The tapestry of Green Man is woven from a reverence for the past and the promise of a future that, for one August weekend, feels thrillingly attainable. Nestled in the natural amphitheatre of a Welsh mountain valley, for two decades the festival has offered a suspension of reality that its annually returning devotees can only describe as “magic”. Where else can you find refuge from a festival’s never-ending spectacles to hold a chicken?
In these intervening years, Green Man has fostered a certain intimacy with its audience, meaning the 25,000 tickets for its 20th-anniversary weekender sold out within three days despite the only confirmed headliner being Mercury-prize winner Michael Kiwanuka. But Green Man dares to roll the dice while remaining deserving of this blind faith. Though it remains loosely anchored to its folk-indebted beginnings, it also welcomes the absurd, the wonderful and the otherworldly.
