Bearded FFP. B
Live Reviews End of the Road Festival
FOUR STOPS TO THE END OF THE ROAD
Words Kat Brown Owe Carter Gareth Main Andy Price Photography Alex Poulter
It takes many a wise mind to decipher everything crammed into the most perfectly packaged music festival, Bearded sent four less-than-wise minds filed them off against Peacocks and sent them to the End of the Road festival. It’s a little hazy, but some good things evidently did go on. As the summer came to an end before it actually started, miserable faces from the Bearded team who had trudged the mud at Glastonbury and floated in tents at Roskilde were perked up by the thought of coming to the End of the Road festival, the best new festival in 2006 and probably now the best festival… period. The gods that be were not in the mood to let it start like that, as our respective reporters pulled into Larmer Tree Gardens as the first drops of rainfall started to drop. “Typical” went the general response from those too moody and too overworked to have been enchanted by the plywood animals welcoming the 5,000, overaged, overworked, well-mannered End of the Roadians onto the festival site. It was an attitude that didn’t last for long. “The Larmer Tree Gardens are full of magical things!” exclaims Owe Carter from his dishevelled state after the weekend is past, “Roaming peacocks! An enchanted forest! A piano in the woods! Regularly emptied toilets! It’s unlike any festival I’ve been to before.” That is before he even notices that people are actually nice at this festival, like, proper friendly – some sort of socially untouched family? Quite possibly.
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For the festival is full of drunken larks and lost property like any festival. One of Bearded’s esteemed colleagues loses their mobile phone through too much kossack dancing, it is promptly returned after a phone call reaches the person it probably hit (thanks again), and a security guard finds out that someone has been pinching things from tents but soon catches them (“I imagine he looked for the three people in five thousand who didn’t seem fey”). Whilst the newcomers in the Bearded team were enjoying their introduction to Larmer Tree, resident hack Kat Brown took a little longer to release herself from her mood – instigated somewhere at Salisbury Station when the bus that was promised her fails to turn up, she is then forced to stand gallantly in amongst a line of Tepees in the lashing rain waiting for unkempt pseudo-hack Gareth Main to direct her to Bearded’s area of the campsite.