Is there any festival more aptly named than End of the Road? As people and performers gather at the woodland site in Larmar Tree Gardens, near the border of Dorset and Wiltshire, it does inevitably feel like an ending – festival season, and summer itself, drifting into a gentle and bittersweet close. More than 100 live music performances featuring artists from across the world were on the bill at this year’s End Of The Road Festival, held in a quiet corner of rural Dorset.
The independently run event, which is in its 18th year, is renowned for its cross-genre musical line-up, and for showcasing emerging talent alongside established acts.
Headlining on Friday were Bristol-based punk band Idles, riding high after their Glastonbury set earlier in the summer, while on Saturday, 90s shoegaze pioneers Slowdive – who released their fifth album last year – were also taking a turn on the main Woods Stage.
It’s something felt by the artists as much as the attendees. Introducing a moving, pared-back set on the scenic Talking Heads stage, Jess Williamson (one-half of the Waxahatchee collaboration Plains) remarks that it has “last day of school vibes”. For others, such as the brilliant and sonically mercurial electro-pop duo Jockstrap, the weekend also marks the end of a long summer run: a tour in lambent twilight.
The biggest coup of the weekend actually comes on Thursday, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the indie-folk music project of actor-songwriter Will Oldham, holds court on End of the Road’s main Woods stage. His is a sound that has influenced a generation of songwriters: sparse, soulful and cerebral Americana. Oldham seldom plays festivals, and his booking here is said to be more than a decade in the making.
It’s worth the wait: watching him and his small band pluck and strum their way through songs such as “Like It Or Not” and the rousing anticapitalist ballad “In the Wilderness” feels like a rare privilege. Not many festivals would yield a primetime spot on their biggest stage to music this gentle and intimate; he is rewarded with an audience that’s pin-drop quiet. When people say that End of the Road is a music lover’s festival, one with audiences that are “more attentive” than typical festival punters, it’s easy to dismiss it as spiel or hyperbole. Oldham’s set suggests it’s right on the money.
On The Woods stage, though, it’s very much a gentle introduction to the weekend. Laetitia Sadier, following the Stereolab reunion that rolled through Larmer Tree Gardens a couple of years back, is here in support of her fifth solo album “Rooting For Love“, containing, in her own words “sonic balm[s] to aid the evolution of Earth’s traumatized civilizations”.
But it’s not all acoustic guitars and mellifluous choruses. The bill across the weekend spans a rich and eclectic range of sounds, from moshy young American outfit Lip Critic (playing in the darkened Big Top tent), to rowdy British rockers Idles, to Irish trad experimentalists Lankum, who headline Saturday’s garden stage slot with a set that’s by turns exhilarating and laden with doomy dissonance. The Irish folk group whose 2023 album became the first in the genre to be nominated for the Mercury Prize in more than a decade. Lebanese collective Sanam and Somali singer and cultural activist Sahra Halgan played the more intimate Garden Stage,
Quirky singer-songwriter Joanna Sternberg is raw and captivating, performing twice, the second time in one of the festival’s many secret sets. Indie rock maven Julia Jacklin takes another, performing a terrific set of songs on her birthday – marked by a cake being brought out on stage.
Another of the highlights of the weekend is Irish country-pop powerhouse CMAT, whose athletic, funny and charismatic set includes an astonishingly well-executed cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. “This is one of the best shows we’ve ever done,” she says towards the end.
Away from the music, the festival is just as eccentric in its choices, with the cinema tent – moved this year into a brick-and-mortar hall, in the part of the site patrolled by peacocks – featuring a diverse and unpredictable mix, from Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful indie Old Joy to classics such as Back to the Future. The comedy billing, meanwhile, includes Stewart Lee, Josie Long, and Fern Brady, who delivers a sharp half-hour about her experience turning down a slot on Strictly Come Dancing, one of the “most sinister programmes on TV”, and a magic mushrooms-dazed trip to Thailand.
A drop-out from Fever Ray due to illness sees indie rock veterans Yo La Tengo seamlessly upgraded to the main-stage headline slot, The US indie rock trio were announced to close proceedings on Sunday.at one point bringing out a young child to join them on guitar, to the delight of the crowd. Despite this, and a few other cancellations, it’s a weekend replete with great music and great vibes. The end has never looked so full of possibilities.
The Fat Angel Sings 