to 18, all locked in their bedrooms. A period everyone remembers in a blue way. Nevertheless, Ann wasn’t the kind of teacher who bored you to death, to put it mildly.
First of all she proposed “let’s all wear funny hats” and then : “ (…) (She) started making TikToks just to cheer (her) students up and also to make the classes a little bit more interesting.”
What could have been anecdotal if Ann wasn’t that bold, but Ann is. When she asked her students to challenge her, they replied “get 10,000 followers on TikTok”. She didn’t say, “no, it’s impossible, I can’t do that”, instead she told them : “you know, I’m living proof that you can do anything you want to do. You can put your mind to it. You can do anything at all. So I said, bearing that in mind, I want you to set me a challenge and I’ll prove to you that you can do anything you want to do in life (…) So I said, yeah, okay.”
It’s not often you see a teacher invest herself that deeply. Ann isn’t just an professor, you could genuinely call her a mentor. Because this isn’t the kind of teaching that stays safely in theory. Most of the time, students are given concepts and told they’ll “apply them later”. But when it comes to life, Ann seems to understand something very special: you learn by doing. You keep moving, you stop giving the impossible so much space, and you listen to that quiet inner voice that says “go on, you can do it, the world is yours”.
It’s with that idea : showing them that everything is within reach, that the “Crazy Auntie Ann” adventure really begins. She decides to start posting funny videos regularly, putting herself on camera on the app. But the video that truly made her blow up was a simple one: her reading a poem, wrapped in her best dressing gown.
“Then I woke up the following morning to something like 50,000 views on it and people…” People were saying, “I love your dressing gown.” “Actually, I didn’t become famous, my dressing gown did.
“The mountain will still be there, When you want to try again, You can climb it in your own time, just love yourself till then!” Laura Ding-Edwards
In that now famous video, Ann is Ann Chambers, in a white polka-dot dressing gown, reciting The Mountains by Laura Ding Edwards, just a Poem about stopping, being kind to ourselves, and climbing again when you are ready. It lands because it’s true, her whole life reads like proof that rest isn’t a failure. It’s the reset before claiming again.
“And it actually got to 2.1 million views on this and my followers went up to 70,000 followers.” Ann told us.
Quickly, Ann starts to get a taste for it, and it becomes a daily game, a way of showing up and performing a release of the eccentricity she always has. And then the music starts bleeding through her screen. A second video takes off : Ann miming a guitar, playing with full commitment, all the internet goes with, even Ed Sheeran who commented “Slay queen”.
“And my son went into work and everybody in his office were like, come and have a look at this video, it’s hilarious, it’s so funny. And my son just went up, yeah, that’s my mother.”
Then she kept posting, not because she’s chasing fame but because she really enjoys it “ “I can still make a video now and make myself laugh,” she says. And at first nobody around her treats it like anything more than another Ann moment : funny and finally very her. “ (…) I’ve always been that sister that’s like, ugh,” she laughs. “So a lot of my brothers and sisters are like, ‘What’s she doing now?’”
It didn’t take long until people started pointing out her sharp musical taste. It was her lip-syncs, and her deep knowledge of music, that really helped her account grow. And the real turning point isn’t a strategy meeting or a brand development plan, it’s a memory of a song that throws her straight back to the dancefloor.
The Kitchen Booth’s concept
“One day I wanted to do Delirium — Silence,” she says. “And I just thought: this reminds me of that Sunday night in the over-30s singles club… where the DJ used to play this and we all used to dance to it.” So she grabs two pans, sets them on the kitchen counter, pretends to be a DJ, and the rest is history. “ It went berserk” she says. And the whole concept clicks. In her video she wrote “I was 38, and you ?” everybody in the comment section was taken by nostalgia, we can read : “I was absolutely OBSESSED with this song back in the Club” / “ still an epic one, I was 27”
NB: For those who still don’t know the song, “Silence” by Delerium (ft. Sarah McLachlan) is in our Deep Tech Mag Melodic Techno Trance Spofity playlist.
Through this track, an entire generation was pulled back into ’90s house, a fertile era for the genre, multiplying in clubs and steadily taking root in the hearts of people searching for freedom, and above all, for love. Ann speaks about it with moving flashes of memory. It’s almost hard to picture now: a place where only the vibe matters, and where the mobile phone is still far from becoming the ultimate symbol of alienation it might be now.
“We didn’t have mobile phones then we just we just danced, we just went and danced and you know”
So, in the end, what allowed Ann to build this community was wistfulness, she managed to bring millions of people together around an era she actually lived through. Ann remembers it with clarity : “It Wasn’t Raving. It Was Clubbing “(…) you get your bottle of water and you just danced all night long” That’s also where her success comes from: she doesn’t comment on house music – she brings it to life through herself.
That fame has led to some surprising situations. She used to cite Marshall Jefferson among her references – and one day she was offered a video call with him: “Would you come onto a Zoom meeting with Marshall Jefferson?” She thinks it’s going to be a fan moment. In reality, the scene flips. “My wife’s a big follower of yours,” he tells her, before asking for a photo. Proof, if any were needed, that her persona has outgrown TikTok: it now speaks to club culture she has.
“It just made me feel really special, now, so I do get recognised.”
At first, TikTok was small money “something like 50 pounds, 80 pounds a month” she used “to give it to the NSPCC to children...” But as her account grew, the pace changed and arrived the moment she realised that TikTok isn’t just a hobby, Ann eventually understood that what was happening wasn’t a fluke. TikTok was no longer just a place to make her students laugh. In fact, it has become a job, a rhythm and a certain organisation. She says it without making a fuss, almost as if she’s apologising for taking the place she deserves :
As the inbox fills up with song promos and requests from label and artist, Ann makes one thing clear: she wants to pass the light forward. With real humility and a touch of humor, she explains what her job actually involves: “So actually it’s easy to video, because what you’re videoing is what they’ve sent you that 15 second clip and then and also a lot of people say “well how do you learn all the words to all these songs” well actually I only learn 15 seconds worth. “
Despite her fame, Ann hasn’t changed. The common thread in her life – sharing- never really left her. Even when success landed in her lap, she seems to have kept her feet on the ground: If we can’t support a new artist, then who are we?”
From kitchen to stage?
In the end, everything she’d been through led her back to music – not just through TikTok. More and more people started telling her: “You need to DJ”. It was a new challenge, gladly taken on by this fearless woman.
“I took six lessons with a local DJ, a lady from a place called Melody’s DJs who were brilliant. (…) I was completely hooked”
What she was still missing was the one thing that truly made her feel alive: the pleasure of the mix, and the pull of the studio. Ann absolutely loves the creation side, which makes perfect sense, it’s never about the track, it’s always about the pulse underneath it : “The beat, I love the beat. Even now, everybody will say to me: “what’s your favourite song?” And I always say, I haven’t got a favourite song, I’ve got a favourite beat.”
The beat didn’t stay in her kitchen. A few months ago, a techno DJ called Stark approached her with a simple question: “Do you want to make a track?”. Ann said yes, like every time she has the opportunity to try new things. Suddenly, the woman who made turntables out of saucepans found herself in a music production studio.
“It was hard work, it is hard work actually”she insists, almost laughing at how serious all this was. She recorded the spoken parts (voiceovers layered over the beat). What she loves the most in that part, is the level of focus involved in music creation, but also the intimacy, the strange quiet of creating without anybody around you. Nevertheless, she also discovered something else, being invited on a track is not building one. The process became a set of options, but Ann may have wanted a blank page:“Not completely open creative” she admits. So what she discovered is, looking forward, she would like to be much more involved.
Hence, behind the creation, everything still has to be done. The posts, the pressure, the assumption that you can’t “just put a video every night” adding to her current schedule of a content creator “It wasn’t really making the music,” she adds.
What comes next already sounds bigger than her kitchen:“It just keeps getting better and better really, more and more exciting,” she says, casually dropping future plans: “lots of things in the pipeline,” “more DJing, proper DJing,” even mentioning Dubai in January and Ibiza this summer.
Actually, her coming music and gigs are the continuation of everything that came before. The patience of teaching, the instinct to care, the audacity to take matters into your own hands. Her musical journey is only the beginning, but she already felt truly grateful to live all these new adventures at 64. Ann has always measured life by what it gives back:
“If I can make a difference to one person’s life then everything’s worth it”.
At least, we can say one thing: the world is hers!
Discover more of Crazy Auntie Ann’s universe on her official website.
📷 : Cover Photo Credits / Crazy Auntie Ann / Slippy Clouds
📷 : Additional Photo Credits / Courtesy of Crazy Auntie Ann
💚: Special thanks to @crazyauntieann and Liv from @slippyclouds