Back after a weekend away at the End of the Road festival, and what a weekend it was. Wonderful weather, great company, and only the briefest hints of rain. It felt pretty special: a small festival (only 5000 tickets), lots of families, great food, wonderful music, and a schedule that never felt too crowded, but always yielded serendipitous discoveries wherever you looked. Highlights included:
- Bumping into a musician practicing on the piano in the piano garden, and being his audience for a while
- The peacocks! (Larmer Tree Gardens has several resident peacocks, who would happily wander around the paths)
- Finding that friends I wasn’t expecting (Ben-Rizla, Tim) were also there
- Discovering Midlake in their wonderful 90-minute set
- Darren Hayman + co’s impromptu secret bluegrass gig in the piano garden
- Hush The Many playing a lunchtime set like it was a headline show (and subsequently chatting to Nima from HTM the next day - November 9th, at the 100 Club if you want to see them again)
- The fantastic burritos at the Mexican place - their breakfast burrito was a triumph
- I’m From Barcelona’s hilarious, uplifting, ecstatic afternoon show - crowd-surfing-on-a-lilo and all
- Jim White’s humble, delightful songwriting
- Cooking breakfasts and lunches on our Trangia
- Architecture from Helsinki - at times bewildering, and then just as I’m about to leave, they bring it around with some dirty four-to-the-floor. They battled poor sound to give a good show
- Finally getting to see Salter Cane perform (congrats, Jeremy!)
- The stage invasion during SFA’s The Man Don’t Give A Fuck
- Standing around the fire at night with some particularly fine hot chocolate
- Kurt Wagner’s majestic, delicate closing Lambchop set
There were many others, but that should give you the idea. Alex and I spent a while trying to describe what tied all the acts we saw together, given they felt so disparate. But in the end, there was definitely one thing that brought them altogether: a shared sense of humility. The organisers were thanked in practically every set; the festival lauded similarly. So many musicians and bands just seemed so thankful to be there, and would always inform the audience of this - usually prior to thanking the audience themselves. And they all meant it. It felt wonderful to be at such a gentle, honest festival, which made up in heart what it lacked in bravado.
Already, I cannot wait for next year.
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Lu said... 1
Thanks! This is the first blog report I’ve been able to find from EOR, a festival I was truly sorry to miss. Did you see the Young Republic?
Martin said... 2
Wish I could have gone. I saw Howe Gelb last night at the Luminaire and he was awesome. Jim White’s playing there next month if you’re interested.
brendan mannion said... 3
I’ve been to Leeds Festival for the past 5 years, but the lure of Bees, Brakes, SFA, and British Sea Power all on one day, and a host of unknown (to me) pleasures lured me the long way down to Dorset.Sadly SFA & BSP were on at the same time which was bad planning I thought, so BSP won the day and were outstanding as ever. Just hope the new songs haven’t been overproduced on the record. Aside from them, and Pete& the Pirates and Misty’s Big Adventure(both superb live bands), I enjoyed discovering Jeffrey Lewis, Darren Hayman, Loney Dear, Michael J Sheehy, 30 lb of Bone, Hyacinth House, Twilight Sad, and others too numerous to mention. Outstanding bands in beautiful settings, and after meeting Russell Howard & Jon Richardson of BBC6 Music on the saturday, I ended up talking to them live on their sunday morning show, hungover in my tent after about 1/2 an hours sleep. listen to this weeks podcast of their show , and I’m on it.
Anyway,back to the point, I want to recommend EOTR to everyone but not at the expense of it then becoming too big and losing the little touches?? tricky dilemma, but well done to all involved.