Breakfast in Bed is the everyday adventures of Rowan, aka @Rowstar, writing about adoptive parenthood, outdoor adventures, food, live music and other favourite pursuits.
Ever since I arrived back from last year's End of the Road Festival, I have been trying to persuade Ant that he would have enjoyed it, despite his professed hatred of festivals in general. It's unfortunate that to date his only festival experiences have involved excessive rain and mud (Green Man, Fleadh, Roskilde) or boring mainstream music (Isle of Wight), which meant that it was a bit of an effort to convince him that End of the Road is brilliantly different and much more up his street. I couldn't promise no mud, but based on 2009's experience, it seemed there'd be a fair chance of sunshine and I could confidently promise great music and a charming atmosphere. When I also mentioned the on-site therapies, real ale and abundant use of camping chairs, he agreed to give it a try.
Arriving on site on Thursday evening, there was a definite feeling of trepidation on my part as I sensed his misgivings about the whole proceedings. But by Sunday evening, wine-fuelled, music-soaked and massaged to within an inch of his life, a grinning Ant gracefully admitted that End of the Road had restored his jaded faith in festivals. Phew. I'd had a wonderful time too - there were so many good bands it'd be impossible to review them all, but highlights included Wolf People, Mountain Goats, Three Trapped Tigers, Citay, Ben Ottewell and Mountain Man. Aside from much musical enjoyment, we indulged in plenty of people watching, dancing, bantering, cake eating, curry eating, pizza eating, pie eating, chilli eating, tea drinking, stargazing and laid back bimbling. Once again, the sparkly woods provided much magic, especially the spontaneous late night jams and secret acoustic gigs on the woodland stage.
A game of Kubb on Sunday was a new experience for us both and something we'll definitely be looking to make or purchase for our own back garden. A Swedish skittles-chess hybrid, Kubb involves throwing large blocks of wood to knock out an opposing team's pieces; shins beware. The things that have grated at previous festivals - shouty teens, grotty toilets, epic walks between stages and back to camp, conspicuous security and bag searching, the sound of nitrous oxdide balloons emptying every few seconds - didn't really factor at End of the Road. The only thing I wanted for was a shower (there is only one block on site), but apart from that it really was a very very lovely festival and I shall definitely be going back next year. Based on his reaction, hopefully so will Ant.
Here's a little video I made of some of the bands we saw and the other activities in between. The sound quality is a bit rubbish on a few of the clips, but hopefully it gives you a flavour for the event.
With the end of every year comes a string of essential rituals - some imposed by religious and historical tradition, some of our own making. For me one of the best year-end ceremonies is to sit down between Christmas and New Year's Eve to go through all our photographs from the year and put the best ones into an album - something we've been doing as a couple almost since the beginning.
Another rather more self-indulgent custom is the making of the annual 'Ant & Ro' CD - a compilation of our favourite and significant music from the year, usually dominated by bands we've seen live. These are distributed to friends and family who visit over the festive period and sometimes posted to other musically minded comrades.
As our tastes have grown more and more eclectic over the years, it's become trickier to compile a fluent mixtape of accessible music. Whilst my motivation is to share cool new discoveries and inspire musical exploration, I appreciate that not everyone cares as much as I do for the more esoteric Freakzone-ish end of the listening spectrum.
A couple of days ago I started thinking about this year's mix and jotting down some ideas for what might go into it. The hardest part has been whittling it down to just one CD's worth of tunes, from what has been an outstanding twelve months of musical enlightenment; what with four festivals and plenty of local gigs in between, my musical cup literally floweth over with bands that I want to shout about.
The other difficulty is actually tracking down recorded versions of unsigned material, which usually involves various emails to band members and ordering homemade CDs recorded in bedrooms and sold from dubious looking websites, hoping that they'll materialise. But this is all part of the ritual, and gradually the mixtape has started to take shape. It's not 100% finished yet, but what with the impending festive frivolities, I may not get another chance to share my annual compilation here.
The above YouTube playlist contains all the tracks that I could find in a reasonable format, but by the nature of the platform is of varying quality. Below is a complete tracklisting with download links and an Amazon preview widget that lets you listen to snippets from each song (if you want to hear more, go to the band website). The only one missing from the widget (because it's not available from Amazon) is Quack Quack, which I strongly recommend you listen to here (but only if you are into rambling energetic contemporary prog).
It's not often you leave a music festival feeling perkier than when you arrive, but that's exactly what happened to me at the End of the Road festival last weekend. Unfortunately, this wasn't anything to do with the reviving qualities of the festival, but more due to the fact that I'd only had three hours sleep the night before it started. I'd had a brilliant evening on Thursday at Brightwest II, playing 'Murder She Twote', chatting to the assembled Twitterati and knocking back a pint or five of ale at the Black Lion. How on earth we went from this relatively civilised gathering to a seedy all-nighter in the Bulldog (I know!) is anyone's guess . It must have seemed like a good idea at the time; not so much when the alarm went off at 7am the next morning.
"How much muesli does one man need?" Steve, upon arriving at the End of the Road Festival armed with a mountain of cereal
But the End of the Road was calling (in so many ways) and I had other people relying on me to get them there too. I'd planned on having a disco nap when we arrived in Dorset, but as it turned out, it was all far too exciting. Set in the picturesque Larmer Tree Gardens, the End of the Road Festival is now in its fourth year, and fast gaining a reputation as the serious music lover's festival. Some would call the line-up alternative, I'd say fundamental. Much to my own personal delight, End of the Road is largely a festival for chin-stroking, album-buying, real ale-drinking DINKYS and empty nesters, with only the occasional obligatory festy crusty and over-excited tween.
"Do you consider yourself worthy of a poetic license?" Paul, to me, sometime in the early hours of Saturday morning.
There were so many highlights during the weekend that it would be hard to boil them down into a single readable blog post, but a few bands stood out in terms of atmosphere and sheer accomplishment. The one I'd been most excited about was the Low Anthem, who I'd discovered back in May at the Great Escape Festival and have been raving about to anyone who'll listen ever since. I was extra thrilled when it turned out they were playing not one but two sets during the weekend.
"Unless it's cake, it can f**k off" Matty, on my aversion to brandy other than in pudding
The first Low Anthem gig was in the smallest venue - the Tipi tent - which looked cute from the outside, but turned out to be a terrible space for live music. Despite persistent sound problems and noise pollution from the neighbouring tent, Low Anthem appeared composed as they delivered an intimate set, mostly of their more obscure material. But it wasn't until their second gig on Saturday that the band really shone, bringing a packed out audience at the Garden Stage to its metaphorical knees. I've never heard a quieter field of festival goers as in between songs during the Low Anthem's End of the Road performance. Rapturous applause gave way to mesmerised silence after each song as we all eagerly awaited the next. So many other bands get by on catchy tunes and adequate musicianship, that it's impossible not to be affected by the sheer arresting intensity of the Low Anthem's immense talent and potent delivery.
"In the light, I can tell when people's eyes are glazing over" Nick, on our general inability as a group to pay attention
Efterklang came in a close second as most enjoyable set of the weekend with their uplifting New Wave tinged Post Rock. Not many of the bands I went to see were particularly danceable, though I did have a silly strut about to Herman Dune and hurt my neck moshing to The Heavy. With a choice of four different stages, plus the odd spontaneous gig in the woods, it was sometimes difficult to choose where to park yourself. I tended to wander round until something caught my ear and then stick with it. Out of all the festival's venues, The Local (curated by esteemed promoter Howard Monk) yielded the most exciting new discoveries, including my final band of the weekend, Quack Quack, who succeeded in fulfilling my (quite vocal) craving for a prog fix.
"Behave, or you'll get turned into sausages" Linda, getting all teacherly on us
I was also really taken with Wildbirds & Peacedrums, who can only be described as 'Drum n Blues' - the set up being a female bluesy singer accompanied only by drums and various percussion noises. Her powerfully husky voice was enough to carry the lack of any other instrumentation, and I have not seen such fervent drumming since the Muppets. A namecheck must also go to Faceometer and his friend the Dapper Swindler, whose unofficial woodland jamming kept us all enthralled, and distracted me from the disappointment of being told not to climb trees by security. To be fair to security, they were pretty laid back in their fun-spoiling, even in the face of my loud protestation: "I climb trees all the time when you're not here. There's no law against climbing trees." All power to Nick for beautifully diffusing the situation, and winning a bet at the same time, when he offered the guy in question £50 to dance the Can-Can for him.
"You're my best sparkly forest band I've ever seen" Michael, to Faceometer and the Dapper Swindler
It was exactly this kind of jovial, conspiratorial atmosphere that kept everyone smiling at the End of the Road and made it so easy to make new friends along the way. The lack of Hippy Shit and abundance of excellent food and ale also helped a lot. I sincerely hope the organisers are never tempted to increase the capacity, because it felt nicely intimate at the 5,000 mark. I came away feeling as though I'd shared a special moment with a chosen few, and I like that feeling very much. More of the same next year, please.
If you've never been to The Great Escape, you'd be forgiven for dismissing it as a purely 'young and trendy' festival, full of the sort of bands loved by hipsters in skinny jeans and Wayfarers. You may also be aware that it's a music industry festival, organised as a showcase for new and emerging artists and attended by hundreds of journalists and music 'people'. Personally I think it's pitched as a hipster festival because they are perceived as having the most clout in the rise or fall of pop music. But beneath those layers of industry spin and round-the-corner queues for the Maccabees, there is almost a separate festival going on, if only you know where to look.
My Great Escape motto this year was "If they wouldn't play it on Freakzone, I'm not going", and I pretty much managed to stick by this philosophy throughout. There were a few more mainstream bands on the agenda, but even those were at the alternative end of the spectrum, and more likely to be played by Radcliffe & Maconie than Jo Whiley. I also have a strict policy against queuing at the Great Escape. I can't see the point in standing in line for ages to possibly see the last ten minutes of a set when there's so much else on offer. If I really really want to see a particular band, I'll book tickets to one of their tour dates rather than hold out for them at a festival.
For me, Great Escape is all about expanding my music collection, not worshipping bands that I already love. Apart from Thomas Truax, who I had seen only recently (and wanted to introduce to Ant, who hadn't), all the bands that we saw this year were totally new to us. About half of them were good enough for me to want to go out and buy their CD, some were sufficiently amusing to stay and watch for a couple of songs, and one or two made us run for the hills. But all in all, it was a good festival, and we hardly had to negotiate any hipsters (although I did laugh at plenty in the street) along the way.
The first band we saw on Thursday night was Gablé, whose billing as a 'lo-fi avante-garde experimental trio from Paris', seemed to fit nicely with the Freakzone-ish prerequisite and also appealed to my Francophile leanings. Feeling terribly self conscious as the only ones waiting outside the venue, we almost didn't go in, but I'm so glad we did - I cannot tell you how much I loved this band. Their strange and sometimes unnerving tales - told with amusing relish and furnished with all manner of lo-fi accompaniments - revealed a deep appreciation of the weirder side of life, and made us laugh out loud.
A few more stragglers turned up during the set and eventually there were enough of us to make some well-deserved appreciative noises between songs. Despite the poor turnout, the band members - two guys and a girl - all continued to smile in a strangely contented manner that seemed to suggest they were in possession of a delicious secret. I went away feeling as though I had acquired a brilliant secret of my own in having discovered them, and thinking that it would be hard for any other band at the festival to live up to their bonkers brilliance.
After Gablé, we stayed on at the Unitarian church to watch Soap& Skin, who I'd listened to and liked during my pre-festival Spotify/Last.fm/MySpace research. I'd been intrigued by the sweeping piano arrangements and melancholic Sigur Ros style vocals, and was hoping for a tingly, intimate experience in this atmospheric little venue. What actually happened was an unfortunately discordant conflict between grand piano, laptop and unsteady vocals - and a swift exit by us. After this less than pleasing experience, we hopped across the road to the Pavilion to see The Acorn - a much more agreeable Canadian alt-country band with a touch of the Paul Simon about them. I had a little dance around, my first and last bop of the festival.
It has become something of a Great Escape tradition to end the day in a civilised fashion at the Duke of York's, which is where we discovered the next big delight of this year's festival, The Miserable Rich - a Brighton band who had somehow escaped my notice until now. Essentially a string quintet with a singer, these five hugely talented blokes bring a touch of classical elegance to their affectingly contemplative folky repertoire. So swept away was I by their performance, that I have failed to remember anything much about the band that followed - Teitur - although I think I enjoyed it.
Friday began at the Prince Albert with a disappointing set from Hanne Hukkelberg - who, Like Soap&Skin, had sounded promising on Spotify, but failed to pass the live performance test. After that we heard about five muffled minutes of Obijou from behind a huge pillar at the Arc, and decided that although they sounded interesting, the venue was just too crap to endure. Unlike in previous years, there didn't seem to be much of anything going on in the daytime, so after accidentally wandering into a (distinctly underwhelming) Charlatans rehearsal, we acted our age and went home for a quick disco nap.
The Naive New Beaters shook us well and truly awake again with their giddily ironic French hip-hop, but we were distinctly unimpressed with Django Django, who came on next at Above Audio. A quick skip down to the end of the pier to catch the end of an intense set by Norwegian rockers Harrys Gym was worth the windswept trip, then it was back into town for The Phantom Band at the Pavilion. But the day's real revelations didn't commence until we went entirely on spec to see Elizabeth at the Basement. Both venue and band were brand new to us, and both were equally impressive. The Basement is a cosy underground spot in the North Laine, with unusual stepped sides, where you can lay back on cushions to watch the band, and the perfect place to enjoy the eerie offerings of electro-opera-marvel Elizabeth.
Once again, we concluded our evening with tea and cake and a comfy seat (yes, we are old) at the Duke of York's, where Friday night was Nordic night. Jolly Icelandic band Hjaltalin kept us awake with bassoons and violins and some kooky between-songs banter, then Norwegian Thomas Dybdahl soothed us off to sleep (almost) with his surprisingly authentic-sounding alt-country Americana.
On Saturday we were joined by my 18 year old cousin Barnaby, and I was a little nervous that he might not be into the more alternative stuff on mine and Ant's gig wishlist. But thankfully he's not a typical teenager, and was quite open-mindedly up for some more esoteric musical exploration. After a couple of lame daytime gigs that do not even warrant a mention, we decided to abandon the Great Escape for a couple of hours and do some Open Houses instead. Things rebooted in the evening with Mechanical Bride at the Sallis Benney where the combination of a refreshingly decent PA and the band's tight, experimental Celtic-tinged folk was a good kick-off. But nothing could have prepared us for what came next.
In the less than salubrious setting of the dingy Ocean Rooms basement, I lost my heart, soul and all sense of reality to The Low Anthem. Even the usual clique of chatty bints behind me were swiftly silenced when singer Ben Miller opened his mouth; such a haunting and utterly disarming voice I have never heard. My legs turned to jelly as I stood breathless and in awe throughout their mind-blowing set. The other two band members, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams, proved just as jaw-droppingly skillful, switching with ease between all kinds of instruments and providing spine-tingling vocal harmonies. Just as you found yourself bestilled and bewitched by a delicately sorrowful ballad, they'd shake things up with a rugged, whisky-swigging country rock-out. It was all totally unexpected and beautifully accomplished, knocking spots off anything else we'd heard so far.
It would have been difficult for even the finest of acts to match such a deeply affecting performance, but I doubt whether Mothlite would have impressed me in any context. Now I'm all for noodling electro post-rock, but this was the most humourless, self-indulgent tosh I have heard in a long time. It was like watching four guys having their own personal bedroom stoner sessions, oblivious to each other and their audience. Ant seemed to be enjoying it though, so we stayed to the end, trying to see the funny side. Things picked up back at the Albert, with Woodpigeon, who sounded nice - but the room was so hot that we had to leave after one song. Kate Rogers Band at the more temperate Unitarian church was pleasant enough, but felt so pedestrian after The Low Anthem, so we left that and hung out until the grand finale of the festival, Thomas Truax.
Isn't it nice to see a brother and sister getting along? It's especially touching to witness a creative collaboration between siblings that doesn't descend into the realms of the gimmicky or twee. The hotly-tipped brother-sister act Joe Gideon and the Shark played an electric set at Brighton's Freebutt last Wednesday night (apparently their first ever headline gig), proving that it is possible for a band to be talented, hip and related. A definite familial chemistry crackled off the pair as they rocked out the intimate dive venue with their haunting anecdotal country-tinged post-rock epics.
Blessed with the sonorous vocal chords of Johnny Cash and the wistful delivery of Leonard Cohen, Joe's half-sung, half-uttered renditions are toe-curlingly cool. Younger sister Viva, aka "The Shark" (pictured) excels on both percussion and keys (sometimes both at the same time), whilst also twiddling various looping/fx trickery knobs and providing backing vocals. Plying their talents with equal parts precision and abandon, the dramatic duo held the small but appreciative Brighton audience in thrall throughout the set.
A youthfully enthusiastic support band, Ice Black Birds, had got us going with some Jon Spencer Blues Explosion-inspired high-energy blues-rock. Good value photographically, their exuberant stage moves reminded me of that other (excellent) arseless boyish ensemble, Foals. Natural successors to the Brel/Beefheart/Cave tradition of brooding cabaret art-rock, Joe Gideon and the Shark's darker, subtler offering proved the perfect contrast, though no less energetic in its own way. Comparisons with The White Stripes are inevitable, and not entirely unfounded; both bands exude a certain kindred cliqueyness that shines through in their music, both use lo-fi techniques to make big brash rock 'n roll noises. The stand-out track of the night for me was Kathy Ray, the (allegedly) true story of an ageing backing singer, dripping with the sultry deep-South sentiments of Tony Joe White's High Sheriff Of Calhoun Parrishor Bobbie Gentry's Fancy, but with an unexpected psychedelic twist. Spangly, stirring, inspirational stuff.
Joe Gideon and The Shark's Debut Album, Harum Scarumis just released. They'll be back in Brighton for the Great Escape Festival in May - don't miss it!
, the (allegedly) true story of an ageing backing singer, dripping with the sultry deep-South sentiments of Tony Joe White's 
or Bobbie Gentry's 
, but with an unexpected psychedelic twist. Spangly, stirring, inspirational stuff.
is just released. They'll be back in Brighton for the 
