End of the Road Festival: Pulp and Geese round off the summer in style

I tend to approach the start of September with a back-to-school seriousness. It is a time I associate with rootling around in drawers for crumpled school uniform, with the smell of fresh notebooks and the phrase “Michaelmas Term”. A time, in short, for noses to resume their positions at the grindstone.

And so, as I hurtled on a train down to a field somewhere in Dorset with a bag full of frivolous garb on the first Thursday of September, I felt the faint thrill of bunking off.

As the festival which rounds off the summer, End of the Road has a last of the summer wine feel to it. The crowd comprises groovy West Country parents whose kids have left home, young couples pushing their babies around in fairylit wagons, and a smattering of teens and twentysomethings. A bit like Latitude, but with fewer plummy voices.

This year was the 20th anniversary of the festival, and the line-up was plump with big names and interesting up-and-comers spanning rock, folk and indie pop. Earlier in the summer, the most exciting rock band on earth right now, Geese, were revealed as the surprise Thursday headliner. When I arrived at lunchtime that day, the campsite was already filling up.

After ditching our bags, my friend and I made our way to the woods, where there is a warren of smaller stages and games. There’s nothing more tragic than walking past a lesser known artist performing to a crowd of tumbleweed, but the Boat stage was impressively curated and busy from the off. Proceedings were kicked off in style by multiscreen, a charismatic London-based band who are like LCD Soundsystem for the Instagram age.

Geese

BURAK CINGI

Size-wise, this is the Goldilocks of festivals. There are six music stages and one for stand-up comedy and live interviews. There’s time in the day to wander around in the woods, where tiny children are searching for sticks to enter into the hotly contested best stick competition. My highlights included a ferocious game of ping pong doubles with two teenagers and a song we performed in a homespun recording booth complete with janky instruments, which was then given to us on a cassette tape.

End of the Road was true to its name on Saturday night when headliner Pulp gave the final performance of their tour, which frontman Jarvis Cocker said would be their “last one for a while” – though not forever. It was part show, part PowerPoint presentation as Cocker paused between each song to tell the story of Pulp’s ascent, complete with a slideshow of photos and memorabilia. The first third was dedicated to back catalogue esoterica until Cocker got the crowd bouncing to his mid-Nineties hits, before a euphoric rendition of Common People.

Aside from some secret DJ sets at an unmarked spot known as the shack, the late night offering is pretty limited – this is more a festival aimed at oldsters and youngsters who like to rock out in a friendly, relaxed environment. Many attendees I spoke to had been coming for years, and it’s easy to see why: there is an easygoing, communal atmosphere which can be hard to come by – a sense that if you lost your phone, it would certainly find its way back to you. A delightful way to take the edge off of September.