La Route du Rock 2026
I had never heard of this Breton festival before Festivals & Gigs offered me press accreditation, nor had any of my friends. But, eyeing the solid lineup (Kurt Vile, Fontaines D.C., Aldous Harding) and the chance to visit Brittany, I quickly agreed to the assignment. What ensued was a multi-month panic at the prospect of a solo camping festival, which seemed like a harrowing leap from a solo gig or day festival.
In the end I needn’t have worried. Dropping innumerable parlez vous anglais, I got chatting to various festival goers as I made my way from Paris to Saint-Malo by train and then the festival site, within the ruined walls of Fort de Saint-Père, by shuttle bus.
The path loops through the thick (roughly 20 metres), imposing stone walls of the fort, which form a loose perimeter around the two stages, which are positioned remarkably close together. While ordering my first drink I ended up talking to an Iranian festival volunteer who looked a bit like Penélope Cruz in The Invite, which helped to raise spirits. She gave me a tour of the volunteer section of the campsite, where we had a glass of wine before Cate Le Bon started. The informal tour gave a sense of how rustic the site was: on top of one of the walls of the fort, overlooking the stages, was a ramshackle smallholding, replete with goats, geese, ducks and sheep.
The friendly vibe of my fellow festival goers was to become a recurring theme of my experience at La Route du Rock (LRDR). When I remarked on this to a radio producer from Normandy in the press area, she laughed and said the festival is famous for its friendliness. She also said it is known as the Glastonbury of France, which seemed a bit off: La Route has an attendance of 12,000 people and only has two stages.
The small size lent a close knit, parochial sense to the festival. And while far from being France’s largest festival, it is certainly one of the oldest. It was set up in 1991, and I met numerous groups of people who had been attending for a decade or more. On the bus to the beach day party I spoke to a chap from nearby Normandy. He had attended La Route for the past 16 years; it had become an annual reunion for him and his childhood friends, who had all attended together as teenagers. There was a certain wholesome charm to that, I thought, as he spoke.
As he got off the bus, he said “right, we are going to go and down some shots of Ricard and take some pills”, which was less wholesome.
The overarching sense was of French folk here to get on and have a great time. Indeed the only raised voice I heard was a drunk Englishman shouting at a Parisian band for speaking in French in between songs (“who do you think you are, you wankers”), which felt like poor form indeed.
Our new friend from Normandy imparted a few other tidbits about the festival. The name comes from La Route du Rhum, a quadrennial sailing race from Saint-Malo to the French Antilles. Saint Malo was the pirate capital of France. The slightly questionable crossbones in the festival’s logo, which could deter a more refined music fan, make more sense with this context. Personally, I would recommend a rebrand. The crossbones symbol is suggestive of the gothic, which completely misrepresents the gentler, bougie vibes of the festival.
Another of his tidbits was that the physical constraints of the walls of Fort de Saint-Père have stopped the festival from growing larger. I’m not sure if this theory has legs, but it is certainly true the festival has remained tiny and personable. With artists becoming more expensive, the festival organisers have therefore had to carefully curate the programme (at this point my bus neighbour mimed picking a cherry from a bush).
I would agree this relatively slight festival punches well above its weight in terms of quality. I saw most of the music on the lineup, and enjoyed the vast majority of it. Ditz, Moin and Chest. all stand out as bands I had not heard of before the festival who put on solid performances.
Fontaines D.C. and Darkside were great, Kurt Vile far exceeded his 2019 Glastonbury set, Mogwai blew the doors off, while Peaches delivered a shocking and bass-heavy set full of sex-body-horror costumes and props. Smerz were impossibly sultry on Thursday night, hair blowing in the outflow of upward-facing fans as they played their strange interpretation of pop. The sound quality rarely dipped.
As this suggests, the lineup was mostly Anglo bands, with just a few French bands on the roster. Artists regularly return to LRDR (this was Fontaines’ third and Mogwai’s sixth), which is a positive sign.
Among La Route’s more remarkable features are the sets held on La Plage Se Bon-Secours (a beach) in Saint Malo. Minor acts play from a small tent to the more mobile RDR attendees, who were interspersed with Saint-Malo’s August beach set, a mix of locals and European tourists. I was unsure how they reacted to Bibi Club’s lo-fi goth noise rock, but there were not many smiles going around, and I had a sense of the long-suffering. Like Margate, Saint-Malo has a large sea pool with stone diving platforms, from which festival goers jumped while the music echoed across the beach. There are a series of fort-topped islands stretching into the blue bay, where children frolic in the sand dunes. Altogether, it served as an excellent mid-festival palate cleanser.
Basking in the sun on the beach to rock music felt like a shabby Ibiza, albeit with a much less well groomed clientele than the Love Island set: French rock fans, several days into a festival.
Long queues formed for the shuttle bus back to the festival after the beach music concluded. The queue probably lasted 30 to 40 minutes on average, with another 30 minutes left on the bus and then a 20-minute walk to the music or campsite. It was a schlep and those with less patience would struggle.
At times, the narrow genre focus and limited geography of the actual festival site did become a touch repetitive: walk 200 metres this way to see one variant of rock, then walk 200 metres the other way to see another variant of rock, on repeat for seven hours. In this sense, it revealed its true self as a programme of three consecutive day festivals with the associated scope limitations. One could see this as a weakness compared to a larger UK festival like End of the Road, but given the ticket price, it’s swings and roundabouts.
There was also a distinct lack of a designated nature-filled chillout area at the actual festival site. There was plenty of nature to go around, however. A small woodland stage with some soft landings for the space cadets would have added a nice geographic layer to the festival, and feels a bit remiss compared to UK alternatives.
That said, the festival’s tree game was on fire (no pun intended). Attendees entered the site through an arbored walk of oak, while in the press area I relaxed beneath the shading boughs of two magnificent sweet chestnuts.
At the end of Fontaines’ headline set on the last day, a giant writhing conga line formed and looped back and forth across the stage areas to the music of Maitre Gazonga, an annual ritual known as La Chenille. It was a joyous thing. To me, La Chenille was a synecdoche for the broader festival.
On the final day there is a party for and in the volunteer area, where some of the festival artists sometimes play. I snuck into this, where I met a group of Bretons who took me along for their night out. The After Hours stage, as it was called, was a touch cursory, but it provided a service: somewhere to listen to electronic music until the early hours.
At 5am on Sunday morning I stumbled back to my tent. There is always something a bit calamitous about the end of a music festival, the build-up now depleted, as thousands of tired, dirty people take down their tents and contemplate a return to their nine-to-fives. There was nothing different about La Route, and I spent the day with an escalating hangover on the beach as I waited for my seven-hour ferry home.
The logistics were time- and morale-consuming, but this was offset by the location and how much fun everyone was having. The French were good to me. Those who enjoy We Out Here and the like would find the sonic diversity a bit lacking, but for the less fussy, who are into bands like Kurt Vile and Fontaines, La Route du Rock is well worth consideration. I would very happily go back.
