End of the Road review — Fleet Foxes and Pixies offer a perfect end to the festival season

The promoters at End of the Road must be the luckiest people in England. Year after year, this last big turn of the festival season escapes the onset of autumn, offering instead a glorious summer weekend. Even this year, with the weather apps predicting rain, Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset escaped unscathed and once again End of the Road offered a gloriously bucolic experience: a festival big enough that it’s quite possible never to get around the whole site if you are committed to any kind of schedule, but small enough to keep bumping into friends and pull you off that schedule. Throw in the excellent beers, the terrific food and the Wessex sun, and you have a near-perfect weekend.

Near-perfect rather than completely perfect only because of the top end of the bill. Last year’s event, with many American acts forced to pull out for Covid-related reasons, ended up with a deliciously eclectic set of artists on the main stages each evening. This year’s felt rather more like business as usual and meant that on Friday and Saturday, the headliners on the biggest stages were all shades of indie — Fleet Foxes and Black Midi on Friday, Pixies and Magnetic Fields on Saturday.

That said, Fleet Foxes were magnificent. They had played a small London warm-up show the previous week, which I had been unconvinced by, but with the benefit of a festival PA — and these outdoor sound systems are genuine marvels now, unrecognisable in quality from even a decade ago — they sounded astonishing. Their harmonies rolled across the fields like a chorus from the skies, and the intricacies in everything were audible, guitars and horns and keyboards playing off and dancing around each other.

Their method has barely changed over the years — you could still reduce it to Smile-era Beach Boys playing Americana — but the absolute highlight of a faultless set came with “Phoenix”, a track they recorded with the Big Red Machine collective a couple of years back, whose West Coast soft rock felt like the softest, warmest blanket you could ever wrap yourself in.

Pixies were a thornier proposition. They opened thrillingly — “Gouge Away” began with an extended intro that kept on winding itself in, tighter and tighter, before the explosion of guitars. And for half an hour, as classic after classic poured out of the speakers, it was a perfect festival set. The issue came with a string of new songs. Admirably, Pixies don’t want to be solely a nostalgia turn, and the band seemed more engaged playing them, which was good to see.

But the problem was that piling them into a run in the middle of the set killed momentum and seemed like the work of a different band. The new songs are, at heart, well-done new wave. The old songs are broadcasts from another world (though two different versions of “Wave of Mutilation” was one more than necessary). It felt as though the set had been very oddly paced.

Thursday night’s headliners were contrasts in style. On the one hand, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (often shortened, for typing reasons, to Pigsx7) played brutal and thrilling stoner metal — they are clearly a metal band, albeit one who have been embraced outside metal’s world — and laughed at themselves. Singer Matthew Baty, looking like a Stars in Their Eyes Freddie Mercury in black singlet, slicked-back hair and moustache, apologised for the fact they were “the world’s worst Queen tribute band”.

On the other hand, Khruangbin’s huge popularity is destined to remain a mystery to me: it felt like watching a virtuoso guitarist fronting a wedding band and, because he’s a virtuoso, ignoring the things that make wedding bands fun. It was less reminiscent of the globetrotting musical masterminds they are reputed to be than The Mike Flowers Pops Orchestra with some extra flavouring.

Down the bill, naturally, there were abundant treats. Shovel Dance Collective were flatly brilliant. As they reminded their audience, they play only traditional English folk songs, and they don’t add anything rocky or electronic for the sake of the kids; beginning their set with a version of “The Foggy Dew”, played at mournful pace, was a daring statement of intent. There is perhaps a similarity to the Irish folk supergroup The Gloaming, rather than to punkier new-folk ensembles such as Lankum or Stick in the Wheel: the music is about beauty. Still, as they pointed out from the stage, “This is folk music. That means your music. Working-class music.”

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan was one middle-aged man and his electronics set-up, and was so indebted to Kraftwerk in tone, texture, rhythmic preferences and melodic sense, he could have called himself Craft Shop: there were two points in the set where the rhythm seemed certain to lead into “Trans-Europe Express”. But his visuals were not 3D retro futurism — they were clips from local news and promo videos from the 1970s for the Warrington-Runcorn new town development in north-west England. If Kraftwerk now tell you, Here’s what we were imagining in the 1970s, this was showing what that music was really soundtracking.

The Australian band HighSchool can’t decide if they are Duran Duran or The Psychedelic Furs, and there’s excitement and dynamism in that contrast. The Weather Station and Cassandra Jenkins both played blissful sets of soft, grown-up pop. Deathcrash will not surprise anyone who has loved Slint or Mogwai, but their pulverising post-rock was magnetic.

A great festival is about the incidental moments, too. And on Friday night, having gone back to the tent to get a sweatshirt for the evening, I sat outside on my camping chair, listening to the great desert blues band Tinariwen rolling across from half a mile away, the sun setting over the English parkland. That on its own was perfection. May End of the Road have many miles left.

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