Say what you like about End Of The Road, but it’s surely the only festival where a comedian can venture a bit of ad-hoc new material about The Blue Orchids. This is Stewart Lee, of course, down on the Talking Heads stage, attempting to “establish a liberal consensus that dissolves on contact with the outside world”. It’s strictly one-in-one-out to hear him wring ever more nuanced laughs from some of his greatest hits (“These days, you say you’re English…”), even if he contends that most people are only there to watch him die trying to get back up the steep hill from the stage. Thankfully, a sighting of Lee later at Yo La Tengo’s secret Piano Stage set confirms that he made it out alive.
As the afternoon skies darken, Florence Adooni brings more than a splash of colour to the Garden Stage: she and her co-singer are in sparkling purple dresses while her band – including a mini brass section and a guy providing regular awesome organ wig-outs – are in dazzling orange shirts. Her joyous Afrobeat carnival is totally irresistible, with infectious chants like “The Uh-Ah Song” instantly lodging in your brain. “Before you go to sleep tonight, turn to your partner and say ‘Uh’,” she instructs, “And they will say ‘Ah’”. Job done.
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Over in the Uncut Big Top, Thus Love are that lesser-spotted thing days, a straight-up, swaggering indie rock band. Well, not exactly straight. The gender-queerness of frontperson Echo Mars turns what otherwise might resemble typical rock-god posturing into something else entirely. Plus the songs are great and they sound absolutely massive, with nods to the Bunnymen, Suede, Interpol and The Screaming Trees. “They’re not breaking any boundaries,” says the man next to us, handily writing Uncut’s review, “but I really like them.”
Slift are next up, three skinny longhairs from Toulouse who look harmless enough but are soon whipping up an ultra-heavy psych inferno from the very depths of Hades, as the big screen strobes uncontrollably behind them. After 20 minutes of this ceaseless barrage, if feels like you’re being lifted off the ground and sucked into their diabolical wormhole.
Altin Gün are the perfect sunset band, a nifty Anatolian spin on the synthy utopian psych-rock of Tame Impala. If they’ve inevitably lost something with the departure of co-frontperson Merve Dasdemir, they compensate by rocking things up a few notches. And, as always, “Süpürgesi Yoncadan” compels a field of people to dance like they’ve just downed a bottle of raki at a Turkish wedding.
Then, just as it seems like the festival might be preparing to wind down with a rash of acoustic sets, Uncut chances upon an all-ages crowd going absolutely bananas to Snõõper in the Folly tent. A ludicrously haywire cross between Amyl & The Sniffers and Bikini Kill, they blast out snatches of drum’n’bass and Dolly Parton between songs, while their coup de grace is a hardcore punk version of The Beatles’ “Come Together”. At which point perma-pogoing singer Blair Tramel reappears in a giant papier-mâché head, Frank Sidebottom-style. Total bedlam.
Perhaps sensing the mania from across the site, Yo La Tengo immediately wrongfoot their crowd by launching straight into a pair of thundering motorik jams. Can these really be the same people who played a hushed acoustic set on the Piano Stage just a couple of hours ago? But the joy of YLT has always been that they’re several bands in one. Before too long, they’ve left-turned again and are singing Sun Ra doo-wop songs together at the front of the stage.
It eventually settles into something approaching a greatest hits set – “Autumn Sweater”, “Stockholm Syndrome”, “Tom Courtenay” – but Yo La Tengo have one more surprise up their sleeves. At the point where a headline band would normally bring out their special star cameo, Ira Kaplan introduces a guest guitarist that they apparently only met earlier that day: a cute, floppy-haired pre-teen called Arlo. By the end of his impressive tear through “Sugarcube”, the crowd are chanting “Ar-lo! Ar-lo!” as he waves bashfully in acknowledgement. It’s a quintessentially heart-warming End Of The Road moment in a weekend packed full of them.
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