End of the Road founder on the secret to a good festival and the act you can’t afford to miss in 2025

It has never been harder to run a festival in the UK. The run-up to 2024’s season was full of event organisers announcing they were cancelling or postponing their knees-ups, from Nozstock and NASS to Standon Calling and Bluedot. One count put the number of fallen festivals at 78. Ever-rising costs and Brexit are frequently blamed. “I think it is oversaturated with a lot of sort of landfill indie festivals that are doing the same thing that the same festivals are doing down the road,” says Simon Taffe, co-founder of End of the Road festival. 

“Or it’s like, I’ll just book a big name, and a bunch of bands underneath in the same world. That is evident from a lot of London festivals. There’s no thought that’s gone into it

“There’s no sense of community, you’re kicked out at 11. You see a lot of these festivals and they come and go, even the big ones peter out. I think the good ones stay.”

For End of the Road’s 19th edition this year, Big Issue cover star Self Esteem will headline along with Caribou and Father John Misty. Taffe’s festival has sold out in advance every year since 2008, and counts Patti Smith, David Byrne and the only-ever UK festival set from Sufjan Stevens among past headliners. Over the years, it’s carved its own path in the UK’s festival landscape.

Almost 20 years ago, Taffe sold his house to begin the festival. The risk paid off, and the end-of-season bonanza has grown into one of the UK’s best destinations for music lovers. Every week, Taffe – 44 years old, bearded, roughly what you’d imagine a man who runs an indie festival to look like – is off to at least a couple of gigs, hunting down music. 

At the festival proper, he’s often spotted enjoying the acts he’s booked – and reveals that he often moves the weekend’s line-up around after the acts are booked so that he can see all he wants to see.

The ethos, explains Taffe, is “just music I’m passionate about and that I love. I spent my youth going to festivals, and I’m taking all the best elements and getting rid of the shit elements I didn’t like.”

Taking place as August turns into September, the festival is a laid-back place (implied bedtime, 2am). Peacocks roam the site. But the music is serious.

Of course, Taffe’s production is not immune to rising costs driving festivals to the wall. Production – stages, security, lights, shower blocks – is double what it used to be, up to almost a million pounds. 

Faced with this, putting prices up was a better choice for Taffe than cutting back on things like art installations or cramming more people in.

It is now £275 for a weekend ticket to End of the Road – the same as Green Man. Download will set you back £345, early birds for Boomtown are £330, Reading is priced at £361 for Wednesday entry, and Glastonbury tickets cost £380 if you can get them.

“We don’t want to get too big. We want to keep it at this size,” says Taffe. The festival doesn’t need to sell out to break even, he adds: “We could break even around 75%. But I spend, on the band budget, probably a couple of hundred thousand pounds more than I actually need to. We’d still sell out, but I’m a great believer in giving people more than they expect.”

What you can expect at End of the Road is a complete lack of phone signal. Lose your mates and that might just be that for the day. 

“I love the fact you can’t really get reception. We could pay a little bit extra to get better reception, but I haven’t bothered,” says Taffe. 

“If I could have it my way, I’d literally do what Bob Dylan did at his gig I went to at the Albert Hall recently, where you put your phone in the zip-pocket thing and you can’t open it until the end of the weekend. 

“But I don’t know if it would go down that well.”

Two decades of running a festival must, surely, give you an eye for when someone’s going to make it big – and why. “Fontaines DC was a good example of that, like two in the afternoon, whenever they played in the big top and you could tell they had it. They had this sort of swagger, the performance,” says Taffe. 

“You can tell it in the live performance, but it’s usually down to that melody. They’ve gotta have a couple of songs. There’s so many bands these days who are amazing to watch live, but they don’t have songs. 

“It doesn’t mean they’re bad. They just don’t have songs.”

As an example, I ask Taffe for any acts he’s excited about this year. He names Westside Cowboy, a band who have a grand total of one song on Spotify. Days later, they win Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition, bagging £5,000 and a slot on one of the festival’s slightly-less-than-main stages.

While Taffe is hot on recycling, and the festival generates money to replant forests in Scotland, going fully renewable is not on the immediate agenda. Taffe thinks he can get the festival’s footprint down within five or six years.

“Massive Attack have done it obviously, and they’ve done it really well, but they’re Massive Attack. They also don’t care about profits, they’re a great band, it’s a great idea, but I think that’s what’s stopping us,” he says. 

“If everyone wants to pay me £500 for a ticket, I’m ready to do it.”

End of the Road festival takes place 28-31 August at Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset.

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