End of the Road festival review – a beautifully-curated feast for music lovers

In the space of an hour or so at End of the Road 2024 you can do the following: Describe your friend to a postman and have them roam the site to deliver your letter. Race marbles down a drag strip with your friends. Listen to an artist produce sounds you didn’t think a synth could make.

Over four days of music at the bucolic Larmer Tree Gardens in Wiltshire, the 18th edition of End of the Road festival serves up a treat for music lovers.

It is a difficult time to be running a small festival, with 60 festivals cancelling this year, and 192 disappearing completely since 2019. The music venues which give bands a start struggle, and bands themselves can barely afford to tour. Against this backdrop, End of the Road 2024 manages to pull it all together.

The big-ticket items deliver. Bonnie “Prince” Billy raises the curtain on Thursday, getting the crowd acquainted with his tender acoustic set. Slowdive’s headline set pulses and strobes until the Woods Stage starts to look like a portal. IDLES singer Joseph Talbot declares he won’t be reading any reviews during the Bristol punks’ Friday show – which is a shame as the band busted any of my previous ideas that their songs were all “I’m angry, I’m 40, the Tories are naughty” with a big burst of righteous showmanship. Stepping in for an unwell Fever Ray, Floating Points closes the Garden Stage on Sunday night with big beats and wild visuals. 

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Further down the bill, spread across stages which each have their own character, the programming has real variety. CMAT struts and shimmies through the highlight of the weekend – a power hour of Americana, pierced by an uncanny cover of Wuthering Heights, which will have the box of wine in your tote bag screaming at you like the Telltale Heart.

On the Boat Stage, the Tara Clerkin Trio are an unexpected gem, jazzy trip-hop birthed through synth, clarinet, and vocal. King Hannah blend storytelling with great shoegaze-y guitar tones, while experimental Indonesian act Senyawa make some truly unsettling noises as they transfix the Big Top. Baxter Dury’s late-night new-wave seance is a sight to behold, and a treat to be part of.

CASISDEAD and Billy Woods bring hip-hop heft, while fans of a lovely lie down will find solace in Mary Lattimore and Ichiko Aoba. 

So you’ll find yourself with a packed schedule, ambling across the site. Luckily, every part of the site feels it has been curated with care, making it a joy to explore. You’ll stumble across an art sale, Victorian buildings, and huge trees. If you get too lost in the maze-like woods, the stewards are affable enough to point you in the right direction with a laugh. The toilets remain clean enough, and during the more ethereal sets a crowd will often be filled with punters lying down and reading books. The festival’s compact size means hard decisions never really have to be made – even faced with the worst clashes, you can probably squeeze in half of both.

If you truly had to pick holes, you might point to the following. The crowd feels as diverse – or not – as you might expect from an indie festival in Wiltshire. There also appeared to be a point where the silent disco began to repeat its playlist, with a double dose of Cher’s Believe. Nor too, will those on the hunt for the heart of darkness find the true debauchery they seek. The festival seems to converge around a 2am bedtime, although wholesome fun can still be found after this. Silliness reigns over chaos.

The lack of phone signal on site makes smartphones essentially useless. If you lose your friends, you’re condemned to wander round the site having fun until you bump into them. But by the end of the weekend you realise this may not be a bad thing at all – there is something reassuring about making a rendezvous, sticking to it, and asking: “Is this what life was like all the time?” 

When everyone packs their tents up, you know summer is truly finished. One of my friends told me they’ve been 10 times. Another was on their seventh trip. It’s not hard to see why End of the Road inspires such loyalty.

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