Even though each artist gets at least a 45-minute slot - and everyone on the main stage gets an hour or more - there's still a lack of epic outros at End Of The Road. At least Americana-tinged indie-rockers, and Uncut favorites, Woods, playing the Woods Stage, of course, are here to level the score, ending their set with a climactic echo-drenched jam. Although that's perhaps the wrong word - their imploding, superloud ending (at least seven minutes long, I'd estimate) appears far too structured for that. Either way, it's an impressive ending to a set that really brightens up a wet day. Graham Coxon bounds onto the stage next, with a cute "Have you had your tea?" You would imagine that a set from the guitarist's 2009 psych-folk album, The Spinning Top, would be ideal for End Of The Road, but of course this is Noisy Coxon on show today, supporting his brilliantly caustic A&E. Though he plays his biggest indie hits, including "Freakin' Out", "Spectacular" and "I Can't Look At Your Skin", it's the songs from A&E that are the most noisily invigorating - the opening "Advice", "Running For Your Life" and "The Truth" ("Here's another jolly one," Coxon jokes after the latter's noisy misanthropy). There's sadly no outing for "Seven Naked Valleys", an exceptional, grooving Stooges-like grind, though. There's also a good deal of typical Coxon larking about - spitting beer on the microphone, blaming the perfect-pitch-possessing bassist for not noticing Graham was badly out of tune on "What'll It Take", and hurting his finger while thrashing during one wild solo, a common occurrence at Coxon gigs. It's his guitar playing that really shines through, though, and he nets a large crowd. Who would have known Patti Smith enjoyed Graham Coxon's set as much as the rest of us, though? "The band who were on before were great, I really enjoyed them," she gushes. "Sorry, I don't know their names. They're Blur but not Blur..." And that's merely the tip of the iceberg of Smith's stage chat, even more unrestrained than usual. Talk of "winged horses", being free and projecting love might seem a bit mumbo-jumbo-y if you're feeling cynical, but it's nevertheless hard to argue with the songs Smith and her band - featuring Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty - play. The set begins with "Dancing Barefoot" and ends with a thrilling trilogy of "Gloria", "Banga" and "Rock'n'roll Nigger", Smith praising Pussy Riot during Horses' opening track. We then briefly slip off to the Tipi Tent to see French space-rockers Yeti Lane. The duo, on guitar, keys and vocals, and drums and synths, create a mighty noise for a two-piece, analogue synths and cavernous guitars pulsating over Krauty drums (of the jazzier Jaki Liebezeit variety rather than the straighter motorik of Klaus Dinger). "Analog Wheel", especially, moves from sparse, ambient bleeps to full-on dronebeat, before collapsing into an exultant coda you imagine could soundtrack interstellar sports highlights from a distant galaxy. Grandaddy were always known for their shambolic live shows - but after reuniting this year, Jason Lytle claimed that a lot of the old equipment had been replaced, meaning the gigs would be a lot smoother. He didn't reckon on projector problems shaving around 20 minutes off their set, though - a sad loss considering how mighty their performance is. From the opening trio of Sumday songs, "El Caminos In The West", "Now It's On" and "Yeah Is What We Had", to the midset lesser-knowns, including "Levitz" and "Chartsengrafs", the group sound tight, powerful and content, every synth arpeggio and creaky sample in the right place for once. "There's this thing called a curfew," says Lytle before the final two songs, "Stray Dog And The Chocolate Shake" and "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot", "and we're law-abiding people." How very Grandaddy that some technical problems should be the only blot on a stunning return. Tom Pinnock Check out Uncut's blogs from the rest of the weekend: End Of The Road – Day 1 End Of The Road – Day 2 Picture: Andy Sheppard/Redferns via Getty Images

The second day of Dorset's End Of The Road is a scorcher – not bad for the first day of autumn. Van Dyke Parks must be pleasantly surprised, if he's still around. Despite the dark subject matter of some of The Antlers' songs, their glistening, laconic music perfectly suits the afternoon sun, and hundreds of people at the main stage are lying down, sunning themselves or drifting off to the angelic sound of Peter Silberman's voice. Next, it's to the Garden Stage, where Jeffrey Lewis is playing an even greater set with quite a different voice - nasal and slightly tuneless but perfect for his geeky, philosophical and supremely witty songs. Backed by his band, The Junkyard, Lewis intersperses songs with his mosquito-killing rap and a sonnet about Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots". The highlight for me is the opening song, "Krongu Green Slime", a subtle, hilarious rant against corporatisation, using the monopolization of the primordial ooze market as a metaphor (as you can see, Lewis' songs can't really be explained well in text). As Lewis finishes, we head off to the main Woods Stage, where Alabama Shakes are drawing the biggest crowd of the festival so far. People stretch out of the field and right across the path towards the food stalls. Despite their success, it seems like Brittany Howard and her band can't quite believe it, either. The Shakes run through a solid set, to huge applause after the majority of songs - but it sometimes seems like we've just stepped into a standard Alabama Shakes show, rather than something more special, and more in keeping with a festival. Professional, yes - transcendent, no. After sampling from the aforementioned food stalls, we head to the Tipi Tent to see Robyn Hitchcock. The singer-songwriter is joined by Abigail Washburn, who played her banjo while opening the Garden Stage earlier in the day, as well as a virtuoso cellist and two backing vocalists. The set, which begins with "Sounds Great When You're Dead" from I Often Dream Of Trains, draws heavily from Hitchcock's limited-release album for Norway from last year, Tromso, Kaptein - "Savannah" is a sultry highlight. Of course, there's the usual brilliant Hitchcockian between-song weirdness – "this song is about where babies come from, but not where they go back to - unless they're lucky" introduces "Ole Tarantula". It's heartening to see the tent packed to the flaps - Hitchcock, though very much a cult artist, is proving himself to be one of our most consistent and inspired songwriters of the last 30 years. Then to the main Woods Stage, where Grizzly Bear are closing Saturday night. The set is heavy with material from the new album, Shields, and their crowd is a lot smaller than Alabama Shakes', but they feel more like headliners - lined up along the front of the stage like the Shakes, they put on a dynamic, enticing performance. The interplay between frontmen Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen is especially impressive - each having the skills and charisma to individually front a band. After closing their main set with "Two Weeks" and two new tracks, the band suddenly realizes they've got nearly 20 minutes left of their allotted time. "Hang on, we've got to work out what to play," says Droste, while the group discuss the options among themselves. "Ok, we're going to take a vote..." The ensuing epic, "Colorado", is very much worth the prevarication. Tom Pinnock Check out Uncut's blogs from the rest of the weekend: End Of The Road – Day 1 End Of The Road – Day 3 Picture: Andy Sheppard/Redferns via Getty Images

It's the last day of summer, as Van Dyke Parks tells us, repeatedly. He's right, of course, but it's also true that there are still two days left of End Of The Road, pretty much the last festival of 2012. Other than this unwanted reminder of impending autumn, Parks is on gregarious form on the Garden Stage on the first afternoon of the festival, rattling out witty, self-deprecating anecdotes like a Southern Woody Allen. After one song ends, he quips, "We're always so grateful when we stop playing at the same time." As he astutely claims, Parks is a man "with a flexible agenda" - his set takes in covers of a '40s calypso song praising Roosevelt ("FDR In Trinidad"), a New Orleans piece from 1857, and his own songs on topics ranging from a rain storm to Southern folk lore ("Orange Crate Art"). Playing with just a drummer and bassist, the setup is a lot more stripped-down than some of his more recent shows, leading Parks to embellish more on his grand piano, scattering curdled, clashing notes in the middle of his smooth, jazzy runs. As he begins a song about a Hawaiian cowboy and Captain Cook, we head over to the main Woods Stage to see Roy Harper, who plays a stunning set of his best-known songs to a huge crowd who seemingly appear out of nowhere as he begins. "Highway Blues" kicks off the set, and sees Harper climbing to the heights of his vocal range as if it's 1972 again. "I'm shagged now, so I'm off," he says, then launches into "Another Day". It's heartening to see just how much love there is for someone who's ostensibly a 'cult' artist, and Harper can clearly feel it, spinning out his yarns into even further-out tangents, taking in anti-war riots, Norwegian mountains and preachers on Oxford Street. "Twelve Hours Of Sunset" is given a beautiful rendition, the audience lost in the echoes from Harper's voice. After a tender "Me And My Woman", he finishes with one of his favorites, "When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease". "I'll finish with this," he says, introducing the song, "and I'll make it - no, I won't make it short." After such freewheeling genius, the studied, crystalline haze created by Beach House feels a little too cold and anodyne. The temperature has dropped as night falls, and the chilly blue lights behind the duo (and their live drummer), all barely moving, fail to really rouse all of the crowd.  Sure, Beach House have a clutch of melancholic indie classics, specifically "Zebra", but they're better suited to indoor shows of their own - one of their greatest strengths, subtlety, translates badly on a blustery festival stage. Midlake, headlining the Garden Stage, are similarly subtle, but do better in the greener, more intimate glade. While they make Fleet Foxes look downright bombastic, they charm the crowd so much they're forced to come back for two encores. Tom Pinnock Check out Uncut's blogs from the rest of the weekend: End Of The Road – Day 2 End Of The Road – Day 3 Picture: Andy Sheppard/Redferns via Getty Images

50 years is a long time to wait for a book. In September 1956, Alan Garner started writing his debut novel, a children’s book set among the landscape and folklore he’d known all his life – Alderley Edge in Cheshire, 12 miles south of Manchester. First published in 1960, The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen followed the adventures of 12 year-old twins, Colin and Susan, on the Edge – “a long-backed hill… high and sombre and black.” The Edge is a potent backdrop for Garner’s stories, littered with burial mounds, abandoned mines, Bronze Age standing stones, wells, caves and hollows. “Colin and Susan roamed up and down the wooded hillside and along the valleys of the Edge, sometimes going where only the tall beech stood, and in such places all was still,” wrote Garner in Brisingamen. “On the ground lay dead leaves, nothing more: no grass or bracken grew; winter seemed to linger there among the grey, green beaches. When the children came out of such a wood it was like coming into a garden from a musty cellar.” Plucky 1950s kids in peril, Colin and Susan met a wizard, sleeping knights, shape-changing witches and a number of evil creatures dredged up from primal nightmares. It was vivid stuff, its power enhanced by Garner's very specific depiction of Alderley Edge's haunting topography. Garner halted Colin and Susan’s story in 1963, with Susan galloping off into the stars with the Wild Hunt at the conclusion to Brisingamen’s sequel, The Moon Of Gomrath. Garner since claimed he was so bored with Colin and Susan that he abandoned the idea of writing a third book, depriving his readers of a natural resolution to the story. So, here’s Boneland, half a century years on. Those expecting that natural resolution may be confounded that Garner hasn’t followed the easy path back to Alderley Edge. If its two predecessors were children’s books, Boneland is very much written for adults. Colin is now a brilliant astrophysicist, working at Jodrell Bank (the dish of the Lovell Telescope sits close to Garner’s back garden). A psychiatric report tells us that Colin is “an immature uncooperative hysterical depressive Asperger’s, with an IQ off the clock.” The intrepid teenager has become an emotionally crippled, hypersensitive obsessive who can’t remember anything before he was 13 and who spends his days using the Jodrell Bank telescopes to search the Pleiades for his missing sister. At night, he dresses in robes and walks the woods of Alderley Edge, perhaps in imitation of Cadellin, the wizard from Garner's previous novels. He hears voices, which may belong to his missing sister, talking to him from the stars. He receives counselling from a therapist, Meg, who may be an aspect of the Morrigan, the witch Colin and Susan faced as children. Boneland is less of a conventional sequel and more a deepening of the story, recasting the narrative in poetic, mythic terms. Alongside Colin in the present day runs a parallel narrative, where an Ice Age shaman uses rituals to keep the stars in the sky and ensure the sun rises every morning. Garner suggests Colin is the latest in a long line of shaman - who include Cadellin - to live here. “Someone has to look after the Edge,” Colin explains. “There always is someone; always has been.” To Garner, Alderley Edge is a place of High Magic, perhaps a boundary between worlds, where preserving rituals must be re-enacted down the centuries. The Arthurian idea of the Sleeping Hero prevails. A network of radio telescopes is ascribed the acronym MERLIN. An epigraph for Boneland quotes from Gawain And The Green Knight: "overgrow with grass in clumps everywhere, And all was hollow within, nothing but an old cave". This is the entrance to the Green Chapel, wjocj might be Ludchurch cave in Alderley Edge. Garner's Ice Age shaman lives in a cave, Ludcruck. Time is not necessary linear here. Garner’s present-day prose is sparse, almost like a film script, the dialogue often oblique, closer to the style of his experimental novels like Red Shift. The Ice Age strand, meanwhile, is symbolic, incantatory: “The Grey Wolf struck the damp earth and ran, higher than the trees, lower than the clouds, and each leap measures a mile; from his feet flint flew, spring spouted, lake surged and mixed with gravel dirt, and birch bent to the ground. Hare crouched, boar bristled, crow called, owl woke, and stag began to bell.” Although Garner has clearly abandoned the elves and wizards of the previous two books, these are nevertheless strange themes and ideas for an adult’s book. He doesn’t make it easy, either. Ironically, perhaps, Boneland is far closer to Garner's post-Gomrath books, Strandloper, Thursbitch, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet, that explore a connection between man and environment, quantum patterns as they unspool through centuries, and the evocative power of places. A tremendous book, in other words.

One bright morning a couple of weeks ago, I was unpacking CDs in my new house and found Four Tet’s “Pause” as an ideal soundtrack. Eleven years old, it still sounded wonderful: beatific but fleet of foot; contemporary in spite of folktronica, or whatever it was called (the pricelessly daft “Idylltronica” was even better), being a very fleeting fad. I think Kieran Hebden once blamed me for coming up with that folktronica tag; wrongly, I hope. It’s sobering to think, in fact, that Hebden has been releasing records for 15 years now in one form or other, and that the first Four Tet single – the jazz epic "Thirtysixtwentyfive" – came out as long ago as 1998. Since then, there’s been something akin to an evolving consistency about his music: an enduring lightness of touch and melodic subtlety, coupled with an omnivorous musical appetite that ensures he absorbs new things – especially beats – while keeping a deep faith in the transcendent jazz, acoustic textures and other sounds that have sustained him for so long now. As a consequence, Hebden’s brilliant new “Pink” compilation, collating a bunch of tracks he’s quietly released as 12-inches on his own Text label over the past few months, feels entirely in keeping with his back catalogue, but at the same time ready and contemporary enough for a 2012 Rinse FM playlist. The notional model is “Ringer”, the EP Hebden released in 2008 (and blogged about here) to privilege his more dancefloor-focused music while he was deep in a productive improvising partnership with Steve Reid (a quick recommendation for “Morning Prayer” from the Hebden/Reid/Mats Gustafsson ‎jam, “Live At The South Bank”: it’s immense). Even so, there are still strong links to the filigree, organic/processed music that has been Hebden’s (possibly reluctant or inadvertent) trademark for over a decade now, from the opening “Locked” onwards. But it’s most pronounced on the to some degree self-explanatory “128 Harps”, which aligns a spectral harp sample – the sort of thing which attracted all those ‘folk’ tags to “Pause” and “Rounds” – with a sliding and fresh-sounding (at least to these admittedly unschooled ears) UK bass rhythm. Best of all are the last couple of tracks. “Pinnacles” is a supercharged upgrade of Hebden’s space/jazz tastes, grafting a brokeback piano line onto a characteristically flexible rhythm and some ferocious bass. The 11 and a half minutes of “Peace For Earth”, meanwhile, begins as a synth meditation reminiscent of Laurie Spiegel’s amazing “Expanding Universe” (just reissued on Unseen Worlds, and totally recommended for anyone with an interest in Terry Riley/kosmische music etc), before working its way into an artful and intricate take on microhouse. Great record (or download, I should say more specifically; it's available now), and also one that reminds me to mention that Hebden’s old friend Dan Snaith (once Manitoba, then Caribou, and on the flipside of one “Pink” track, “Pinnacles”, when it was originally released) has a new album forthcoming, this time under the name of Daphni. Like Hebden, Snaith is pushing his dancefloor side on “JIAOLONG”, named after Snaith’s own imprint, that’s releasing it. Unlike with “Pink”, though, it’s harder to spot obvious echoes of Snaith’s Caribou work here (maybe another listen to his Manitoba debut, “Start Breaking My Heart”, might be apposite). Snaith’s sometimes insipid, indie-ish singing voice is nowhere to be found on “JIAOLONG”, and the psychedelic textures are for the most part discreet (a vaguely eastern/Turkish guitar sample on “Jiao” for example) until the the closing ‘70s synth ritual of “Long”; an explicit reminder that the first time I came across Snaith’s new project was on a remix of Emeralds. Mostly, these nine tracks are stylishly-evolved techno, built on sweat, loops and repetition: often tough, sometimes tribal, occasionally a little camp. It’s all beautifully done, and highly energising, not least when Snaith feeds some Underground Resistance-style Detroit acid into the mix on “Light”, where it works in steely harmony with a flute loop and some neat dub FX. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey