“These little things out in the woods are so magical,” says Matt Berninger during his Friday afternoon Uncut Q&A, and all around him End Of The Road takes the challenge head on.
“These little things out in the woods are so magical,” says Matt Berninger during his Friday afternoon Uncut Q&A, and all around him End Of The Road takes the challenge head on.
Just a short time later, members of London’s Broadside Hacks collective arc out across the Garden Stage, enclosing Mike Heron and his daughter Georgia Seddon. They’re here to celebrate the work of Heron’s psych folk innovators The Incredible String Band – or predominantly their first five albums – and grace it with a kind of fervent fragility.
The Celtic folk of “Chinese White”, cracked and intricate, approaches the edge of breakdown; “Maya” drifts by on a psychedelic Eastern lilt, for all its yells of “Jesus and Hitler!” Seddon takes on a keening “Cold Days Of February” but it’s not until the closing stretch that Heron takes the vocal fore, his delicate husk of a voice imbuing “Log Cabin Home In The Sky” an hymnal “Air” and a shortened, ambient gospel “A Very Cellular Song” with a weightless lustre. Incredible? Pretty much.
At the Talking Heads stage, meanwhile, New Orleans’ Sabine McCalla is bringing antique Southern blues and soul to life like Simone without the crackle. With just a resonant electric guitar and a voice steeped in the grain and mythology of the Big Easy, she summons the ghosts of blood-smattered murder ballads (“I Went To The Levee”) and spare spirituals (“Deep River”).
Back on the Garden Stage, Ireland’s Lisa O’Neill – famed singer of Peaky Blinders’ climactic cover of Dylan’s “All The Tired Horses” and author of celebrated 2023 album All Of This Is Chance – is starker and more righteous still, her dark, primal, Lankum-esque folk accompanied by double bass and forthright messaging. “Violet Gibson”, concerning the Irishwoman who was committed to an asylum in 1926 for trying to shoot Mussolini, becomes a platform to decry all of history’s abusive men. “Mother Jones” spotlights early 1900s union organiser Mary Jones, a heroine of O’Neill’s philosophy that “we do not lie down, we raise our voices”. A stoic, stately “The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right” is dedicated to Palestine: “our hearts are with them, the world is watching”. Powerful business.
For Berninger’s own headlining part, his solo incarnation – with guitarist Sean O’Brien taking a less expansive approach than the Dessners – feels more direct and personal, as Berninger rants, vapes and dementedly slaps his forehead through “All For Nothing”, “Nowhere Special” and the Smiths-y “Why Don’t Nobody Love Me?” as if using the set as some sort of primal howl therapy. “Silver Jeep” and “Little By Little” bring a certain grandiose serenity to proceedings and “Bonnet Of Pins” glides by like a freeway Tindersticks, but it’s the covers dominating the second half of the set that really make memories: “Gospel” and “Terrible Love” by “my favourite band of all time”, a sultry take on New Order’s “Blue Monday” drenched in experimental noise and an “All Apologies” that has him smashing his plastic glass into the stage with an impassioned “everyone is gay!”
“This is so much fun,” he says, “I wish I lived over there where it says ‘bar’.” Well, at little things out in the woods like this, just wish hard enough…
The post The Incredible String Band celebrated at End Of The Road, Day 2 appeared first on UNCUT.
