Across Larmer Tree Gardens this year, memory looms large. Hanging ribbons of each year’s festival wristband curtain the Effing Forest, countless renditions of happy birthday are sung to the festival, and there’s even an End Of The Road history exhibit sitting proudly on the site. While a British festival staple in 2026, the origins of End Of The Road Festival shouldn’t be forgotten.
Twenty five years ago, builder and decorator Simon Taffe was drunken standing at All Tomorrow’s Parties festival watching Yo La Tengo. Ever since his teenage years, Taffe had aspirations to work in the music industry. He played in bands, he DJed, he went to a never-ending list of gigs and festivals, but ultimately found work in the building trade instead. In 2001 though, Taffe first conceived of putting his own festival on.
Five years later, Taffe had remortgaged his house, taken out a flurry of loans and carved out his place in British festival history with End of the Road’s first edition taking flight in 2006. He did not make any money from End Of The Road for three years.
Twenty years on and End of the Road is widely considered to be one of the country’s finest festival offerings, being a shining light for emerging and storied alternative acts to play in intimate settings in front of dedicated and open music-lovers. This weekend’s offering has commonly been spouted as the finest lineup of the festival season and for good reason. A twentieth birthday requires a proper celebration, and End Of The Road is here to party.
And party we must. Early doors punters are greeted with the soaring American eagle vocals and chugging of Geese sound-checking ‘100 Horses’. Excitement is already palpable with early doors tinnies being cracked and guy lines being tripped over as talk of the New York titans show is planned out in advance.
Bug Teeth
Before them are plenty of other reasons to get stuck in though. Pastoral post-rockers Bug Teeth eek open the dusty environs of the Folly tent with glacial, supernal guitar music while The New Eves’ Nina Winder-Lind delivers a surprisingly stirring and hearty flash of 70s singer-songwriting stylings. If these steady offerings weren’t up to scratch then YHWH Nailgun’s monolithic translations of alien communication certainly blew any and all cobwebs out of early arrivals. Primitive rototoms ping as guitars spiral and warp beneath Zack Borzone’s subterranean sermons, which are particularly lithe as the sun sets and Cameron Winter’s head peeks out from behind stage right to watch his fellow New Yorkers.
Speaking of which, whispers of Geese are everywhere come Thursday evening with considerable mentions of a potential Cameron Winter secret set later that evening. But what is immediately affecting and utterly plausible is Darlington’s pollyfromthedirt just before the Thursday headline. A champion performer coming into his stride, Polly is confident and slick and virtuosic in his vocal runs filling out the tent and inspiring envy from the queue of people unable to witness this display.
pollyfromthedirt
As the quick march to the Woods main stage begins, the intensity of Geese’s magnetic pull is dense, grabbing any and all festival-goers with an inkling of curiosity. They are duly met with a montage video of New York and British culture, replete with the Knicks, Mitchell and Webb and Big John. Following this comes nearly two hours of utter class from the young quartet. A masterfully slick operation from a colossal touring run, Geese are showing no signs of road rust as they bounce from the dad-rock singalongs of ‘I See Myself’ or ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ to the abstract shuffling of ‘Long Island City Here I Come’ and the bombastic encore of ‘Trinidad.’ While much ink has been spilled about the group, this Thursday headline feels seminal drawing in the biggest crowd of the weekend. Few come close to this confluence of excitement and delivery. The hype is real.
Geese
Friday morning begins with a touch of rain and the excitement of 1000 Rabbits in the Big Top. Their jazzy lift and firm bounce recalls Björk’s more elastic Sugarcubes-era work or Life Without Buildings, but there’s something to prove in this cavernous space from 1000 Rabbits. They are dynamic and bolshy, every movement coming with a snap. The synth bass sits deep in the throat and, at times, seems determined to overpower everything around it. The sexual gasping of vocalist River is a lot for Friday morning, but the theatrics are bracing, while glacial strings give the whole thing the feeling of a groovy film score.
At the Woods main stage, Junior Brother offers a different kind of endurance test. Entering to Irish pipe music, he begins ‘Small Violence’ with a water bottle used as a slide before launching into something howling and feral. It feels almost like a test: if you can weather this, you’re ready for the show. Guttural vocals and undulating rhythms are punctuated by puckish tin whistles and shifting metres, with ‘Take Guilt’ rousing enough to shake the bones. “Hands up who’s afraid of God” Junior asks the crowd before leading a hearty singalong to ‘Hungover at Mass’, which brightens the set.
Cardinals
Two similarly strong outings follow at the Big Top with Colossal Squid summoning what feels like an electrical storm – artillery-battery drums and alien-invasion samples colliding with toy-box jingles and cacophonous guitars. Cardinals similarly bring weight and poise, arriving gruffer and noisier than on record, but overcoming feedback issues that threaten to overwhelm them, ‘Masquerade’ offering a warm, rich centre amid the din. Over at the Boat, thredd’s murky, bass-heavy set bounces ping-pong samples and skippy French house switches around trip-hop rhythms, with a rowdier crowd than expected.
Elsewhere, Friday’s more peculiar corners provide some of the festival’s most rewarding experiences. Milkweed’s performance in the Garden feels less like music being performed than something unearthed. Live loops and deep tape degradation pull ancient vocal recordings through a haze of high-pass filtering, orphan banjo strokes and airy, broken textures. A long, single composition slowly assembles itself before being torn apart by distorted banjo, guitar thrashing and dubsteppy bass. Ancient religious music is broken and reassembled into something new. It is minimal, ghostly and wholly captivating.
Angine de Poitrine
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Angine de Poitrine, have attracted a considerable crowd for what can only be described as mosquito bangers. Their alien-Quebecois-car-engine banter is met with a devoted, near-culty audience, but beneath the oddness is one of the tightest groups of the weekend. Dense but spritely, their campy math-rock precision feels less clinical than ecstatic. It is beautiful to see this kind of wonkish technicality enjoyed on such a scale.
The evening gets progressively less sensible. Adult DVD pack out the Big Top with fat 00s electroclash energy; acid synths chirping over dense bass and happy-Mondays-style vocals. Dance-punk reaches its zenith as the crowd falls neatly into their hands. Model/Actriz take things somewhere considerably more unhinged though for one of the best showings of the weekend. Opening with the strutting of ‘Diva’, they are noisy, scratchy, and utterly delicious with Cole Haden screaming ‘with a body count higher than a mosquito’ to a moshing, skanking throng which he soon joins for the majority of the set. There are kicks, vogueing and enough high camp to make the Big Top feel like a noise-rock ‘Paris Is Burning’. Somewhere deep in the crowd, everybody crouches,‘You make me purr, End of the Road!’ For a moment, you forget this is noise-rock at all.
Model/Actriz
Mac DeMarco provides the necessary comedown from this chaos at the Woods. Throughout the entire day, a similar story is told between punters. “I wasn’t really interested in seeing Mac” a fellow hack says at the press hut, “but I heard him soundchecking and I felt like I was sixteen again.” A warm, dreamy nostalgia trip is exactly what Mac delivers beneath a haze of weed smoke and elder-millennial singalongs. Mac is spritely and surprisingly limber with his age, running and wiggling his way through a serene set of indie-rock classics. He swings the microphone around like a hardcore vocalist, brings photographer Yuki onto the stage to sing, and generally conducts proceedings with the relaxed confidence of someone who knows exactly how much everyone likes him. ‘Ode to Viceroy’ yields shrieks and lighters flicking, ‘Freaking Out the Neighborhood’ sends the crowd down before a joyous explosion, and a surprisingly slick cover of ‘Human Nature’ by Michael Jackson closes the set. It’s silly and sincere in equal measure. There is so much love in the crowd and it just about stems the FOMO of eschewing caroline at the Garden stage.
Secret sets are met with massive queues for the Folly, but after squirrelling in we are met with the moshing hole of GANS. Sadly the set is interrupted by goonish security descending upon the youthful mess, shoving and bullying punters. A true weak moment of the festival but thankfully righted by the secret performances of Angine, returning for the second time today but in a more intimate, snappier setting before the colossally hyped Man/Woman/Chainsaw who deliver an almighty performance of their debut LP, ‘Cannonball’.
big long sun
Saturday arrives with big long sun healing all hangovers. Glistening psych-pop, driving guitars and enormous vocal power make the Woods feel temporarily less like the festival’s main stage and more like a particularly benevolent hallucination. An expanded lineup of dancers morph into wood sprites running, jumping, crawling and (impressively) backflipping around the stage.
Following their excitement, Spanish Horses offer a more grounded take on the Americana-inflected and sweetly jangling splash of indie they are quickly making a name of themselves for, while RIP Magic bring spectral funk, bubble guns and two bass guitars to the Big Top. Marco Pini skulks in front of a hologram wand displaying snakes and ferraris, armed with a sausage-dog side bag named Albert, skanking and throwing roundhouse kicks with the essence of someone who has never once doubted their own cool.
Madra Salach
By the time Madra Salach take the stage, the hype is tangible. GAA jerseys and Madra shirts are everywhere this weekend. The sun is firing directly into their faces amid one of their biggest festival crowds to date, a note the group continually mentions. “I’m glad I wore my SPF,” Paul says, before a punter throws him a pair of sunglasses. ‘Tunnel Tigers’ begins vigorously and fiercely, proof that relentless gigging hasn’t dulled their blade. Stage banter is a supreme talent of Madra Salach. They tell a story from earlier in the day of a child losing a welly, followed by a call to reunite the pair. To the band’s disbelief, a member of the crowd finds said welly, with it travelling down the audience to meet the band who promise to somehow deliver it to its owner. New material is received as well as their EP’s now classics, with ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure’ following a very heartfelt thank you to the crowd for making the band members’ lives made up of these beautiful moments. Little more can be said for Madra Salach’s performance other than majesty, sincerity and joy.
Completely contrasting elements continue to flow with Fat Dog destroying the Woods, emerging to ‘Ave Maria’ before detonating into timbales, fat bass and big Soviet melodies. Joe Love heads straight into the crowd, demanding that they “show Papa Joe what they’ve got”. The pit responds accordingly with piss and vinegar galore.
A return trip to the Garden is met with Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland offering perhaps the weekend’s most devastating performance. There is an extraordinary control and poise to the set. Piano and voice dance together with the ease of two people who have spent a lifetime learning exactly when to leave space for one another. The audience is directed into communal singing, suddenly resembling a school choir being shepherded by its pianist and teacher. Tears appear everywhere. The Copelands serenade each other with love songs written for their birthdays before bringing a large choir onto the stage. It is life-affirming music in the least cynical sense of the phrase.
A brief and maliciously cathartic stop off at SILVERWINGKILLER is sadly interrupted by the need to see Pulp. Pulp’s Saturday night headline is something different again: history rendered warm and homely. Children’s drawings of the band, aged memorabilia and vintage photos appear on screen as Jarvis Cocker leads a sprawling trip through a challenging set of B-sides and rarities. The scale is enormous, but the feeling remains intimate. Twenty years of End Of The Road is being celebrated by a band with their own decades of history to draw from. Bangers are few and far between which is challenging for a festival crowd, but when Jarvis announces that this may be the last Pulp show for a while, the decision to eschew the hits for the forgotten highlights of a storied career makes perfect sense.
Sunday begins gently, with Shaking Hand’s tight and springy performance in the Boat. Their intertwining bass and guitar harmonies shimmer like light breaking through leaves, while new material introduces a more precise, mathy edge. The Cindys offer bright, jangly songwriting somewhere between Neil Young and Elliott Smith, while Little Grandad’s rousing alt-country draws a packed Folly tent and countless punters in awe of their seamless ‘blood harmonies’.
The Cindys
But the weekend’s final day still has plenty of teeth. Vancouver’s PISS are frequently spoken about among heads and anoraks alike and the anticipation for their Folly set is palpable. Taylor Zantingh warns the performance will contain mentions of violence towards women and that everyone should look after each other. She stretches deeply with two knee braces on and the group explode. Their performance is moving, terrifying and haunting – their samples and lyrics heavy with polemic and revolutionary intent championing action against the violence of capitalistic, patriarchal misogyny. You can see how much the set takes from Zantingh as she hurls herself against gross hardcore instrumentation. The band emerge into a devastating rendition of ‘blocking a scene you can’t remember’. Zaytingh crawls across the stage to her sampler and water bottle. There are tears in the crowd, everywhere.
It is difficult to catch the breath after PISS but a return to the healing and ghostly realms of the Garden help. OXN are ominous and imposing – their woody, monolithic sound built from lurching organs, accordions and Radie Peat’s chirping, weaving vocals. ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’ is colossal, as is their cover of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’.
Factory Floor reduce the Big Top to its most basic components: clattering house, acid basslines, live drums and whispering vocals. CMAT, meanwhile, is operating on an entirely different frequency. She walks on to Boyz II Men’s ‘End of the Road’, announces that this is her “favourite fucking festival” and spends the rest of the set with the crowd firmly in the palm of her hand. Shirts are removed. There is line dancing. There is a heartfelt ‘Jolene’ cover dedicated to the memory of Dolly Parton. She picks on children in the crowd. Big fuck yous are spoken to the south coast’s fascistic protesters as well as Reform and NIgel Farage. As CMAT moves into her final song, she announces that it will be her last UK performance for two years before splitting the crowd apart to dance with everyone one last time.
CMAT
One final performance cannot be missed though, and that is the sheer power of Anna von Hauswolff. Damned by the Catholic church as satanic, Anna is every part witch and every part angel in her jumps between the horrors of ‘Dead Magic’ and the elation of ‘Iconoclasts’. It becomes quickly apparent that Anna’s voice may be THE finest voice I, and hopefully everyone else in the Big Top, have ever heard. The power and dexterity over the thundering weight of her band is nothing like I have ever witnessed. If seeing one of the greatest feats of musical ability is the way I finish End of the Road then so be it.
It feels like an appropriate ending, really. Twenty years after Simon Taffe bet the house on a festival of his own, End Of The Road feels alive in ways few other festivals compare: a place where new acts can arrive, established ones can get strange, and the past is continually being dragged into the present and given another go.
There are bigger festivals sure, there are ones that get more hype on social media, yeah. But few feel so committed to making their dedication to quality and openness such a part of the experience without allowing it to become a pretentious mess. For its twentieth birthday, End Of The Road has looked backwards but perpetually keeps its eye on the horizon, eager and steely for what is set to come and what has led to this formation of utter magnitude. The party is very much still going.
Photos by Daniel Lincoln
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