I drove down with Mary in the van late Thursday night, getting to the Green Man festival site around midnight. Pete and Cait and the kids were already there as were our friends Nathan, Vicki and their kids, Martha and Ingrid. I deffo drank too much and smoked (idiot) but saw some ace bands and met up with many friends such as ZWOLF, Dr Ben, Vendettas, Big P, Jon, the gloriously named Jimmy Bell, The Civil War Bear, Teflon Monkey, Bernie, Mel, Kim, Mel and Kim, Schnorbitz, Crav, Angh, Furries, Ifans, Elvis, Spenkins.. the list goes on. Green Man is where all my friends go every year. It’s ace.
I’ve written about some of the bands on the Review page. It rains every year at Green Man and this year they tried switching the dates a week earlier. Friday was a beautiful day filled with warm sun but things turned very nasty indeed on the Saturday and it pissed down for pretty much the whole day. I spent most of the day in the cottage and the rest of it in the Bear Inn in Crickhowell. Sunday was a bit better and Marylou and I skidded around the place, watching bands and eating some of the fine food they have on offer.
We got back late afternoon yesterday and slept for a few hours. I stayed up most of the night reading David Cavanagh’s Creation book which I’ve never read and which I will talk about another time.
Five years ago I received a call asking me to play at the second Greenman festival. The first had completely passed me by but since nobody was offering me gigs then I readily agreed. The festival was ace. A handful of gentle, bearded folk with lots of kids running around and acts like Alisdair Roberts, Four Tet and The Earlies playing amidst the soft rain, it was small enough to navigate (nobody has ever been lost at a Greenman festival) but just big enough that you could get out of your cake without upsetting anybody. I’ve been every year since and even though it has become much bigger (the first one, in 2003, was attended by 350 people. In 2008 there must have been ten times that number). The mixture of folk, electronica and random esoterica is far more interesting than the usual festival lineups of identikit indie bands and commercial heavyweights.
Jo and Danny, the organisers, had been members of the indie scene in the late eighties before it was seduced by money, cocaine and fame and have used their love of music and their experience in putting on bands (they used to run the Buzz Club in Aldershot) to create an experience completely lacking in cynicism, violence, corporate interference and the usual multi tier backstage pass shenanigans that are the hallmark of most major festivals. They are lovely people too, enthusiastic, generous and, for the time being, completely committed to ensuring the festival remains purely about the artist and their audience.
Over the past five years I’ve seen incredible performances from Bonnie Prince Billy, The Earlies, Dead Meadow, Bert Jansch, Pentangle, Richard James and this year didn’t disappoint. The Cave Singers were the act that I was most looking forward to seeing and they were great. Knee slapping, beard totin’ tunes sung by a guy who sounds like a girl with a guys voice.
The Fuck Buttons were disappointing. I’ve been playing one fuzzy note from a laptop for decades and it took two of them ages to do very little. Kling Klang would have been so much better.
Oh yeah. Music that moves.
I loved the first North Sea Radio Orchestra album and they were better this year than last. Then they were lost in the big tent but somehow managed to overcome that this year. Maybe it’s just that I was standing a little closer to the stage. Spiritualised were ok but relied heavily on the ballads and their performance was a lost opportunity for a crowd who wanted to finish off the night with a display of Astaire footed abandon. Threatmantics, playing early on Friday, were the best I’ve seen them. Lurching between, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, The Specials and a host of others using a guitar, drumkit and viola, they left me breathless.
I was standing in the courtyard of the Green Man cafe waiting for Mary to finish watching The Peth (who, it must be said, were utter shite and need to sort out their priorities. People don’t but tickets to see a singer who’s fucked his voice up so completely that he could only muster a bellow akin to a stricken yak. It’s alike a guitarist chopping his arm off just before he’s due on) with a beer in my hand when two people walked on the small stage and started playing. Wildbirds and Peacedrums (and what an ace name that is) are a couple of Swedes who make a free soul racket that had me transfixed. At times it was difficult to believe that there were only two of them up there.
I checked out the dance tent on the Sunday night and, as usual, it was Andy Votel playing undanceable psych music to a handful of his mates. For somebody with a supposedly wide ranging taste in musical styles, his sets always sound to me like two bands at the most. I called it a festival and slid back down the muddy hill and to bed.
