Hello internets! Here’s my review of last weekend’s Green Man festival. My first draft was twice as long and contained at least four times as many tenuous cricket metaphors, but I had to cut it down to 700 words and this is the result. I’m getting a bit better at editing down. When it comes to reviewing music stuff, 90% is spent on the opening paragraph – specifically, avoiding writing the opening paragraph. Once the page is no longer empty, the rest comes fairly easily.
This review appears in today’s Morning Star newspaper, the world’s best (and, in terms of English language, only) socialist daily. It’s on the website here.
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Green Man Festival
Brecon Beacons, Wales
This year’s Green Man festival fell on the weekend of the Ashes decider; I gave up my cricket tickets to go to a valley in the Brecon Beacons and watch some bands. England were bound to lose, so I fled to Wales to watch some folk.
Green Man has expanded its capacity again, to 15,000 this year from 10,000 two years ago. But they’ve added a new area, and added lots more food outlets and space, so it doesn’t feel noticeably busier, and is still located in a beautiful spot, with hills looming all around. Best of all, they’ve moved the pub stage from a busy courtyard thoroughfare to a walled garden, where I started my festival experience by enjoying Pagan Wanderer Lu’s brand of charity shop synths and charming whimsy. Later, I visited the literature tent, because I needed a bit of a sit down, and was rewarded by Keith Allen performing his spoken word reggae opera about police corruption, Tesco and Alastair Campbell. Lily, eat your heart out.
Sibrydion are the first of many Welsh bands I see over the weekend, and sound a bit like Coral before they got too stoned. Britpop. After Mary Hampton’s perfect trad folk, and Emmy The Great’s fragile confessional pop, we head over to see trendy headliners Animal Collective, who, I am told, are psychedelic pop folk you can dance to. Instead, they sound like Moby, with sub-Sting vocals yelped over the top. It’s dreary stuff, and I put Animal Collective on the list of credible bands I just don’t understand, alongside Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend and Toploader.
Later, a drunk man in the thali tent will bemoan, “No Greek sailors died on this table tonight.” Food for thought.
On Saturday, it struck me the festival’s demographic had changed, and now had too many posh trust-fund kids and not enough old men dressed as wizards. The line-up had much to do with this: while Green Man has always had an elastic remit, having the never-knowingly-underfolked Jarvis Cocker headline felt a step too far; particularly as the skinny-arsed popster hasn’t written a decent song in a decade.
Elsewhere, though, are still treasures. The afternoon sees the lush and unashamedly pop ukulele-folk of The Leisure Society, and Stornoway, who are ones for the future, even if they’ve never been to Stornoway.
Euros Childs & Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake combine for Jonny, but the best songs are unmistakably Euros’: no-one else would write a song about a boy who spends his mornings flying on a crow belonging to his sweetheart, and play it on keyboards cheaper than the batteries that power them.
Later are the American invaders. Brooklyn’s Beach House are dreamy and doomed, and would be the perfect soundtrack to a suicide cult’s initiation ceremony of dropping acid in an abandoned fish warehouse. Grizzy Bear have a good line in haunting balladeering, while Andrew Bird is spectacular virtuoso musicality defined, throwing in whistling solos like the world’s most talented milkman.
Sunday is where the true soul of the festival is located. Folk mafia the Fence Collective are Green Man perennials, and James Yorkston, King Creosote and friends swap instruments, mesh songs together, and are effortlessly charming. They’d be able to spin a melodic yarn even if they were plunging down a hill in a tin bath.
As the afternoon unfolded, men everywhere clutched transistor radios to their ears, as the cricket hurtled towards a conclusion. The final wicket fell, inappropriately enough, just as Scottish misery merchants Camera Obscura took to the stage, their glorious heartbreak-pop stormers mainly overlooked by an audience wondering why they had a collective face like a slapped arse.
So, England had won, but what of the festival? Organisers Jo & Danny, like the MCC for cricket, are the guardians of the laws and spirit of Green Man. They have something wonderful, and need to ensure it maintains its uniqueness and eccentric charm in the face of commercial pressures. Sunday headliners Wilco are the cricket of bands – multi-layered, intricate and probably go on a bit too long. I look forward to next year – but Green Man, please resist those technical innovations. Some things are already perfect.
