Festival Review: Green Man

After a year pandemic-long break Wales’ Green Man still stands strong with Wu-Lu, caroline and Caribou as standouts.

Artwork by Poppy Lam

In many ways, the pandemic has infantilised our sense of object permanence. I found it quite hard to believe that football grounds were still there until fans were brought back, and in a similar way, I was under the impression that, even though everything was finally confirmed, my ticket to Green Man 2021 would only result in a refund email in July.

Then, a few weeks ago, I saw an Instagram photo of an old friend at Latitude. Grass decoupaged with camping chairs and empty lagers, everything felt real again, everything felt sudden. And back from it, into the bed I spent most of my lockdown in, I’m still not entirely sure it really happened. Regardless, here is my write up of the 19th-23rd of August at Green Man 2021.

Firstly, just getting it out of the way: this was an exceptional festival. It was my 5th time there, and my 2nd time working the festival, and although the pool of artists to book this time around was significantly smaller, the lineup always seems fresh and covers enough ground genre-wise to feel like it has spanned far more than a weekend. The views never seem to disappoint, the crowd were, for the most part, lovely, and the drinks were flowing all weekend.

I’m not going to do a write-up of everything I saw but rather talk through the three things that I enjoyed the most, the reasons for those things, and then maybe mention a couple of slight negatives at the end.

Wu-Lu

I’ll start off with South London’s own: Wu-Lu. I was vaguely aware of Wu-Lu’s music, coming out of that Windmill scene that has produced a lot of the UK’s most (and quite a few of its least) exciting bands of the past few years. Those sounds are very apparent in the music, but with a hip-hop twist that takes it aside from the other Windmill alumni. It’s not loud for the sake of being loud, the vocals have purpose (again, unlike a lot of people who want to sound like Squid), and the energy the band brought was just incredible.

The crowd scared me a little bit; the mosh pit at the front was caring, but had people swinging punches, and launching themselves without a place to land. For someone who hadn’t been to a gig like that in 18 months, it felt a bit much. But overall it was a great summation of the energy live music can bring that studio music just can’t.

caroline

There are bands who fuse genres that, on the surface of it, don’t sound like they could work. Caroline are not one of these bands. Their mix of midwestern emo, traditional folk and experimental minimalism is a clear sell just by title. By hearing? It’s barn-burningly good. The music is so erratic, and yet so deliberate, its spasms are so secure within the boundaries curated by the minimalism of it all, that each one seems like an explosion. Each instrument (of which there are about 50) is played with full expertise, and although I’m not 100% convinced by the non-choral vocals, the full arrangement feels fleshed-out and warm.

The whole gig, played to a much smaller crowd in the forest, felt insular and surrounded. This was something else I truly missed about live music: how its unfiltered nature can feel so inwardly soft.

Caribou

I was a bit late for Caribou, and walking in there felt like going to a club. Barging through the crowds to find friends, pitch-black nothing set against all the artificial lighting. When we got near the front, settling down didn’t feel good enough: there was some kind of command to dance. The upbeat nature of the music, the crowd in full attendance, all the annoying lot gone to Shame instead, all combined to cause some sort of exhilaration to what seemed like the direct antithesis to the past year and a half. There were no illicit substances taken, on my end at least, but the whole thing felt so forbidden, so exterior to what I had become accustomed to with music for so long now, that I think I actually squealed a bit at some point. Live music at its best is total ecstasy.

That was essentially my festival. I would like to raise one thing before finishing though, and not something that Green Man particularly suffers from by itself (and not something I have a particular solution to), but rather something I think all festivals could get better at, and that is the diversity of their clientele. Now for a festival held in the south of Wales it isn’t entirely surprising that most of the punters are white, however, when most people are coming from nearby cities anyway, it does beg the question of why this seems to be the case. And this isn’t a question for which I have an answer. In the past, I would say that the more-folky lineup would appeal to such a specific brand of people that others would have been put off, but most genres are now covered by the bill, even more so in years when they can recruit a more worldwide crowd.  

What this means is basically a crowd of middle-aged Guardian readers, and that seems very restricting. The festival has grown so much in the past 20 years (even since 2015 when I’ve been going) but to grow further, to get better, then this feels like the limiting factor they need to address.