.jpg?width=1200&auto=webp)
The small but mighty Green Man has carved out one hell of a niche for itself in the midst of the Welsh mountains. The 25,000 capacity festival, which regularly sells out within a couple of hours, books the kind of weird, wonderful, often very left-field talent that bigger festivals might shy away from.
Rather than rapidly expanding and losing some of its charm in the process, the festival has slowly evolved over the last couple of decades instead.
There also seems to be something in the air that empowers bands to take a few punts along the way. During Big Thief’s flawless Saturday night headline show, the band gamely played a handful of favourites, but over half of the set was made up of brand new, unreleased music. From the gently-picked, tender opener All Night All Day to the intensely moving closer Incomprehensible – Adrienne Lenker’s simple but highly effective love letter to aging beautifully – the crowd was rapt. Similarly, London post-punks turned experimental folk-rockers Black Country, New Road trialed all manner of new songs – some finished just a couple of days before the festival – on the all-too-willing audience.
Other stand out sets came courtesy of Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, Syrian artist Omar Souleyman and his upbeat, electronic-heavy take on the dabke (a traditional Levantine folk dance), Asheville alt-rockers Wednesday (who also played an additional secret set at titchy tent Round the Twist, as well as their main stage slot), the high-energy afrobeat-influenced jazz of Mercury Prize award winners Ezra Collective, and the raucous late-night revelry of Irish folk group The Mary Wallopers.
Among the newest acts, Lutalo (fronted by none other than Adrienne Lenker’s cousin, Vermont-based Lutalo Jones), the ridiculously fun Getdown Services, Edinburgh-based duo No Windows, London five-piece Man/Woman/Chainsaw, Cambridge band Ugly, and Trinidadian-British bedroom indie singer Toni Sancho shone the brightest.
From a team of cutesy posties who deliver post based on letter-senders’ often quite surrealist descriptions of the person they’re trying to reach in the festival (somehow, the system actually works: I tested it out and successfully sent a letter to a friend) a collection of talks and workshops in Einstein’s Garden, and Sunday night’s communal bonfire experience, to a rather death-defying corner of the site where hundreds of children spontaneously gather at all hours to juggle with diablos, the atmosphere admittedly skews towards the whimsical.
Still, for those in search of something a little heavier, it was quality over quantity. Friday night top billing Jon Hopkins scratched the festival’s clubby itch (trading his recent ambient experiments for crowd-pleasing, chuggy tech house), as did Sunday Far Out stage closer Joy Orbison, who snuck in an unreleased remix of Fontaines D.C’s Starburster, and a glitching reworking of Charli XCX’s Brat cut b2b. And who could resist the lure of London DJ Sherelle, and her expert command of high-tempo jungle and breakbeat?
.jpg)
And above everything else, Green Man is ridiculously great fun. On Saturday night, the majority of the festival made a beeline for Byrnes Night – a supergroup of Windmill-adjacent alternative band members covering David Byrne and Talking Heads songs, with a bit of bagpipe haggis stabbing, and a truly chaotic guest appearance from Nadine Shah thrown in for good measure. After dark, an innocuous-looking fancy dress shop transformed into not-so-secret cabaret spot bar Wishbone.
While festival season can sometimes feel like a revolving door of the same old suspects popping up on bill after bill throughout the summer, Green Man manages to offer something completely different. That’s no mean feat. Slow and steady clearly wins the race: whatever this magical festival is doing year after year, it’s working a treat.
