It was a weekend of running for cover at End Of The Road’s Larmer Tree Gardens site as the outer edge of Hurricane Erin caught the UK’s south-west a glancing blow. Hoods were up, brollies out, and unexpectedly large crowds flooded the festival’s smaller, covered stages. Dove Ellis, the promising young Irish songwriter with the Jeff Buckley warble gracing the Folly tent on Friday afternoon, was not the only artist to wonder out loud if the audience was there for him, or just keeping dry. Thanks to Ellis and his ilk, there was more than enough magic and mischief to keep minds, for the most part, off the mud and squalls. Afterwards, MOJO rinsed our wellies and recalled five of our highlights…
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Woods Stage, Thursday, August 28
Van Etten’s metamorphosis from self-effacing, Americana-leaning singer-songwriter into dramatic goth-pop diva, hasn’t thrilled every one of her OG fans, but the advantages of her new band’s lush soundscaping, a more outgoing approach to audience interaction and stagewear that appeared to homage Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark, were made clear on EOTR’s main stage on Thursday night. When you’re headlining a festival for the first time, there’s a lot to be said for making an effort. Not only did songs from Van Etten’s latest album, written with and for this band, max out in an arena they seem to have been written for, but the new approach – layered with synths but powered by a bravura rhythm section (Devra Hoff on bass, Jorge Balbi on drums) – sheds new light on established favourites. Opener Live Forever from this year’s Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory LP glowered like Suicide. I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way) lurched quirkily as if memorialising Lene Lovich’s Lucky Number. Older songs enjoyed a glossy makeover – Serpents from 2012’s Tramp soared; Tarifa was a version of her version in 2017’s Twin Peaks reboot, and was dedicated to Peaks auteur David Lynch. The show ended near the beginning for Van Etten with I Wish I Knew and Love More from her first two albums, and yet she’d proven how far she’s come. “Women can headline festivals too,” she’d announced. So it seems can Sharon Van Etten.
Broadside Hacks Presents: A Celebration Of The Incredible String Band
Garden Stage, Friday, August 29
A strong EOTR showing for folk music from the UK and Ireland (Shovel Dance Collective, opening the Garden Stage on Sunday, were revelatory) was exemplified by the latest of Broadside Hacks’ live homages. Just two weeks ago they’d treated Green Man Festival to a set of Dylan covers. Here, eleven-strong (was this the weekend’s longest and most excruciating soundcheck?), they saluted the sui generis Scots hippie-folkers and counted one of them – the great Mike Heron – among their number. Sure-footed and telepathic, the Hacks brought musicianly solidity without sacrificing any of ISB’s precarious charm. Particularly effective: ‘G’, the distaff singer from the band Milkweed’s gorgeous vocal on Chinese White; and singer-guitarist Junior Brother, masterly on The Hedgehog’s Song, ISB’s anthropomorphic manifesto-of-sorts. Best of all, the frail but game Heron, now 82, sang along until inspired to take the lead on Log Cabin In The Sky and Air, and conduct an ensemble attack on A Very Cellular Song, the moving finale. Wondrous – and yet, why no spoken introduction to tell anyone unfamiliar with ISB what they were about to experience? Or indeed, what they’ve been missing?
Lisa O’Neill
Garden Stage, Friday, August 29
Whilst perhaps nominally a folk artist, County Cavan’s Lisa O’Neill is rapidly becoming undefinable. Small, with salt-and-pepper pageboy coiffure, white blouse, black trews, she combines the commanding severity of a charismatic headmistress with something elfin, fey, otherworldly. At EOTR she began as if in tribute to the festival spirit itself with a transfixing version of Ivor Cutler’s haunting, transparent I’m Going In a Field, before waxing far more serious. Violet Gibson – a ballad about a real-life woman who shot and wounded Benito Mussolini, and spent the rest of her life in an asylum in Northampton for her efforts on behalf of world democracy – was as pointedly addressed to today’s fascists and their discontents as it could be. Rock The Machine eyed the history of technology as a cuckoo in the nest of working people (hello, AI). Mother Jones, another song about a female who stood for the downtrodden and suffered for it, rang out, incandescent with defiance, while something in the spare, organic backing of Joseph Doyle on double bass, Brian Leach on hammered dulcimer and Mic Geraghty on harmonium made some think of Raindogs-era Tom Waits, or a becalmed Bad Seeds. But O’Neill is a rare poet of inner journeying, not just historical resistance. Old Note, from 2023’s All Of This Is Chance, remains for now her key song. Performed solo, in her strange, pinched voice that’s somehow beautiful, it was suspended in silence – the sound of an audience’s breath held.
Mary In The Junkyard
Big Top, Saturday, August 30
In the up-and-coming category, Dove Ellis’s soaring voice, wistful songs and subtly surprising arrangements (big points for soprano sax) struck home in the Folly tent on Friday, The New Eves brought raucous Slits energy to the main stage on Saturday and, on the Boat stage, kind-of rapper Black Fondu was a Duracell bunny electrified by his own disorientating mélange of blastbeats and dream-pop nuages. London trio Mary In The Junkyard are further on up the road – literally so as they head to the States to resume opening for Wet Leg. In the Big Top on Saturday there was no question of the quality of Clari Freeman-Taylor songs, serrated cousins of early-’90s grungy pop, or the flexible power of the band in harness. Tuesday surged like Dry-era PJ Harvey. Ghost rose on an updraft, then dropped on a dime. Mouse was the best song about meeting someone you knew in a past life (as a mouse) MOJO heard all weekend. Raised on the fecund scene centred on Brixton’s Windmill pub venue, they’re more musically straightforward and emotionally direct than better-known recent graduates (eg. Black Country, New Road; Black Midi) and none the worse for that. Perhaps they are yet to be recorded at their best – but live, there’s steel to offset Freeman-Taylor’s preoccupied fragility. They’re going places, and not just geographically.
Viagra Boys
Garden Stage, Saturday, August 30
As if self-identifying as a corrective for everything serious, muted, respectful or considered on the EOTR bill this year (or indeed, most years) Stockholm’s Viagra Boys hit the Garden Stage on Saturday night like a blast of drug-sweat and cig-breath. And the frenzied response from a packed crowd suggested they’d saved all their bad behaviour up for one blowout. Cue: circle pits, beer throwing, grown men in gimp masks crowd surfing. The group’s sound is a relentless punk-adjacent glam-stomp built on bassist Benke Höckert’s implacable grind, layered with sick disco keys and the impertinent skronk of Oskar Carls on sax (and tiny shorts). At their centre, lavishly tattooed, US-born Sprechgesanger Sebastian Murphy spouts gravelly chunks of jaundiced satire and comedy Weltschmerz.
At End Of The Road, despite the incipient chill, it wasn’t long before Murphy had his top off and was delivering the lines that make fans feel, Phew, I’m not the only one thinking this. “I don’t wanna pay for anything,” he declared on Man Made Of Meat, from new-ish album Viagr Aboys, nailing a Western malaise, and while he’ll take the laughs, there’s a melancholy sincerity to its payoff: “I hate almost everything that I see / And I just wanna disappear.” In a strange way, the band’s hard, unfussy groove, fashion-blindness, and the fact they look a bit too old to be doing this, made MOJO think of Dr Feelgood. Murphy – statuesque, pecking at the mike, is a reborn, albeit topless, Lee Brilleaux.The band’s EOTR set built not on peaks and troughs but peaks and peaks. Diseased rap thing Store Policy strutted horribly (with flute!) as Murphy revealed: “Smokin' crypto is bad for your health / I'm touching myself by the health food shelf.” Troglodyte plumbed the conspiracy theorist/would-be mass shooter sump at eye-bugging tempo. Perennial crowd pleaser Sports mocked the very idea of a healthy lifestyle. Ending, Research Chemicals’ cautionary tale of internet narcotic-purchasing was gleefully interminable, as the crowd saluted a band against but very much of their times.
Photos: Chris Juarez/Rachel Juarez Carr/Burak Cingi/Gem Harris