Tyler Ballgame meets Belle And Sebastian at End Of The Road, Day 3

Line-up clashes? Saturday at End Of The Road takes it to the next level: the stylistic. Case in point. Brighton’s The New Eves, playing their biggest ever show, open the main Woods stage with a wake-up call of jagged, disjointed and shape-shifting crank-folk bedecked with shrieks, yelps and spoken word rants of ancient fantasy hue – “the first sunrise of primordial chaos!” – all while being filmed from the photo pit by a Cossack.

They call what they do Hagstone Rock, but it relentlessly defies definition: part primal Velvets rock (right down to stand-up drummer Ella Oona Russell), part motorik Can drone, part Birthday Party clamour, and part classic pop – “Rivers Run Red” is effectively Merseybeat chewed down to the bone and refashioned into a sacrificial headpiece. You might have them tagged as The Last Wicker Party, then they premier a new, weird western song on which Violet Farrer – one of their four singers – performs interpretive twirls and shouts about boy scouts.

Over on the Garden Stage, meanwhile, New England’s Tyler Ballgame couldn’t be more digestible. Elvis Presley meets Roy Orbison in his fabulous falsetto and his songs sound like memories of 1950s jukebox pop that you never actually had. Steeped in retro organ and Tennessee trills, “Radio” is sweetly anthemic, “I Believe In Love (And That’s Fine)” trips along adorably and “Got A New Car” struts coquettishly along. He’s acclimatising to the UK too, expressing a romantic interest in the “see it, say it, sorted” woman (“Where is she? Hook a brother up!”) and bringing Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch onstage for a new tune full of songbird melody.

Things only become starker as the day progresses. Early evening, Geordie Greep applies the madcap mentality of his former band Black Midi to the sphere of prog jazz. His first half-hour largely consists of one lengthy, off-kilter workout, while his second is more eclectic, taking in samba interludes, crunching rock solos, hints of oompah, rabid scat babbles and a touch of the Seven Dwarves’ “Heigh-Ho”. By the time he’s yelling “we are the winners of Eurovision!” over some ambient cosmic jazz, it’s clear he’s operating in a very different musical dimension; one where Frank Sinatra took all the drugs.

While Greep is ranting about Jihadis and revolutionaries in “Holy, Holy”, in sharp relief – in more ways than one – Canada’s Jennifer Castle is describing life as “an opulent pageant of continuous non-death” to a rapt Talking Heads stage crowd. Hers is a set of gossamer tremble folk of great poetry and imagination: her fragile acoustic songs – all dedicated to “fresh water” – visit Arthurian England (“Camelot”), mythological pasts (the unicorn-laden “Louis”) and, as she takes to a quiet keyboard, the shores of Lake Erie when the butterflies arrive (“Monarch Season”). Frail and hardy at once.

And the headliners? Chalk and cheese. On the Woods stage, Self Esteem and her gang of supportive dancers bring an exuberant pop show to the home of the heady skronk, full of tongue-in-cheek TikTok dances, spotlit gospel chorales and heartfelt self-love confessionals. While on the Garden Stage, the rather less wholesome Viagra Boys roll in the gutter at the road’s end, all belching, belly-out sax punk deviance about mutant children, petty theft and drug dealing at schools. One minute, tatts-out singer Sebastian Murphy is berating the UK government for arresting peaceful protesters and promising their fee to Doctors Without Borders, the next he’s encouraging the weekend’s most packed crowd so far to laugh like goblins. Around the bend, what next?