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What to see at End of the Road Festival this year according to the music industry

23 August 2018, 20:30

With End of the Road - our favourite British festival - only a week away, we catch up with critics, writers and presenters from The Guardian, Noisey, Uncut, Pitchfork and more to get their insider tips on who to see this year.

Nilüfer Yanya

Tshepo Mokoena, Editor at Noisey:

“Nilüfer Yanya’s voice knocks you back first. Before you even get to her lilting melodies and deft storytelling, the west Londoner guitarist and songwriter thrusts herself forward, vocals thick and textured as a knotted rope. She first broke through in 2016, aged 21, with single “Small Crimes” and has gone on to put out a smattering of tracks since. All swell with emotive guitar lines in a style that falls somewhere between indie and lo-fi pop – trying to slot her neatly into one genre category proves to be a bit of a nightmare. With a BBC Sound of 2018 longlisting behind her and a tour on the way all summer, she'll be one young UK artist worth catching at End of the Road this year. That way, you can let her voice work its magic in person.”

Nilüfer Yanya plays The Big Top at End of the Road on Friday 31 August at 2.30pm

Nilufer image

Insecure Men

Will Hodgkinson - Chief rock and pop critic at The Times:

“The Fat White Family have an unwholesome but smart take on rock’n’roll, so when co-founder Saul Adamczewski got a new thing together with old school friend Ben Romans-Hopcraft of the indie soul band Childhood, it was always going to be worth checking out. The surprising thing about the aptly titled Insecure Men is how poignant, thoughtful and downright sad their music has turned out to be. The Fat White Family are belligerent, defiant and nasty. Insecure Men are far more vulnerable, as if representing the other side of the bohemian life. When you look at the band members’ recent history, it makes sense.

In the thick of dealing with all kinds of drug problems, Adamczewski formed Insecure Men with Romans-Hopcraft — the most sensible person he knew, apparently — as a riposte to the Fat White Family’s celebration of grot. There are touches of Martin Denny-style exotica and the sombre reflectiveness of Brian Eno’s Another Green World in the gently melodic music, while the words concern all kinds of disconcerting subjects. Mekong Glitter covers Gary Glitter’s horrible sex adventures in Vietnam; The Saddest Man In Penge is an autobiographical tale of Adamczewski’s crack addicted times in the unstylish southeast London suburb of the title.

This combination of easy listening and uneasy subject matter translates surprisingly well to a live setting. Adamczewski and Romans-Hopcraft have star quality, even when they’re not doing a great deal, and a host of musicians including a southeast London music teacher called Steely Dan on vibraphone flesh out the sound. I’ll be very much looking forward to seeing them in the Big Top on Saturday afternoon at End of the Road, although really, Insecure Men belong to a wife swapping party in 70s suburbia. Both are preposterous, kind of exciting, and a little bit tragic.”

Insecure Men play The Big Top at End of the Road on Saturday 1 Septemebr at 1.15pm

Insecure men sep17

Lucy Dacus

Greg Cochrane - Associate Editor at Loud And Quiet:

“Back in spring Richmond, Virginia musician Lucy Dacus released her second album Historian. It didn't simply represent the follow-up to the 22-year-old's very fine debut No Burden, but something more symbolic. 2017 sucked for Dacus - a set of relationship, health and financial challenges all tumbled into each other like an unforgiving row of dominoes, all set to the backdrop of Trump's farcical first year in office.

Those aches, pains and ghosts were all channelled into a dramatic set of songs that formed a narrative rainbow that stretched from despair to promise. While those experiences left her in a new state of mind ("not really in the best way"), this year she's spent trying to look to the future while getting out on the road to perform those songs. It's all good, but the more hushed moments will be particularly arresting. After that we'll be tripping to the Loud And Quiet stage at Big Top to catch Tirzah, and later, the mighty Protomartyr. Come with. “

Lucy Dacus play The Woods Stage at End of the Road on Friday 31 August at 3.45pm

Lucydacus hi 33

Screaming Females

Hanna Hanra, Editor in chief at Beat Magazine:

“Screaming Females were introduced to me by Shirley Manson of Garbage. Marissa Paternoster can really shred. I find women who play the way she can so intriguing. Rose Mountain - their 2014 album, is a beautiful piece of work. I recommend seeing this band at End Of The Road, they are like a breath of fresh rock n' roll air. “

Screaming Females play The Big Top at End of the Road on Saturday 1 September at midday

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Billy Childish

Jordan Bassett, senior writer at NME:

“When people write about garage rock hero Billy Childish, they usually talk about his incredibly prolific approach to creativity – the man’s recorded around 150 albums – but what’s really inspiring is that he still seems to be having as much fun as he did when he formed his first band, the Pop Rivets, way back in 1977. The Chatham, Kent punk has since been in a bewildering number of bands – The Milkshakes, Thee Headcoats, The Vermin Poets and The Spartan Dreggs, to name just a handful – and each has been imbued with same joyous, freewheeling, spit-and-sawdust ethos. These are records where the mistakes are half the fun.

Billy performs pretty rarely and doesn’t court attention (despite having fans in Kylie Minogue, Beck and Jack White), so this End of the Road show is a rare – and unexpected – treat. Praise be that he’s back with CMTF, a band that features his wife Nurse Julie (great name) on bass and with whom, typically, he's released five albums in as many years. It’s been suggested that he’s been making the same album for 40 years. Well, that’s probably true – but it’s a bloody good album. And then there’s my other favourite thing about Billy Childish: he once released a song called ‘(We Hate The Fuckin’) NME’.”

Billy Childish plays The Big Top at End of the Road on Saturday 1 September at5pm

Wild Billy Childish Resize

David Thomas Broughton

Jazz Monroe, Associate Staff Writer at Pitchfork, Contributing Editor at Q:

“My first David Thomas Broughton epiphany occurred in 2011. He’d just released a song called “River Lay”, from his second album, or what I assume to be his second album, called Outbreeding. You never quite know with Broughton. The eccentric Yorkshire-born songwriter purportedly now lives in South Korea, having emigrated, apparently, from the North earlier this decade, though you wouldn’t bet against his having spent that period stuffed up in a basement in Otley. The revelation was that the song’s tuneful chorus, “You can waste your life on the banks of the River Lay”, was not a pastoral meditation but a play on the French future tense of “to dream”, “reverai”: You can waste your life on the banks of your dreams.

Like most grand ideas formulated in my late-teens, I concluded later that it was perhaps a stretch, but I never stopped admiring Broughton. His lyrics had a way of making me believe he meant more than I could possibly imagine. “I tried all night to set your body on fire,” he sang in a swooping baritone on another Outbreeding song, a lyric that resonates in still mysterious ways. He seems to know, in the way others know when to cough, exactly which of his abstract thoughts will turn you to putty. “

David Thomas Broughton plays End of the Road on Sunday 2 September at 4pm

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Zimpel / Ziolek and Moor Mother

Verity Sharp, Presenter on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction:

“Anyone who describes their music as being inspired by Slavic folklore, mysticism, poetry and black metal has my attention. This is the brief of Kuba Ziołek, a multifaceted musician and composer from the Polish underground whose solo set a couple of years ago seduced the masterful Wacław Zimpel. The two are appearing at this year’s EOTR as a duo on the Late Junction stage. Ziołek will bring the folk sensibility, the guitar, the abstract, dreamy lyrics, Ziolek his mastery of the clarinet and long held interest in American minimalism.

Also on the bill is poet and activist Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother who’s been stunning audiences globally with her visceral lyrics styled from a life lived in some of the most close knit, yet economically bereft, communities in Philadelphia. She rails against social inequality, racial injustice, police brutality and sexual discrimination. ‘For me’ she says, ‘it’s all about putting sound out in the world to change something as an act of protection. Not as a performance in front of somebody’. As ever, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction stage comes highly recommended to anyone who welcomes a break from the comfort zone.

Zimpel Ziolek Resize

The Limińanas

Tom Pinnock, Reviews Editor at Uncut:

“If you were constructing a timelessly cool band in a rock laboratory, you might stumble upon something a little like The Limiñanas. From Perpignan in the south of France, Marie and Lionel Limiñana mix the hazy chug and droning momentum of The Jesus And Mary Chain and Neu! with the Gallic spoken-word sophistication of Serge Gainsbourg, and sprinkle in textures from Turkish and Eastern psych. If that all sounds a little try-hard on paper, on record and live they’re disarmingly fun and almost cinematic in scope. They’ll probably be drawing mostly from their last album, this year’s great Shadow People, produced by The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe, but their previous records are well worth checking out too, especially 2013’s psych-Serge opus Costa Blanca – a premier cru from the côtes du drone.”

The Limińanas play The Woods Stage at End of the Road on Sunday 2 September at 1.45pm

The Liminanas Resize

Kiran Leonard

Laura Barton, BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, The Observer and The FT:

"There is so much incredible music at EOTR this year (yes, I concede, there is every year, but still each September I get excited all over again). Away from the shiny big names, I’ve been wanting to see Caroline Spence live for ages — she’s a country-folk songwriter from Nashville with a sumptuous voice and a mean turn of phrase, and her Spades and Roses album was one of my slow-burn favourites of last year. I think Tamara Lindeman of the The Weather Station is one of the most interesting and adventurous and affecting songwriters around and I can’t wait to hear her voice in this setting.

The artist I’m most looking forward to seeing is maybe Kiran Leonard (pictured above)— it’s been a little while since I last saw him live, and I feel that between each live show and each album he takes these ludicrously huge strides forward. He has a new album out this October that I expect to be properly tremendous. And if you’ve never caught one his live shows prepare yourself for something stunning and visceral. Also if you don’t see Richard Dawson you are a mad person."

Kiran Leonard plays The Tipi Tent on the opening night of End of the Road at 10.45pm

Kiran L at EOTR by Sonny Malhotra

A. Wesley Chung

Rich Thane, Best Fit founder:

“Part of the absolute joy of a weekend at End of the Road returning home a firm fan of someone you'd been previously unaware of. For A. Wesley Chung - a relatively unknown Californian living in Glasgow - his opening of proceedings on the Woods Stage on Saturday afternoon is destined to attract a wealth of new admirers. Debut album Neon Coast, released earlier this year, is an absolute treat - blending gorgeous West Coast melodies are balanced with lilting pedal steel, soft horns and heart-wrenching lyrics. The swooning beauty of album standout 'Restless' will surely act as the perfect antidote to Friday night's overindulgence. Fans of classic-Americana will most definitely find something to write home about - an absolute must-see of the weekend.

A. Wesley Chung plays The Woods Stage at End of the Road on Saturday 1 September at 12:45pm

End of the Road Festival runs from 28 August to 2 September.
A Wesley Chung Resize
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