BILL RYDER-JONES
Friday / 16.30 / Garden Stage
One suspects that, if troubles did not already beset him, Bill Ryder-Jones would invent some new ones, just to keep himself off-balance. The mercurial Wirral singer-songwriter – whose 2024 album, Iechyd Da, is his deepest and best – makes every performance a window into his precarious psyche, keeping his already-great songs in a place where you feel anything can happen. Mid-afternoon on the second (aka. Garden) stage, Ryder-Jones charms and challenges with classic songcraft that suggests The La’s hunkering down with Pavement, punctuated by glorious explosions of guitar mastery. Yet at one point, with the gig appearing to be going perfectly well, he announces he does not have enough time to play Daniel, his keynote memorial to the brother he watched drown on a beach in North Wales when the singer was seven, only for his bass player to point at his watch. “Oh shit,” says Ryder-Jones. “In which case we haven’t got enough songs!” In the end, they play Daniel, beautifully, and close out with an epic Two To Birkenhead and the Deserter’s Songs-adjacent swells of This Can’t Go On. Like watching a small child free-climb up the Liver Building, forever.
IDLES
Friday / 21.30 / Woods Stage
By contrast, Bristol’s Idles are now a band in full control of themselves, their audience and, one feels, their future. Frontman Joe Talbot used to appear quite capable of starting a fight onstage with his extrovert guitar foil, Mark Bowen (resplendent tonight in a rose-gold ballgown) if not himself. Tonight he is wreathed in positive vibes, even where Idles’ songs battle fascism, xenophobia, self-hate and toxic masculinity. Their sound is now massive, brutal-yet-beautiful, its bass eruptions reinforced by Colin Webster on baritone sax, but built on the fundamentals of drummer Jon Beavis, who combines eye-watering hard-hitting with an economy that allows Bowen and crowd-surfing co-guitarist Lee Kiernan’s discordant riffs space to breathe. Control, too, is evident in Talbot’s maturing voice – at times, these days, he seems to take a leaf from the late Mark Lanegan’s book; he has grown into a similar combination of grit and subtle flutter. But ultimately, it’s the wonder of watching what is essentially a hardcore art-punk group, with music that makes you think of the Jesus Lizard, or Glenn Branca, more than it does, say, The Foo Fighters, and choruses that consist of the bellowed words “Mother” and “Fucker”, headline a summer festival, masterfully, that is, in Idles-speak, the fing.
THE LEMON TWIGS
Saturday / 17.30 / Woods Stage
Where do you stand on Long Island sibling phenomenon the Lemon Twigs? A glorious reinvention of power-, sunshine- and harmony-pop tropes? Or a bunch of lightweight pasticheurs – basically, The Rutles? Their audience at EOTR contains both schools of thought, but MOJO cleaves with the former. It’s the winning combination of harmonic sophistication – the Todd Rundgren zone that few have the bravery or skill to enter – and onstage charisma. The D’Addario brothers – Brian, and the younger, more feral Michael – pulse energy, swop instruments and vocal duties, but only Michael does mid-air splits-jumps, in groin-hugging trousers, that make your eyes water. My Golden Years rings with Searchers’ 12-string and Wilsonian vocal breakdowns. Church Bells mixes With The Beatles naiveté with later McCartney whimsy. 2018 single Foolin’ Around is pure Raspberries. No-one is pretending this is without precedent – least of all the Lemon Twigs. Tipping the cap, they deliver peppy covers of The Beach Boys’ You’re So Good To Me and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s Transparent Day (later, in a surprise set on the festival’s Folly stage, they will deliver more ecstatic covers, including Hold Me Tight, I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better, Older Guys, the Flamin’ Groovies’ Way Over My Head). They’re showing their working. They’re also keeping this awesome music alive.
PHOSPHORESCENT
Saturday / 20.00 / Garden Stage
Phosphorescent haven’t toured the UK since 2018 and we’ve missed Alabama songsmith Matt Houck – his wounded warble, his over-sharing, his hypersensitivity to beauty, sadness and joy. His EOTR set is a concentrated version of those recently delivered in London, Dublin and Leeds – catholic cocktails of recent albums, country rock transfigured by Houck’s transcendentalist poetry and, frankly, the best backing group he’s yet convened: Greenhornes/Raconteurs’ bassist Jack Lawrence inserting a supple spine; luxuriantly moustachioed pedal-steel player Ricky Ray Jackson adding an extra ethereal dimension, more B.J. Cole than Sneaky Pete. This is no pork-butt and grits throwback; at best, Houck and co explore the thin divide between what’s real and what’s beyond. They play Wolves, from 2007’s Pride album, and its symbolism is more compelling and enigmatic than ever. There are wolves, Houck sings, in his house. They’re noble and beautiful and savage and terrifying, symbolising everything outside of Houck’s control. After the song ends, there’s an awed hush before the required whooping and applause. It’s the sound of magic, sinking in.
RICHARD HAWLEY
Saturday / 20.45 / Garden Stage
When Richard Hawley’s solo albums began to emerge, from 2001, with their extreme intimacy, focus on small details, studies of love hung onto in Northern England, festival-headliner status would have seemed a hilarious fantasy. But the slow but steady upward surge in Hawley fandom, plus – since 2012’s Standing At The Sky’s Edge – concentration on larger-scale music and louder, rockier arrangements, has turned it into something closer to an inevitability. Accordingly, tonight’s closing set on EOTR’s second stage is zero aspiration, all coronation. Hawley re-uses gags from earlier in this summer’s In This City They Call You Love tour – eg. “You can dance to this one… if you’re a knob” – and holds up a ‘Welcome To Sheffield’ sign at exactly the same point. But if it ain’t broke... Tonight, succinct song power is allied to a tsunami of guitars – namely, Hawley’s fetish-worthy collection of Gretches, Fenders, Gibsons and Burnses, plus consolidation from Bryan Day on his left and Shez Sheridan, on an unprecedented number of different electric 12-strings. It’s so intense and bombastic that the pregnant spaces of Open Up Your Door from Truelove’s Gutter and the deathless Coles Corner are welcome respites. All this and Two For His Heels, the only amazing song MOJO can remember about cribbage.
UGLY
Sunday / 18.30 / The Folly
Imagine if Kelis, Rush’s Neil Peart, a young Simon Pegg and TV choir nerd Gareth Malone were in a band. What would that sound like? Whatever you imagine, it’s probably not Ugly. From Cambridge via the current South London scene, this six-piece feel definitively post-Black Country, New Road, with songs that go in unexpected directions and antediluvian notions of rock’n’roll cool thrown out the window. But in place of BC,NR’s unconventional sax-violin intercessions, Ugly’s special moves are 3-, 4-, sometimes 5-part vocal harmonies that evoke The Four Freshmen, The Fifth Dimension and Steeleye Span, but absolutely not the Beach Boys. Their goofy unselfconsciousness takes a while getting used to, then suddenly you’re re-evaluating every standard of pop value you’d previously taken for granted. Check out The Wheel and Sha on streaming services and ask yourself if MOJO has taken leave of its senses.
Photograph: Idles by Rachel Juarez Carr