As the wicker man in the upper field – half asleep on his staff after 20 years of overseeing the Brecon Beacons’ most refined boutique festival – catches light in a barrage of fireworks, there is more than the usual sense of antiquity about the occasion. We’ve just spent four days at a refreshingly pagan sort of festival. Corporate sponsors shunned in favour of local real ale breweries. Bill curated for quality rather than commerce. Barely a shonky TikTok sensation in sight. Where most other major UK festivals are forced to pander to shallow, pop-timist stream-age tastes in order to maintain the profits of the Oasis/Arctic Monkeys years, Green Man remains an honourable bastion of fine sounds and suspiciously cloudy beers. Combined with its idyllic valley setting, what unfolds is an atmosphere of genuine celebration.
Bubbles and glowing Pac-Man ghosts fill the Chai Wallahs tent for Will And The People’s groove-rock carnival on Thursday night while acrobats dressed as clouds spray water-gun rain from on high at the Back Of Beyond circus-theatre stage. Pirates juggle sticks throughout Irish group Lankum’s set, itself full of mediaeval gallow drones, bouts of knee-slapping, and witch-dunking fiddle-folk. Statistics show that Green Man accounts for around 99 per cent of the UK’s annual injuries from being brained by a sprite-faced child with a spinning top on a string after one too many pints of Dark Side of the Moose ale.
