End of the Road festival ... A sense of community among audience and performers. Photograph: Andrew Chapman
I've been putting together a programme for End of the Road festival. It's my sort of summer festival, even though it's held in the second week of September. It's set in Larmer Tree Gardens in North Dorset - you find it after driving along miles and miles of winding road. It certainly feels like it's at The End - and it's a small-scale setup: orderly, mannered, but with plenty of room for improvisation. I attended last year, and found myself delighted and entranced by everything happening on the margins, away from the big stages and mammoth tents. For example, there was the piano set down in the middle of some woods, where artists including the sardonic Swedish singer Frida Hyvönen and noble anti-folk sorts Herman Düne played impromptu sets.
I spent many an hour drinking Chai tea and eating chilli chocolate in the healing field, unfazed by the hippie connotations. I loved the spontaneity of Howard Monk's Local club, set incongruously in a small tent, where London raconteur David Thomas Broughton sung slow, stately songs of death while moving in slow motion like an early 20th-century mime artist. There was a sense of community among the audience and performers, no doubt helped by the small-scale of the event (the 5,000 tickets weren't even sold out - something that has changed this year). There was a Rough Trade Shop stall, the first ever at a festival. There was a Swedish tent, notable, of course, for its meatballs. Children were extremely well catered for, and it was a source of disappointment for me that my two-year-old son Isaac was not in attendance. That it was possible to camp in peace, without some drunken Stereophonics fan pissing on your canvas at 3am, was yet another plus point.
End of the Road was actually the first festival I'd attended for several years - certainly in the UK. Over here in Australia, there's the Big Day Out: another chance for the corporate sponsors and bloodsuckers of everything that is fine and spontaneous about contemporary music to exert their leech-like hold. Would I ever attend? I don't think so. And I'd long been put off festivals back in the UK - ATP and a few notable sorts like Green Man aside - by my experiences in the 90s with events that are too bloated and alcohol-driven to care how crap the homogenisation of music had become. I had myself a good time, of course - who wouldn't, all the free booze, drugs and sensitive pop stars to take advantage of - but there's always been something rotten at the core of large outdoor gatherings. People have often told me how magical Glastonbury is but, frankly, the idea of going makes me tremble with fear. Stuck in a field with hundreds of thousands of people determined to escape the mundane 9-5 for one brief weekend? I prefer to escape the mundane every day, and keep my weekends to myself. Nothing's worse than Christmas drinkers, or people who hail taxis only in the rain - as Melody Maker's news anchor would say.
Do they still hold Reading, V200andwhatever and Glastonbury in this day and age? Why?
