Too many of the tickets may be snapped up by London meeja types but the festival’s laid-back vibe enables one to forgive even the Radical Midwives’ Yurt.
Green Man Festival, 21–23/08/09 2009
Edwyn Collins’ acerbic vision of the ‘truly detestable summer festival’ conjures up images of the very worst of ‘British people in hot weather’. Whether it’s rancid beer or piss-bombs, sanitary facilities which would shame a refugee camp or pitching your tent next to a snoring gobshite, these are most certainly not a few of my favourite things…
But the Green Man is different. A spectacular five-mile drive over a bleak mountain is followed by a drop into a lush green valley and a sylvan lane. No queues, no nonsense.
The Green Man, now in its sixth year, is the archetypal boutique festival. With its stunning backdrop of Wales’ Brecon Beacons the Green Man is also a family affair, catering for lovers of interesting indie, folk old and nu and psychedelic excess. Too many of the tickets may be snapped up by London meeja types but the festival’s laid-back vibe enables one to forgive even the Radical Midwives’ Yurt. A bunch of ragged-trousered artists fail spectacularly to grasp that the sole point of a festival is to sell mobile phones and instead offer “Crap Face Painting – Free of Charge”. Meanwhile middle-class parents temporarily forget that all strangers are paedophiles and willingly hand over their children to a bearded loony in a dirty mac and rolled-up trousers who chases the kids into the woods.
The festival’s eclectic music policy allows bands that don’t normally enjoy the spotlight of the main stage to do a Queen at Live Aid. British Sea Power’s wonky worldview sees them succeed in being uplifting whilst purveying apparently off-the-peg indie while Roky Erickson may have traded in cutting-edge psychedelia for straight-up hard rock but his impressive castlist of demons, vampires, zombies and bloody hammers gets the parents and their kids grooving. Friday’s only disappointment comes courtesy of headliners Animal Collective who are far less than the sum of their influences, noodling away to little effect.
Day two sees Bon Iver triumph, playing off his fragile, brittle songs against his extraordinary voice but the night belongs to Jarvis Cocker. On the surface, his career is on the skids. His records have long since stopped troubling the supermarket charts, the critics are sniffy but he bestrides the stage like a lanky colossus, dispensing lollipops and largesse to his flock. Every song from his two solo LPs sounds like it belongs on the record Different Class should’ve been.
There’s some intriguing stuff going on away from the main stage, of course. In the literature tent Howard Marks is the stoner Peter Ustinov, dispensing anecdotes with a surreal twist and the timing of a real comic while legendary record producer Joe Boyd reads excerpts from his autobiography, punctuated by Robyn Hitchcock performing versions of Boyd’s classic productions, suggesting that Syd Barrett lives on. Elsewhere Richard James illustrates how Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci were the great lost band of the 90s and Martin Carr effortlessly knocks out classic tunes of hope and heartbreak to a diminishing constituency.
By Sunday the mountains have trapped low cloud in the valley, enhancing the festival’s otherworldly atmosphere but the nippers don’t give a toss. They’re still climbing trees and brandishing their bubble swords as Camera Obscura’s surprisingly beefy Belle and Sebastian-meets-Dusty Springfield jangle channels the sunshine, Rodriguez, the Mexican-American Meic Stevens, charms, despite appearing to be meeting his backing band for the first time onstage, and The Dirty Three’s baroque goth fiddling feels utterly right. Headliners Wilco – the alt.country Radiohead – intrigue and inspire before a druidical parade ends the festival, the crowd led a merry dance from the main stage across the site to the green man sculpture which is ritualistically torched. There is something magical going on in the Welsh hills and even this cynical old scrote sheds a tear as the green man burns, 2000 people applaud and the world is changed, just a little bit, for the better.
Words: Richard Bellinger