Just like a jazz musician, any great festival like End Of The Road needs to be able to improvise. Sometimes the results can improve upon the original scheduling. When Militarie Gun pull out of their Big Top slot, James Holden steps into the breach with his elemental and uplifting psychedelic rave salvo. And with Mdou Moctar sadly waylaid, a saviour is quickly installed in the form of Alabaster DePlume. He may not bring the noise in quite the same way as Moctar, but his twilight Garden Stage set certainly doesn’t lack intensity.
DePlume reveals that he’s just come off a WhastApp call with a friend in the West Bank, and his whole set is charged with fury and sadness at what is happening in Palestine. Backed by drums, cello and the guitar of Rozi Plain, his music tonight often veers closer towards Godspeed-esque post-rock than jazz, topped by his own beautifully desperate saxophone howls.
It is a little tougher for him, in this context, to offer his usual rousing messages of hope of self-care. But he still manages to thank everyone “for living”, suggesting that coming together at a festival like this is the first step towards banishing fear and division. “If you find yourself unsure, reach towards someone,” he suggests. “You have my permission! Alabaster DePlume sent you!”
House Of All are also supersubs of a sort, making no secret of the fact that they exist to keep the spirit of The Fall and Mark E Smith alive. Yet this band of prime Fall survivors are much more than a tribute act. Led by the mercurial Martin Bramah and featuring the full complement of Hanleys, their angular baselines and wild declamations are instantly familiar, while still feeling fresh and off-centre.
Bramah barks enthusiastically about being “the cuckoo in the nest” or how an “awful lot of nonsense talk” sent him over the edge, his mania perfectly offset by thundering double drums. “They sound great, don’t they? What a band.” He’s not wrong, and it’s terrific to see them all enjoying a second life.
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“You beautiful weirdos, what’s the fucking craic?” yells Lankum’s Ian Lynch, before apologising if his band’s instruments go out of tune, as “they were made in a different aeon”. If we’re honest, the diabolical dirges of Lankum’s ancient machines are a big part of the appeal, and the band have correctly calculated that this is a crowd who will appreciate them at their darkest and doomiest. There is a wild cheer for “Go Dig My Grave”, a song they’d earlier revealed (in an uproarious Uncut Q&A) that the Mercury Prize ceremony had begged them not to perform. Clearly the TV people had missed the moment where the song’s desolate suicidal thrum flips, to become somehow freeing and transcendent.
Lankum finish with “The Turn”, a song they’ve “only played four times before and usually fucked up”. It’s not exactly a singalong – “the hardened lumps of charred old chunks… forsaken and bereft” – but it is utterly stunning, somehow going from four people singing tentative a capella harmonies to the sound of a thousand boulders being rolled directly at your head.
Yet for all this thrilling dissonance, the night does need a showman to wrap things up, and Baxter Dury is happy to oblige. “I don’t think you realise who I am,” he leers to an overflowing Big Top. It’s a fair point, as he cycles through his entire repertoire of ne’er-do-wells with kung-fu-kicking relish. “I’m a salamander… a turgid fucked up little goat.. I’m the sausage man!”
He’s also a slum landlord, a slum tenant, the bloke shouting at his girlfriend outside Spoons, the washed-up geezer pretending not to cry on a park bench: “Do you remember me? Do you? Dooo yaaa?” But Dury has a loved-up raver in him too, and a final “These Are My Friends” is a euphoric celebration. “See you soon, my fuckin’ little bunny rabbits!” he cackles at the end. And off we hop to bed.
