The air in Colour Factory on Saturday night was thick enough to wear. Bass, bodies and heat. The kind of atmosphere that takes about thirty seconds to either love or flee, and nobody there was fleeing. Five venues, nine dancefloors, 85 DJs, and a neighbourhood that’s essentially been handed over to the queer underground for sixteen hours. Where do you even start?
It didn’t last long. Because the thing about HOWL is that within minutes of arriving, you stop thinking about navigating it and just let it pull you in. The energy when we got there was immediate and infectious, this collective exhale of a crowd who’d spent all day in the sun and were now ready to fully let go. My two best friends and I have done London Pride together for years, and there’s a rhythm to it by now, the parade, the afternoon, and then the moment the night really starts. HOWL has become our version of that moment.
We spent most of the night at Colour Factory. On the main stage, Juliana Huxtable and LYDO delivered sets that moved between visceral and euphoric, the kind of music that stops feeling like something you listen to and starts feeling like something that’s happening to you. Evissimax kept the room locked in and showed no signs of letting it go. Outside, Chippy Nonstop’s hybrid set at Hackney Bridge was pulling a crowd that had clearly made their decision for the night. “Wish they did this weekly,” one attendee told me. Hard to argue.
What HOWL gets right is the space it creates between the spaces. This isn’t one room you either love or endure. Moving between buildings keeps things feeling alive, you catch a different energy in each room, wander onto a rooftop, find a garden, end up somewhere unexpected. Cruising zones and cage dancers one minute, a terrace full of people watching the Hackney skyline the next. It holds all of it without any of it feeling jarring, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. “I didn’t even come here for the music,” someone said to me near the garden. “Just the people.” Which tells you everything you need to know.
The fashion was its own event. Someone near me in Colour Factory was wearing glitter trousers and a cowboy hat someone had handed him on the dancefloor, and it looked like it had always been his. A red sequinned jumpsuit that caught every strobe in the room. Makeup so good that my friend physically stopped someone mid-dance to ask for a photo. They said yes without missing a beat. “I keep bumping into my exes,” laughed someone at the bar. At HOWL Pride, that’s not a complaint. It’s basically the point.
At some point in the night I looked around and had one of those rare clear thoughts you don’t usually get in loud rooms: everyone here is exactly where they want to be. Not performing it, just in it. That’s the thing about HOWL. It feels like a little pocket of the world operating by different rules.
HOWL, you’ve set the bar dangerously high. We’ll see you in Hackney Wick next year.
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Words: Lola Carron
Photographer: Karen Stanley