Father John Misty closes End Of The Road 2025 with a blitz of bombast

Four days into End Of The Road 2025 and even the weather itself has gone experimental, with passages of blazing summer heat giving way to lengthy bursts of challenging downpour. But this is a festival of stern and uncompromising stuff. As Shovel Dance Collective start the day with some dark, cranky and stirring drone-folk, EOTR remains defiant.

Into one sunnier interlude wanders Georgia’s Jake Xerxes Fussell and a soft-stick drummer, here to bestow Americana both light and dark – a wife dies and is buried in the space of a weekend, but also, “I got fresh fish this morning!” – with his elevating guitar intricacies. As careful with his music’s geography as its spiderweb arpeggios, he’s a welcoming player, even inviting Nick Lowe’s “I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass” onto his idyllic porch swing.

Straight outta Louisville with trucker dust on their heels, Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band are similarly sumptuous, but imbued with rather more edge and energy, not least by having a besuited keyboardist jiving and jerking around the stage and indulging in tom-tom freak-outs as if under the impression he’s in At The Drive-In. Instead, Davis’s music is rich in Midwest mythology, from the National-esque sonics smoothing over the clattertronic effects of “The Simple Joy” to the skewed organ spookiness and gliding country drone of “Junk Drawer Heart” (“Someone’s been fucking with the jukebox again / Now it only plays the ‘Sultans Of Swing’”). All sweet whisky and sawdust, a revelation.

On the Boat stage in the woods, Gina Birch & The Unreasonables are shouting “don’t fight your friends, fight your enemies!” in the most polite ambient dub-punk way imaginable, while later on the Talking Heads stage Christopher Owens, in the woollen hat and waterproofs of a drenched stagehand, hosts a solo set heavy with covers both inspired and bizarre, evidence that his mind is intrinsically set to ‘random shuffle’.

Spiritualized’s “Broken Heart” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” benefit from his tremulous frailty, but so, strangely, do suddenly deeply tragic takes on “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and Michael Jackson’s “Heal The World”. Add in revisits of Girls favourites “Laura” and “Hellhole Ratrace” and a damp hill of devotees is resolutely charmed.

Headliner Father John Misty, on the other hand, is only a passing acquaintance of subtlety. Taking to a Woods stage lined with Hollywood movie lights and backed with a blood red curtain, he lures us in, song by song, with feints of sophisticate soul, classic lounge loucheness, tropical rock and slow gospel country, only to then blitz them all with elegant bombast. There’s a sense that these were the sort of sounds that Harry Nilsson was hearing in his head throughout much of the ‘70s, particularly during the more psychedelic warps of “Being You” or the glorious personal misdemeanours of the acid-tripping “Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose” and “Mr Tillman”, a catalogue of embarrassing wake-up calls that the drunken rock star only ever faces at hotel reception: the mattress on the balcony, the passport left in the minibar.

He’s clearly becoming more self-aware, though. His Lana Del Rey collaboration “Buddy’s Rendezvous” is dedicated to “all my alcoholic 29-year-old females”; the slow-dance cruise ballad “Mental Health” makes friends with its internal traumas; and “Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Cow” – with its strip-joint magnificence and blow-up doll similes – is introduced as “repulsive” and “increasingly inappropriate” but played anyway because “I’m giving you what you want”.

By the closing stretch – monumental blasts through “Screamland”, “Holy Shit” and “Mahashmashana” – it’s all blazing light and sound, literally blasting a CGI hole in the backdrop curtain. “I’m not gonna forget this evening any time soon,” he says before a closing “Real Love Baby”. And nor are we.