End of the Road 2025 review: Pouring rain can't stop a musical buffet

If you want to understand the vibe at End of the Road, consider what led to the festival’s own version of Gallagher Hill, punters massing behind a fence to catch a glimpse of an in-demand act. Instead of Oasis fans craning their necks at Heaton Park, End of the Road’s diehards would do anything not to miss a live recording of the Adam Buxton podcast.

Perhaps that’s reductive. This is the 19th time End of the Road has happened, with almost 15,000 people flocking to a corner of Dorset. It sells out like clockwork, and founder Simon Taffe describes it as a place for record collectors, people passionate about music. If I’m being honest, it’s probably also a place for Big Issue readers: April cover star Self Esteem headlined the Saturday, while ambassador Michelle de Swarte was offering comedy.

And yet, as festivals struggle, gig tickets become bank-busters and venues close, End of the Road’s true value lies in something else. It remains a shining example of how to keep festivals – one of the UK’s truly world-class bits – interesting.

Read more:

• End of the Road founder on the secret to a good festival and the act you can’t afford to miss in 2025
• End of the Road festival 2024 review – a beautifully-curated feast for music lovers
• I bought Brixton Academy for £1

Take the Sunday. Kick off the cobwebs with Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s dreamy guitars, before ambling over to listen to Mark William Lewis, a post-rock singer-songwriter whose voice sounds like he vapes treacle. Vieux Farka Touré’s jazzy Malian blues make way to Katy J Pearson’s sunny songs. At this point, had you stayed at home instead, Countryfile would be in full swing on BBC One. Blawan is perhaps the opposite of Countryfile, best described to friends as “scary, heavy, sort of experimental, industrial techno”. At Glastonbury, the producer was soundtracking the apocalypse at 5am inside a giant head. Here, he’s making synths scream at teatime inside a dark tent. It’s impressive, surprisingly life-affirming stuff, and a wonderfully deranged bit of scheduling. Readjust to the light and Squid are powering through a set, getting the crowd energetic before Father John Misty sees the weekend home with surreal crooning, his properly loud band matched by a properly commanding stage presence.

Here you’d be forgiven for going to bed. Don’t. The cinema is showing Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine’s bizarre 2009 film where shuffling characters in horror masks eerily – I’m sorry – hump bins. It’s the perfect setting for a nap before a real treat: a secret set from enigmatic heavy pop band WU LYF.

It is, singer Ellery Roberts tells the crowd, their first ever gig at a UK festival, a fact all the more remarkable given their breakthrough debut album Go Tell Fire to the Mountain was released in 2011 and made them the darlings of the indie music press. Except, they split up soon afterwards. Now they are back, with a live show full of passion and rhythm – a surreal experience for fans who thought the band were gone for good. After this, you can go to the woods, play a game of chess while you watch drunkards try to climb under and over a pommel horse without touching the ground, and wait for the weekend to end.

That’s one day at a festival. It’s a good one. That’s not to say End of the Road was all easy: crowds had to endure a Saturday of almost-fun-obliterating rain, having already prayed through Thursday night that their tents would survive that deluge. The ground held up well enough, though, and End of the Road’s clientele are the types to all have a trusty pair of walking boots.

Anyone seeking a lively crowd has to venture pretty far in front of the sound tent – at times audiences could be best described as “respectful” – but nowhere felt as pressed for space as bigger festivals or gigs can get. It’s painful to admit £6.90 is a good price for a beer these days. The lack of phone signal is an established ‘Part Of The Charm’, too. You learn which friends you can trust when setting a rendezvous, and it likely contributes to a refreshing lack of phone screens while acts are playing.

Self Esteem’s Saturday headline set was the kind of theatrical, medium-defying bonanza that could well end up on a stage more….triangular. Caribou’s Friday headline set got better the heavier it dived, but would have been even better two hours later inside the Big Top – though anybody dancing until curfew at the Boat stage the next night need only look up to see him dropping by for a stint on the decks, closing out with Suicide’s Dream Baby Dream to make the walk back to the tent feel like the end credits to Alex Garland’s Civil War. 

One big selling point is that End of the Road boasts a genuine Thursday headliner, offering four days of big nighttime sets – something bigger festivals can’t match. This year’s curtain-raiser was Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory – all shadow and synths bolstering the brooding indie roots. In the Big Top, DIIV, Moin, and TVOD all showed how to make guitars sound big.

At a place where crowds rarely get raucous, however, the standout moment may just have been how thrilled South African singer Moonchild Sanelly seemed as a packed tent went wild for her. You can always catch up with your podcasts later.

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