Marked with three question marks on the programme, the 7 pm slot on the Talking Heads stage Saturday was all Thorpe’s, whose beloved band Wild Beasts last played the Dorset festival in 2016 before disbanding two years later. He hasn’t played the songs live since, finding the relearning process “more profound than I was expecting…. It’s not normal to rehearse songs and all of a sudden find yourself in tears, right?”

The solo performance, for which Thorpe switched between electric guitar and piano and was backdropped by a field full of sheep — wild beasts, if you will — doesn’t mark any particular anniversary for the band that formed in 2002. “It just felt right in an unspoken way. I missed the songs. I missed feeling them in my chest. Enough time had passed. Enough peace had been made. Enough had happened.”

The performance came a few months ahead of two sold-out shows at London’s Hoxton Hall, where Thorpe will again play material by his old band. Speaking to Best Fit earlier in the day, he said he needed a warmup before those gigs. “When you're in a British summer and you get in a glint of sun, November feels like some abstract concept. It's a time that will never come, so I needed this to bridge myself between now and then.”

During our brief conversation, two separate fans stopped to express their fondness for his music and requested a selfie. “I’m very fortunate in that, as just happened, most weeks I'll encounter someone who'll say, ‘This particular song means a huge amount to me. It was the song played at our first dance at our wedding’ — these really formative stories,” Thorpe said. That means it was never possible to totally quarantine his past work.

“I live amongst the songs in a way that I was never anticipating doing,” he said. “It’s other people who bring them back to me too. I almost didn't feel like I was a part of them when I went back to these songs, but they're properly made. There's been some love put into them.”

A particularly special track, he said, is “This Is Our Lot” from , the band’s second album. It taught him about the latent muscle memory involved in playing music. “Because I'm not musically trained, I didn't have a formal way of how to re-remember that song, other than to just pick up the guitar and start wiggling my hands around it. And it was some kind of conjuring, like the way it just surfaced and began to fill the chest again. This whole process, if it's taught me anything, it’s that memory isn't just cerebral; it's bodily. We think it all goes on up here [the head], but it happens all over us. If I have to re-remember the music, it's not a thinking process. It's a feeling process.”

The show was performed solo, without his former bandmates, with Thorpe suggesting that “reuniting the family is a very different affair to me jumping in a van from Cumbria with my guitar and a keyboard. This process is about reanimating the skeleton. It's a very different thing to reincarnate the being.”

Even so, it was still a big deal — for Thorpe and Wild Beasts fans alike. “I would like to say it's been a chill week, but it really fucking hasn't,” he continued. “There was a moment yesterday where I looked at my partner and just said, I need you right now. I just needed that kind of grounding.”

The following day, Sunday, Thorpe played a Best Fit secret session on the piano stage. He covered "The Lost Words Blessing", part of a cycle of songs composed by eight UK-based folk musicians in response to , an illustrated "spell book" by writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris. The idea of the book was to counteract the widening disconnect between people and nature.

Introducing the cover, Thorpe said his brother gave him the book during a return to the place he grew up. “It re-enchanted me with Cumbria and gave me new language to understand where I was.”

Thorpe's secret session also included the title track from his first studio album "Diviner", and the Wild Beasts song "Mecca". The final day of Best Fit's secret sessions continues this afternoon.

The full setlist for Hayden Thorpe performing Wild Beasts songs at End of the Road 2026 was:

“This Is Our Lot”
“Mecca”
“The Devil’s Crayon”
“Bed of Nails”
“Lion’s Share”
“All the King’s Men”
“Reach a Bit Further”
“Loop the Loop”
“Wanderlust”