End of the Road 2016
Festival guide
Following 2015’s fantastic 10th birthday celebrations, End Of The Road festival returns to North Dorset’s Larmer Tree Gardens on 1st September with another storming line-up. From Mercury Prize-nominees Bat For Lashes and Savages, to recently-reformed legends like Broken Social Scene and The Shins, we’ve rounded up all the weekend’s potential highlights below.
Top picks
The Shins
Though currently putting the finishing touches to the follow-up to 2012’s Port Of Morrow, James Mercer and co are taking time out from their busy recording schedule to perform at End of the Road. For a sneak preview of the new material – and to hear classics like ‘New Slang’, ‘So Says I’ and ‘Australia’ – head to their set on Thursday, and brace yourself for soaring melodies and swoonsome vocal harmonies.
Bat For Lashes
A decade on from her debut, Natasha Khan remains one of the UK’s brightest musical talents. Her latest LP is a concept album/imagined film soundtrack, centred around doomed nuptials, and has subsequently earned Khan her third Mercury Prize nomination. Hear highlights from The Bride during her headline set on The Woods stage on Saturday, and hang around afterwards to take part in the “wedding reception”.
Kevin Morby
We first fell for Kevin Morby circa 2014’s Still Life, but this April’s Singing Saw helped the former Woods-bassist reach an even wider audience. Divided between sun-dappled, alt-country ballads and lushly-arranged indie-rock – and showcasing the 28-year-old Texan’s languid, Bob Dylan-meets-Cass McCombs drawl – Morby’s third LP deserves the unanimous praise it’s since received. Don’t miss his set on Sunday under any circumstances.
Top picks
Don't miss
More from the line-up
- We both felt that we would like to do some songs with choruses that our kids might like.
- I used to joke that my music was travelling further than I could afford to.
- To be an artist is to declare yourself free; to insist on your freedom and to insist that those pre-existing clichés don’t apply.
- We’re all of us a slave to something; something’s holding us back, something’s keeping us apart.
- Cyncism can be a really, really dangerous thing... I always make myself ready to be surprised by anything.
- Initially, songwriting for me was discovering this way to say things to people that I'd never had the confidence to say.