Assistant Blog

Seeing Robyn Hitchcock at the End Of The Road last week was a privilege. Over the last twenty five years his brand of whimsical, psychedelic pop has been gradually refined to the point where now, despite his advanced years and shock of white hair, he is arguably making better music than ever before. At the End Of The Road his show, only one performance off headlining the second stage (which tells you a lot about the excellent music taste of the festival organisers), was one of the clear highlights of the weekend.

Performing with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones (don’t let that put you off) and his niece (who plays the saw), Hitchcock was debonair, dry and – musically – absolutely phenomenal. As befitting an artist who has written a song called ‘I Like Bananas Because They Don’t Have Any Bones’ his songs are frequently charming and hilarious, but they’re equally moving, the currents of emotion carried by the idiosyncratic frailty of Hitchcock’s voice.

At the same time, his playing surprises me by being exceptionally fluent and able (I don’t mean that I didn’t expect him to be talented, merely that the naivety of his sound often masks the musicianship). Classics like ‘I Often Dream of Trains’ are impossibly beautiful, at once childlike and mature. The newer material, much of it originating from his sessions with Peter Buck last year, stand up admirably.

As I said earlier, I left feeling privileged – many artists delight, but only a few really reach out and touch you. Hitchcock is a master in this second category.

One of the main things that I hope I took away with me from the End of The Road festival this year was an appreciation of the fact that my days of carefully structuring and regimenting my time around particular events are behind me. I think I’m more relaxed than I was a few years ago, happier to just take things in my stride, and the festival was a good reminder of that. Although there were several bands I planned to see this weekend, as often as not I missed them, usually because I was somewhere else, or just happy sitting outside my tent with a book. The sense that I had to extract maximum value from the festival just went absent, and I wandered round, happy, content with the fact that I didn’t know what was round each corner.

As a consequence, some of the best stuff I saw was stuff I didn’t expect to see, or had never even heard of. On Sunday afternoon, still sleepy after an indulgent nap, I bought a pint of Butts Barbus from the Bimble Inn, and wandered around to the local stage, where I had heard The Twilight Sad would later be playing an extra show. When I arrived, however, and sat on the extraordinarily soft, fine grass inside the tent, I watched another band taking the stage, and becoming increasingly weary with the time it was taking to set up. Eventually, with the drums still under construction, the lead singer, a tall, slim chap with a white shirt and a narrow tie, picked up his guitar, stepped off the stage, announced his intention to start playing without any amplification, and introduced the band.

Left With Pictures, it turns out, earned their place on the End Of The Road bill by virtue of winning last year’s ‘Folk Idol’, a tongue-in-cheek version of Pop Idol run by the Local (which, when not putting on bands at festivals, functions as a club and music promoter in North London), wherein contestants are required to don false beards and play two folk classics, before the audience decides the winner. It’s little wonder that the band cleaned up last year, as their music, whether performed acoustically in front of the stage or amplified on it (the band took up their places once the drum kit was assembled) is wistful, diaphenous and enchanting. Classically trained (not that I care about that) the band’s delicate arrangements and soft harmonies recall the likes of Steely Dan, Field Music, My Life Story and Richard Thompson, whose lovely ’1952 Vincent Black Lightning’ they closed with, having once more clambered from the stage and performed with quiet precision amongst us.

Sharing vocals and creating subtle arrangements awash with violin, melodica and keys, Left With Pictures’s fragile but unpretentious pop belies their confidence. “There are two songs to go”, their singer tells us at one point, before adding, correctly, “and they’re real fucking beauties”.