I wake with a deep gasp, sweating like a bottom-of-the-bag Peperami sausage inside a tent that is nothing short of a glorified microwave. Panicked, I unzip the door to find my friends, strewn like crisp packets across the ring of camping chairs, deep in mouth-breathing sleep after almost 24 hours of continuous dancing.
I fish about for my phone in search of the time, and of course it is completely dead. My hand finds the mirror I use to do my makeup, and fearing the worst, I hold it to my face. It’s a disgrace – creased from the lack of sleep, with a thick marble of dirt around my nose and eyes. ‘Christ,’ I say before crawling out of my tent and curling up into a ball under the only patch of shade left at our camp. I trickle some tepid water into my mouth and close my eyes again, falling asleep to the not-so-distant sound of a 4×4 bass that hasn’t stopped since we entered the arena. Yes, I think, there is nowhere I’d rather be.
That was Saturday morning at Houghton Festival, an annual jaunt that pulls an intriguing mix of techno fanatics, lads from up north and East London “creatives” to the grounds of Houghton Hall in Norfolk, for a 96-hour dance. Founded in 2017 by Fabric’s own Craig Richards, Houghton is the UK’s first 24-hour licensed music festival boasting world-class sound systems, light and art installations that weave through woodlands and along lakesides. Its focus on extended-set underground electronic music landed it a cult following almost immediately. Whilst it has grown in recent years, there remains a certain artistry to this party that I am yet to encounter at another festival.
Unlike many, I cannot claim to be a Houghton veteran, as this was only my second year in attendance, but there was something about this year’s edition that really stuck with me, literally, around my throat and into my lungs, and that was the dust. After a summer of relentless climate crisis heatwaves that have left our land bleached, barren, and in many places, on fire, the intensity of Houghton festival was upped even further. We coughed and spluttered through the mornings, voices crackly, coated from head to foot in a constant sheen of dirt that no amount of baby wipes or showers could remove.
But by accepting the grimness, the pure human shit of it all, we were able to fully let go, for better or for worse. It was this energy that had people walking around openly picking black bogies from their noses, or that allowed the 6ft3 man next to me to tap me on the shoulder and point out the tear rolling down his cheek because Calibre’s set was just that good.
Of course the music was incredible, it always is, but it was the moments between sets that I often felt most enamoured by Houghton. My favourite times were the early mornings, just after the sunrise, when we would sit by the lake watching as folks stumbled out of the strobe-lit forest, weary-eyed and weak-kneed, laughing at the knowledge that we looked just like them. Then, later in the day, you would see these same folks cuddled up under trees, in hammocks, draped anywhere they could find shade, in an attempt to catch up on the hours of lost sleep; completely vulnerable, entirely uncaring. Almost nowhere else do you get a glimpse at such intimate and ordinary moments of a stranger’s life. This was a space to feel witnessed rather than surveilled.
The traditional understanding of hedonism is that we should only pursue pleasure whilst avoiding the pain. But here it seems that pleasure is measured in proportion to pain, and when stripped of the regular comforts that make us numb, we can feel joy more deeply whilst revelling in the gory and grotesque experience of being alive.
What amazes me the most is the number of seemingly ordinary people who, every year, seek to lie in a wreckage of their own creation for a weekend, not just at Houghton, but at festivals across the country. Once, I would have said it was all in the name of a good time, but now I believe it’s in the name of feeling human again.
In this over-sanitized, over-convenient, Instagrammable, AI-filtered world, nothing feels better than twirling in the dirt, looking a mess, smelling a mess, with the comfort that everyone surrounding you is willingly in the same position. On Sunday night, when I thought I could two-step no more, I shouldered my way to the centre of the disco tent and basked in the energy of those still hugging and kissing and dancing with their hands in the air. The back ache, dehydration, and 50,000 daily step count are why we do it, because it unbinds us from expectation and appearance, leaving only space to be and feel.
Upon returning home, I am always left wondering why we must go to such extreme lengths to access this level of pleasure and presence. Why must we pay hundreds of pounds and wring our bodies of all they have to give? With each passing year, the world becomes a heavier place, and the horrors that litter our everyday lives are harder to ignore, forcing us to dig beyond our comfort to feel real again. But maybe it is also possible to encounter small moments in the mud that replenish our sense of humanity without the descent into chaos and dust.
