Norfolk might not be the first place you associate with the underground scene of London, but from August 10-13, the thumping sounds of Farringdon’s Fabric nightclub will be taken to the countryside of East Anglia, thanks to one of the venue’s most prominent figures.
Houghton Festival is the brainchild of DJ Craig Richards, bringing his love of music and his passion for the arts to the picturesque Houghton Hall, for a four-day event that features everything from a sculpture park to a 24-hour running stage.
It’s a bold concept from Richards, originally from Bournemouth, who moved to London in 1985, initially to become a painter. His love of visual arts took him to the Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) on an illustration course — where he was exposed to London’s buzzing nightlife.
“It was brilliant time to be in Soho, and a brilliant time to be in London,” he says. “The London club scene was really vibrant, you know, there was so, so much stuff. It's moved all over the city now, but in those days, it was very Soho-centric. There was just loads of little clubs that you could hire when we were at college. We used to do parties, and it was easy to sort of hire a little club in Soho for a Tuesday night.”
He soon ended up DJing — a natural progression from his habitual record collecting — where he would play some of the capital’s legendary clubs, including The Cross, the popular Nineties club, founded by Billy Reilly of the Reilly family, one of London’s most notorious gangster clans — though both he and his entrepreneurial brother Keith are from the haulage side of the family.
The Kings Cross venue closed in 2008, but helped raise the profile of some of the capital’s most influential DJs, including Richards and long-time friend Terry Francis.
Then bigger things beckoned. In 1999, Keith Reilly, would turn a former meat and poultry storage facility into the one world’s best nightclubs, better known as Fabric. The project was about championing the unsung heroes of the scene, with still-relatively unknown Richards and Francis becoming the club’s first weekly residents.
He looks back on his time there with affection: “I have great friendships that were made there, people that I've only ever met in there, people that I've never met in the daylight, you know? I used to see [them] on a weekly basis and we became friends. It was a lovely time.”
After over two decades of appearances at the venue, a then 50-year-old Richards decided to slow down the DJing to embark on a project that would bring together his music and visual arts interests. This venture would take him to the countryside of East Anglia, essentially bringing Fabric to the fields for a new concept, Houghton Festival.
This comes as even more of a left-field idea when you consider that Richards never really enjoyed DJing at festivals: “It was very, very complicated with records and vinyl, to be able to actually do what you need to do,” he tells me. Still though, the artistic promise the Norfolk site provided proved irresistible.
“With the site as it was, and with this sculpture garden, it seemed that maybe you could do an arts and music festival, and that I could perhaps meld together or combine my interests and push them forward.”
The site also benefits from a 24-hour license, a unique element in a crowded festival market, that allows Richards to curate a line-up that provides the soundtrack for both day and night.
The concept was an instant hit, with Richards’ credentials helping him book some of the finest talents in the dance scene - such as DJ and Fabric favourite Ricardo Villalobos, who joined the bill for the festival’s inaugural outing in 2017 and teamed up with Richards for a thumping eight-hour back-to-back set.
The festival has since seen many of Fabric’s regulars taking to the stage, with Helena Hauff and Ben UFO among the many familiar faces that are set to play this year.
While the festival’s popularity grew from its first two editions, in 2019, Houghton hit the headlines after was called off last-minute, due to severe weather warnings, after the site was already built up. For Richards, it was “heartbreaking”.
“We’d taken the festival to a finished state, you know, and the only thing that was missing was the people,” he tells me. “It was definitely a complicated and difficult time.” What followed would be two further cancellations; in 2020 due to the pandemic, and again in 2021, though Richards says the festival could have gone ahead that year.
”We perhaps could have done it, [but] in retrospect, we would have been very cavalier and there was no real insurance. The government were stalling and weren't really very clear about any protection for us doing that — it would have been an enormous gamble.”
Richards held off, instead applying for funding from the Arts Council to help the festival through the challenging times it faced, but the application was rejected.
“It will always be slightly bewildering to me that you can give somebody nothing and somebody else quite a lot”, he says. “The distribution of the money was, I think was done quite poorly.”
He adds: “Having had these two great years in a row, we established a real loyal following and felt that we'd made quite a statement, [so] it felt slightly wrong that we weren't encouraged or helped in any way.”
Loyalty has been a sticking point for Richards through his 20-plus year career, and his dedication to the dance music scene was rewarded by DJs and revellers alike — with some DJs waiving their booking fees, and fans holding onto tickets until restrictions ended.
Last year, Houghton was finally able to go ahead for the first time in three years, with a line-up packed with top class talent, which included internationally renowned DJ Seth Troxler.
With not long till the festival’s fourth edition, and some exciting bookings that include musical phenomenon Reggie Watts, Richards says one of his favourite aspects of the site is that it has no signal, allowing people to live in the moment.
“Different levels of fantasy and freedom come with not having a phone. We're all on those things so much and while it's an absolute drama for us not to have phones in there while we're building and preparing, it's one of the greatest happy accidents of the festival.”
He adds: “People leave the festival having not interacted with their phone. I mean, possibly not even to use it as a camera. If you remove phones from the dance floor, and from the campsite, you really are in a much more liberated environment.”
