End of the Road Festival Christmas Shindig

A disclaimer, dear reader. Through no fault of its own, I had not the highest of expectations for this gig. At the previous night’s Rough Trade festivities, when Jarvis breathed, “When this kiss is over / it will start again…” – well, the room went all Harrison Bergeron on me. “Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well”; the very rotation of the Earth paused in reverent appreciation. The fact that I didn’t spend the entire night at Cargo dreaming of the Sheffield Seducer is testament to a line-up characterised by (with one exception) charm, beauty, intelligence and a… creative approach to time signatures.

The lovely Alessi opened, relaxed and matured since her entrancing but nerve-racking summer set. Songs that showed naïve charm at EOTR (and near-tweeness on her MySpace; don’t let it put you off) were reworked with quiet sophistication. Her flighty, sweet voice had a steely core; vowels were stretched and warped like salt taffy; couplets danced along merrily in rhythm, only to wrong-foot you with a delicately jarring turn of phrase that neither scanned nor rhymed. Inter-song, she joked nervously about not being able to find the right fret for the capo: “Do we have time for this kind of behaviour?” Songs she introduced as new were more straightforward, less compelling. We should all hope she spends a great deal of time locked in her bedroom, obsessively polishing each gem of a melody she turns out.

Slow Club were cute and entertaining, but – apologies, fans who sung along to a set you clearly adored – that’s about it. They were inarguably the best accessorised of the night, with percussion props ranging from half a chair to Shloer bottles (classy) filled with water and hung off a rail, and a beat-up amp case lit from within, holes Biro-poked in one side to spell out the band name. (Charles, such an old head on young shoulders: “I have to turn this off now. It becomes a fire hazard after four songs.”) Lyrics were clever, harmonies tight and riffs catchy – a new tune, ‘Theory’, had the nerve not just to nick the tune from ‘April Come She Will’ but to start with the line “September came too fast” and go on like a shouty ‘Cecilia’. But Rebecca was infuriatingly behind the beat much of the time and without their infectious live energy, they’d be that sad, unmemorable record at the bottom of your 2007 ‘folk’ pile.

Simple Kid, who headlined, gets nul points. No apologies, fans who sung along to a set you clearly adored. Somehow, between Slow Club and ‘SK’, as they seem to affectionately call him, the audience morphed into a hideous mass of bottle-blonde office temps in Karen Millen tops and their fat, mustachioed boyfriends. Just two songs did me in, with grating melodies and vacuous lyrics. Rachel (horrified): “He just ended a song with ‘boom boom’!” Me: “We’re going.”

Best to end with a snapshot from the highlight of the night as well as the festival, David Thomas Broughton. He responded to the faintly disinterested, difficult Shoreditch audience with delicious arrogance, frequently hitting out with walls of feedback that at first seemed a mistake but stretched on for ear-aching minutes as he pottered unconcernedly around the stage. Threads of older songs were woven into a set of almost entirely new, super-noisy soundscapes (fans: be very excited), his lush, baritone choirmaster-meets-Jeff Buckley voice layering with acoustic guitar, banjo and the sounds of slurping water, chirping birds and his own thigh being taped to a stool. Broughton is as much performance artist as pop genius, but if all this sounds inaccessible and po-faced, it shouldn’t. Think of Chris Burden, who crucified himself onto a VW in the name of art. His work has a strange and unforgettable beauty, to be sure, but it’s fucking hilarious too.