You would be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful site. Set in the valley of the Bannau Brycheiniog, complete with a river and luscious trees, Green Man festival is now in its 24th year. Known for its alternative music, the festival is actually much more than that. Despite its smallish size – just a 25,000 per day capacity – the lineup features not just a truly diverse set of musicians but also literary talks, political debates, a cinema, a wellness area, a science garden, and food and drink from all around the world.
This year – the festival's 24th – saw a mix of headliners lending each day a different theme. Shoegaze legends Mogwai delivered a mesmerising, trippy set on the Thursday night. Friday saw Chicago band Wilco play on the main Mountain stage. On Saturday, UK favourite Four Tet gave an electronic masterpiece of a set, sweeping seamlessly from lower beat melodies to higher tempo bangers like his recent remix of PinkPantheress's tune 'Illegal'. Finally, indie band Wolf Alice brought the house down on the last night with an epic performance, proof of their impressive ascent over the years to a place among the UK's major bands.
Curation this year was as thoughtful, yet more inclusive than in previous years I’ve attended, spanning the as-anticipated indie music to Gambian rock and drum and bass, with the unbeatable jungle hero Roni Size closing out the night-time revellers’ weekend on Sunday.
There were plenty of other musical highlights, too. Bristol’s Getdown Services conducted the crowd at the sheltered Far Out stage into an ecstasy of a moshpit with dance-chanting bangers with laughably simple lyrics like ‘I have nits’ and even simpler titles, like 'Crisps'. Slower beats were provided by Tuareg band Tamikrest, who proved a perfect Mountain stage act, supplying soulful desert blues all the way from the Algerian-Mali border.
If your festival game is finding new music, the Rising stage is a brilliant place to discover newer acts – and Green Man has a stellar track record of predicting success, having given Fontaines D.C. their first festival slot. This year, Mên An Tol was one of the more memorable, with the Camberwell-founded group delivering an intricate, folk-laden set.
Some of the top electronic sets came from Montreal-based Marie Davidson, who was the arbiter of chaos on the Friday, with her signature jerky movements underpinned by heavy techno beats and Quebecois grunting. London DJ Ben UFO gave an impressively diverse set on Saturday churning through dubstep, jungle and techno, keeping people out until Daniel Avery took over to finish off an already big night. Avery’s previous set the same night saw him bring out a full-on band to accompany his usual electronic sound.
Alexis Taylor, of Hot Chip, played a particularly beautiful set on Sunday at the Mountain Stage then reappeared some 11 hours later, at midnight, for the ceremonial Green Man burning. Environmental concerns meant this couldn't happen in the usual way, where the structure – complete with the inscribed wishes of thousands of festival-goers – is set on fire to mark the close of the weekend. Instead, a slightly bemused crowd was treated to the oddly compelling sight of a looming industrial crane where the bonfire ought to be, picking a floating silver-clothed woman, all set to the sound of Taylor's angelic rendition of 'Dancing in the Dark'. Crowds gathered either having heard Taylor’s set or by word of mouth. A surreal ending, but endearing in its oddness.
Green Man is one of just three large independent festivals in the UK, and of those, it's the only one to refuse sponsorship of any kind – so you won't see any advertising wandering around the site, as you might at comparable festivals like Latitude – which protects the weekend from the imposing fingers of capitalism.
Draped by those spectacular hills, the landscape itself becomes one of the main acts – reflected, too, in the festival's environmental protection measures – you’ll be faced with a selection of six bins every few metres. Green utopia.
Really, Green Man is several festivals folded into one. Musically, it is just as diverse as September's End of the Road, also described as being for the ‘6 Music’ crowd, while the talks are just as good as those at How the Light Gets In (this year’s Green Man programming featured none other than The Green Man himself, Zack Polanski, as well as top comedians Stewart Lee and Joe Lycett). Booze connoisseurs had over 100 options to drink their way throughout the Welsh Beer Festival – billed as a festival within a festival. The cinema has film listings spanning Oliver Luxe’s 2025 desert horror Sirat to David Lynch’s neo-noir classic Blue Velvet.
Whichever one of these you came for, the chances are you'll leave having found three more festivals you didn't know you needed.
Green Man 2027, the 25th anniversary, takes place 19–22 August 2027. Tickets go on sale 26th September.
