I have now been to Houghton twice, and I have never seen Terminus.
Photo Credit Murphy I Stuart Ashley
For the uninitiated: Terminus is the hidden one. It sits on the far side of the campsite, cut off from everything, running 24 hours with a line-up nobody publishes. Regulars talk about it the way people talk about a pilgrimage – the queue can run to three hours, sometimes five, and once you’re in you don’t leave, because leaving means doing the queue again. Every review of this festival you have read includes a Terminus section. Getting there is the closest thing Houghton has to a rite of passage.
Both years, I ran out of legs before I ran out of festival.
I want to argue that this is the single most useful thing I can tell you about Houghton, and that it is a compliment.
The festival smashes the itinerary. The design does it to you deliberately. The stages sit close enough that you’re always a few minutes’ walk from a completely different sound, which means every journey between two places actually encompasses four as you walk between them.
Stallions is the biggest delinquent, and I mean that with love. It’s a small, cozy tent sat right on the route in and out of the woods, so you pass it constantly, and there’s always enough atmosphere leaking out that you can’t help but stop in for one track. On the Saturday we stopped for one and left six hours later. Three hours of exquisite house from Chez Damier, the peak being when he dropped ‘Can You Feel It’ (The MK New York dub). Listening back to it now still puts a chill through me. Then Prosumer took the reins and opened by bringing back the lyrics – Valerie Carter’s ‘Doorbells in the Rain’ is the kind of selection that gives a room that’s been dancing for three hours a moment to slow down, look around and feel the love, before winding it back up and sending us off again.
Then there’s the line-up itself, which feels engineered for exactly this. Craig Richards and his team booked close to 200 artists this year, and more than sixty of them were Houghton debutants. A third of the bill being unfamiliar ought to be a risk. Instead, it’s the mechanism. It means the thing you fall into by accident is roughly as likely to be as brilliant as the thing you planned.
Saturday afternoon, on our way to get some lunch, we poked our noses into Wayne Holland at Giant Steps, a charming little dancefloor tucked inside a yurt. We stayed the full two hours. Joyous nostalgia: Seventies, Eighties and Nineties pop-disco, all on vinyl, Quando Quango’s ‘Love Tempo’ into Syreeta’s ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’ into Phortune’s ‘String Free’ – effortless selection from a seasoned veteran. On Friday night, we took a wrong turn and ended up at Earthling, going in with Raresh. Wobbly, techy baselines that had you turning to the person next to you with a face like you’d sucked a lemon. It was a peak-hour lock-in that we never agreed to.
And then there was Marie Davidson, who we saw entirely by mistake. We stayed to the end of Helena Hauff’s set at Derren Smart because we were waiting for a friend – and because we’d spent it loitering at the back, we found ourselves in the front row when the action flipped from the DJ booth back to the big stage behind us. Neither of us knew who she was. Her backlit figure appeared, and the bass started to rumble, so we grabbed the barrier and braced for something.
Thumping kicks, crashing snares, gritty saw-wave basslines – and then she picked up the microphone. She moved between sexy spoken word, playful baiting of the crowd, and full-throated screaming without ever seeming to change gear, strutting the stage and climbing onto the barrier close enough to touch. Sir Bob Cornelius Rufus meets Nina Kraviz, if you need a shorthand. Emily called her “the ultimate baddie” and I haven’t been able to improve on it. One of the best things we witnessed all weekend, and we found it by standing in the wrong place.
The range runs further than the dancefloors, too. On Sunday afternoon, while lapping the pond, our ears picked up the sound of BRUCE playing at Pinters – a project barely a year old consisting of Bernese bass clarinettist Sha and Australian pedal steel guitarist James Gilligan. It is a genuinely unlike-anything-else sound. ‘Good Company’ and ‘Still’ were our favorite tracks, but the moment that undid us was when James sang ‘Collateral Damage’…because he sang. BRUCE’s music is all instrumental, but this was a song James wrote with a separate act. His voice was extraordinary – enormous emotion under complete control, and a tone that sat perfectly against the instruments. To tell you the truth, I welled up. And I can confirm, I was entirely sober at the time.
As a producer still hunting for my own sound, this performance was enlightening in a way I wasn’t expecting. I’d barely heard a bass clarinet before that afternoon, and I left in love with it. Beyond the bass notes, which run smooth and soft or harsh and raspy, the thing is wildly percussive. I’ll be experimenting with it. And I doubt I’m the only person who drove home with a new idea. It is a truly inspiring place for creative minds.
While our plans to do the sought-after sculpture tour failed miserably, the things I didn’t plan kept turning up unprompted. At the Mezcaleria, over a frozen paloma – one of the most refreshing cocktails I’ve had anywhere, let alone at a festival – we met Gabriel, a.k.a. the King of Tajín, who runs the Mexican seasoning company with his brother. All weekend we’d watched people wander past with miniature bottles of the stuff, quietly coveting one, and here was the source. We spent the rest of the day with him.
Outside Stallions we found Lucy, miming with total and utter commitment into a glitter-ball microphone. She staggered off toward the toilets with friends and returned minutes later helpless with laughter, holding a lasagne and several loose slices of Bakewell tart. Asked what had happened, she explained that an Italian man had emerged from a bush and given it to them. We have no evidence that Houghton employs Italian men to hide in shrubbery distributing hot food to unsuspecting ravers. If they do: bravo.
None of this was on the running order. Neither was our side quest to find the person handing out little mushroom hair clips that made it look like you were sprouting, or the poets sitting around the site waiting to be hired, or the delightful cup of tea we had in a little old lady’s living room (I won’t spoil it). Houghton is riddled with these small, unadvertised, faintly absurd things that only exist if you happen to spot them.
One practical note: the dust. Houghton sits on dry Norfolk ground, so several thousand pairs of dancing feet put a good deal of it into the air. Nobody can control that, and everyone who’s been before knows to plan for it.
If it’s your first Houghton, pack a bandana. It weighs nothing in a bag, and you’ll be grateful for it by the second night. I saw one guy wearing his boxers like a snood because he’d forgotten his, and I don’t blame him for improvising. I just pray it was a clean pair.
So: two years, no Terminus. Both times beaten by my own legs.
Every other account of this festival that I’ve read is organized around conquest; the sets caught, the queue survived, the mythical stage finally entered. And I understand the impulse. But I think it slightly misses what’s actually remarkable here, which is that Houghton is one of the very few festivals where completeness isn’t available to you, and where that stops being frustrating almost immediately.
There is more good music in this Norfolk field than a determined raver can physically absorb over a weekend. Not more music: more good music, which is a much harder thing to build. Sixty debutants, a bass clarinet at teatime, techno into the sunrise, Eighties pop in a yurt at midnight, all of it curated tightly enough that the accidents land as well as the plans.
So, the way I recommend doing Houghton is not to plan it. It’s to walk in with no list, get comfortable with the certainty that you will miss almost everything, and let the site hand you your weekend. Mine gave me a two-hour disco set I’d never have chosen, an artist I’d never heard of who turned out to be the best live performance I’ve seen in years, a bass clarinet obsession, a man who owns a spice company, and a woman with a lasagne.
I’ll be back next year, and I’d like to say I’ll finally make Terminus. But I suspect I won’t. I suspect I’ll get distracted somewhere around Stallions, the way you’re supposed to.
