Green Man Festival, Brecon Beacons, Wales

Green Man Festival

This review has to start with a total confession of my journalistic bias: Green Man Festival is my favourite place on Earth. Consider my hat firmly in the ring on that one. Just like kids hanging up their stockings for Santa, or lonely middle-aged housewives hearing the thumping beat of the X-Factor opening music, the foreboding doom of black cloud moving over the horizon of an otherwise kind-of-dry summer fills me with an excitement that can only mean one thing: Green Man is coming.

Holding an outdoor event in the middle of a Welsh mountain range is asking for a bit of drizzle at the very least, but this year brings rain to an unprecedented degree. When I say “rain”, I don’t just mean “heavy rain” or even “really heavy rain”. I mean some serious, turning-it-up-to-eleven, next-level biblical shit. The sort of Noah’s ark weather that could get a festival of a less steely constitution cancelled. So it’s to Green Man’s glowing testament, then, that in spite of the weather (and, to some degree, even because of it) this year’s festival is every bit as magical, fulfilling, groovy, relaxed, mischievous and downright brilliant as any other year.

Needless to say, the shelter-providing Far Out Tent is pretty popular during the downpours, and that’s where I spend most of my Friday with synth-led party-starting bands keeping hips shaking and hands clapping all afternoon. Later, stage headliners Fuck Buttons pull the crowd into a far deeper euphoria with their destructive volume and ever-towering walls of noise. By taking their early-career propensity for punishing abrasion and combining it with a more dance-friendly approach, the live experience of the Fuck Buttons has evolved into a powerful and transcendent force to be reckoned with.

Thankfully, Saturday night at the Main Stage is a somewhat drier (if not less muddy) affair, meaning that Billy Bragg gets the fifteen-thousand strong sing along that his working class anthems were written for before making way for the jaw-dropping stage show of the Flaming Lips. Deftly combining their more hard-edged new material with stripped down sing-along versions of old classics, the clearly joyous band spends their hour spewing an obscene amount of confetti, streamers and balloons whilst hammering out the tunes. Being near the front and in the thick of it is life-affirming to be sure, but you can’t help but wish that you could simultaneously be at the top of the arena’s natural amphitheatre so as to take in the full panoramic view of the Lips’ multicoloured volcano set against the backdrop of the stunning Black Mountain range – a view you won’t find at any other festival in the world.

Sunday evening’s headline performance from Joanna Newsom – who has regularly played the festival since its humble beginnings – is an unsurprisingly mesmerising affair, despite a new wave of rain and a visible sense of fatigue within some of the crowd. Going by in what feels like a flash, Joanna offers up material from all three of her albums, including a good number of her 10-minute-plus epics as well as – to the delight of the crowd – some old favourites like ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’.  With Newsom’s vocal timbre enriched by a flawless backing band of rhythm and strings, the crowd falls strikingly silent for the duration of the set – utterly enraptured by the spellbinding nature of the band’s swooping embrace.

Despite this year’s cathartic midnight burning of the green man (for those who don’t know – a giant made of foliage sagely overlooks the festival site) being literally dampened by worsening rain, the towering flames and stunning fireworks still provide a fitting conclusion to what remains one of the most undeniably special weekends of the festival calendar. How special exactly, you ask? Well, allow me to put it this way. During his Saturday night set with the Flaming Lips (after fifteen thousand people join him in impersonating bears, frogs, helicopters and tornadoes) Wayne Coyne himself declares – with a sincerity that can’t be faked – that Green Man is the best festival he has played in over 10 years. That’s how special. Beat that Latitude.

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