End Of The Road Festival – 12th-14th September 2008

Some time round about the start of the month, I heard a trailer on Radio 1 for Bestival which offhandedly described it as “the climax of the festival season”. And, you know, that seemed OK by me. End Of The Road may be a week later, but in its third year it’s got to be a hotly anticipated sellout that attracts a more than decent bill purely by word of mouth. The location, the clientele, the layout… it all seems just right somehow, and with the expanded, wide ranging and exotic food stalls and a few other cosmetic but helpful changes just made it all the better. Small, family friendly but not overtly so and with a few little surprises dotted around – the piano and library in the woods this year joined by a table tennis table and light-up dancefloor – it’s the sort of place you want to recommend to your like-minded friends. Not even a couple of deluges on Friday which left puddles and in time horrible sticky mud in crucial areas affected the general bonhomie. In fact, we were even treated to a double rainbow at one point.

Descriptions in festival reviews of how long it took the writer to get their tent up are more often than not tedious, so just assume I didn’t die and let’s move straight on to Friday’s music, opened by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, trying their best to inject the joy of their 60s hooks via early Weezer and the The Shins into a small crowd on an overcast day with little success. With a felt roof over their heads Gossamer Albatross‘ take on what Zach Condon making a Beirut album based on English chamber folk revival would sound like bolsters the Hereford teenagers’ early promise.

No such easy categorisations when it comes to Cats In Paris, their ADD afflicted synth glam-prog experimental cut and paste pop never quite collapsing in on itself and ending up making a very strange kind of sense. TLOBF favourites The Acorn are well worth braving the first of the day’s rains for, bringing Glory Hope Mountain gloriously to life in a flurry of percussion, ensemble syncopation and graceful, joyous fleshing out of the album’s peaks and troughs. The Young Republic, who similarly won many over here last year, have changed a few members and toughened up, to the detriment of their freewheeling aesthetic – it’s telling that in a set mostly containing new material they’re most comfortable playing ‘Girl From The Northern States’ from their 12 Tales From Winter City album.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw‘s Baltic hoedowns struggle manfully against apathy and weather, while plaintive ukelele toting one man band Peter And The Wolf makes a quiet but steady impact. Despite everything she’s experienced over the last year Laura Marling, now sporting a Boris Johnson haircut, is still visibly nervous at playing to this many people but it doesn’t tell in her performance, capable of drawing ever growing audiences into her fragile world, a new song seemingly totally in keeping with the album tracks that surround it.

If Warren Ellis was any one of the things he has as his main attributes – virtuoso violinist, restless performer, king of banter, mighty beard wearer – he’d be worth watching. That he’s all four and more makes Dirty Three a weekend standout, as while Mick Turner looks implacable while doling out complex drum patterns and Jim White lays down the ambient guitar Ellis is off high kicking and swooping all round the place whipping bow across strings and making a mighty tumult emerge. You can’t turn away for a moment. In non-sequitur terms he has to play second fiddle (sic) to Robyn Hitchcock over in the Big Top, but despite the deep well of a back catalogue he liberally draws from it’s somehow unengaging.

Mark Eitzel these days comes on like a preacher for the black humoured and betrayed, his American Music Club delivering damaged emotional bar-room alt-rock while he summons up his wild-eyed croon and attempts to either convert us to or warn us about the dark side, whichever is easiest. Akron/Family are in an improv mood judging by the fifteen minute feast of droning and screaming they begin with, during which I join the throng deciding they’d best save the energy for tomorrow.

Saturday brings the sun, and also Absentee, Dan Michaelson’s lugubrious baritone croon fronting a set half split between past and forthcoming albums without ever causing much of a spark. Folktronica supergroup The Accidental fare much better, exuding bonhomie both between (tales of near fights in Tube stations and sharing dressing rooms with The Peth) and during (warm but dark four part harmonies) songs.

Threatmantics‘ loose-leaf folk loses out to the talkers in the Bimble Inn and gas mask-clad Screaming Tea Party‘s kamikaze noise-pop seems to come from another festival entirely. No such problems of fitting in with Noah And The Whale, even if the gleeful touch they exhibited in festivals over the summer is dissipating in post-hit expectations, but a more than capable set is finished in the inevitable way, children of shoulders doing the actions for drunken acapella singalong of the festival ‘Five Years Time’. You’d hope kids will never learn to sing along with Let’s Wrestle, whose scrappily charming Television Personalities-like shambling is showing worrying signs of getting tighter.

The piano in the woods is there for anyone who wants to put on a quick secret gig, an offer taken up by the Willkommen Collective whose members include Sons Of Noel & Adrian, the Miserable Rich and Shoreline. They’re there for a good hour swapping around their strings-aided expansive English folk sound, having thought to bring a small amp and some camping chairs. A second, even more wayward set by The Young Republic passes by in the background.

Going on the reaction when he and his band walk on stage, Justin Vernon could have played the whole Bon Iver set on a penny whistle and had disciples flocking to kiss his feet. He doesn’t; in fact quite the opposite, as For Emma, Forever Ago is spectacularly fleshed out, somehow keeping the introspective, personal tone even when fleshed out by a full electric band involving much percussion and if anything enhancing the songs’ peaks and Vernon’s swooping voice, especially on a newly crowd interactive ‘The Wolves (Act I & II)’. New song ‘Blood Bank’ is just what a Bon Iver song written for these enhanced circumstances would sound like, and is excellent. A cover of Talk Talk’s ‘I Believe in You’, simultaneously sounded like an original and a faithful reading. By the time Vernon brings Bowerbirds on for a heartrending harmonic take on Nashville singer-songwriter Sarah Siskind’s ‘Lovin’s For Fools’ the talking point of the whole festival is sealed. Kind of.

If Bon Iver is all snow and desolation British Sea Power are woodland and foliage, by which I mean both that around the amps and that being held aloft by pockets of the audience. BSP have a 100% attendance rate at EOTR, which means they’re among friends and can take chances with a setlist that includes some surprise choices, not least ‘A Lovely Day Tomorrow’, a great song but still a B-side from seven years ago. They’re not as stratospheric as last year but it’s still a more than capable set, and even without the famously chaotic regular closer ‘Rock In A’ guitarist Martin Noble ends up in the crowd.

After a set by the piano by Timothy Victor’s Folk Orchestra, essentially a very British version of the Coal Porters school of bluegrass hoedown, Low emerge in a dark mood in more ways than one, Alan Sparhawk and co turning up the amps and pedals to delicately bludgeon (a concept only modern Low can really pull off) through the purist pleasing likes of ‘Sunflower’, ‘Dinosaur Act’ and ‘Canada’ to stunning effect… until, in a fit of pique brought about by Sparhawk breaking a string right at the end of the set, he makes a half-hearted attempt to break his guitar, unplugs it, whirls it around hammer thrower-style a couple of times and launches it full throttle into the crowd to complete stunned silence. Luckily nobody was injured, but it put a dampener on proceedings.

Meanwhile The Acorn are having a go at laying waste to the Bimble Inn, the percussionist using its actual beams for hammering purposes, and the human traffic enjoying itself up the front turns into a stampede when Rolf Klausener casually mentions he has some promos to give away. Jeremy Warmsley couldn’t top that in any way, as he freely admitted, but he gave it a good go, reworking old songs, showcasing those from the forthcoming How We Became album and finishing on his kinetic cover of New Order’s ‘Temptation’.

Across at the Garden Stage Mercury Rev are turning in what by most accounts is a stratospheric set wisely heavy on Deserter’s Songs, but we’re in The Local for The Chap, a band unlike any other, taking the pared down punk-funk of prime Talking Heads and injecting electro beats, mutant art rock, odd twists and turns and enough archness to make Will Self cry, replete with choreographed shape throwing and between song conceptualising, culminating in Johannes von Weizsäcker attempting to destroy a cello merely through manaical bow sawing. Two Gallants go about things in an altogether more sedate, righteous way, Adam Stephens’ pained holler ensuring their redemption songs are requisitely passionate, especially when ‘Las Cruces Jail’ virtually raises the roof. All that’s left now is to stand outside a full to burst Local for Shearwater‘s jazz-folk Talk Talkisms and a night in the Bimble Inn featuring the Young Republic’s regular covers set and The Modern Ovens, half of British Sea Power and Brighton friends’ Jonathan Richman tribute band.

Sons Of Noel & Adrian kick off Sunday on the Garden Stage with their ten-strong brittle chamber sea shanties full of quiet subtleties and grace. Congregation aim for quite the opposite moods with their dual primal 12-bar blues, but others do this so much better. The Wave Pictures mainline Richman too, with lyrical acumen and the odd guitar solo, and find winning over this crowd a cinch.

Kimya Dawson tries out some songs from her new children’s album Alphabutt – basically they’re much the same as her proper songs except with scatalogical alphabet references rather than relationships. A very different kind of female singer-songwriter is Liz Green, whose voice and fingerpicked blues-folk style seems to come from another age and gets the respect it’s due. The impeccably suited Jason Molina is alone on the stage cherrypicking from his most recent Magnolia Electric Co work, but in this format it settles into a torpor that only the bracingly raw garage rock with military uniform and handlebar moustache of a rare festival appearance by Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire can shift. At one point Childish has to restart a song as he’s forgotten its fourth chord.

Darren Hayman has suggested that this might be the last of the Darren And Jack Play Hefner Songs shows, and if so it’s a fine way to go out, getting a decent singalong for pretty much everything. Dave Tattersall of the Wave Pictures joins in at the end for some self-conscious soloing, and he’s also on hand for Jeffrey Lewis, ukelele in hand. Like BSP, Lewis makes only token attempts at setlist populism, bar a spirited ‘The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane’ plus a new song about how he preferred Herman Dune when both brothers were in the band. A very Jeffrey Lewis subject, frankly.

John Darnielle joins in on the “course they do!”s on ‘Do They Owe Us A Living’ at the end of Lewis’ set, but his own with the Mountain Goats begins less smoothly when he breaks a string with his first strum and holds things up for five minutes. Further problems with the mix threaten to derail a set that plenty of other performers had recommended, but eventually the quality of his storytelling shines through to conclude on a rapturously received ‘This Year’ and ‘No Children’. Meanwhile on the Garden Stage Tindersticks have brought a string section the better to complement their song noirs, if mostly taken from their most recent work. As far as I’m concerned at least, the weekend ends with a bracing Brakes set which sees Eamon Hamilton’s recently betrothed wife join him to duet on ‘Jackson’, a conclusively individualistic end to another triumphant year for all concerned. Dunno what your plans are, but I’ve got my Early Bird 2009 ticket already.

End Of The Road Festival