Green Man Festival

It’s been 11 years since Green Man first launched, and today the festival feels reassuringly established due to the fact it has honed its musical programming and cultural ephemera to perfection. Yet for some reason, the event feels excitingly new, and this year’s showcase for a rich and unique swirl of contemporary music suggested why that might be.

A handful of acts played early sets amidst the clearing rain clouds on Thursday night, including the hoary but reassuringly irony-free Waterboys, but the festival began in earnest with the endearingly raucous Happyness, who dribbled some fuck-you youthful exuberance on to nicely shambolic slacker-rock material. Plank! picked up the thread a few hours later with a set of heavy, proggy instrumental post-rock laced with synth flourishes. But it was the spellbinding, scuzzy and multi-layered gothic garage rock of TOY that provided the first real highlight, with nods to The Horrors (musically and aesthetically), the sludgy romance of Brian Jones Town Massacre and the stylised post-punk riffing of The Walkmen. Over on the main stage, the sparse and delicate compositions of Daughter had a hefty crowd hanging from vocalist Elena Tonra’s every word. In a set of carefully composed heartbreak, the eloquently beautiful Home was especially all-consuming against the fading light of the Friday evening sun.

But even this was just a warmup for the delicious and precision-crafted live show that is Caribou in 2014. After literally years of constant touring, Dan Snaith’s band can now surely lay claim to being one of the best dance music live-acts in the world: passion, nostalgia and half-remembered emotion spooled out of every track. While new material from the forthcoming Our Love LP received a deservedly rapturous response (in particular the otherworldly two-step charm of the title track), it was the seminal album Swim that sent the crowd into overdrive, with the frazzled psychedelia of Sun and the ghostly Leave House galvanising the masses.

Cardiff’s Fist of the First Man cleared the cobwebs on Saturday lunchtime, with a pounding instrumental set of heavy, surf-tinged post-rock. But the day was all about two main stage acts whose gentle-but-epic styles were perfectly suited to the wide-eyed wonder of the Greenman aesthetic. The War on Drugs – just that bit too close to the easy-listening aisle on record – sounded like a cinematic roadtrip through starry skies soundtracked by Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty (i.e., bloody amazing). Their chiming Americana worked its way skywards, providing the perfect platform for headliner Mercury Rev’s cosmic majesty. Playing the classic Deserters’ Songs in its entirety, Crack was pleased to find we still knew not only all the words, but also all the interludes (ahem). Saturday’s festivities were capped with the pulsating, sinister and shape-shifting techno of The Field, which despite being more heads-down than hands-in-the-air provided a welcome blast of 4/4.

The vastly under-rated Other Lives kicked off a sunny Sunday spent mostly lolling on the mainstage’s grassy banks: swooping, orchestrated folk that should have been higher up the bill. Anna Calvi’s stylish and iconic mid-afternoon set was a revelation: her thunderous voice, avant-garde pop and alt-rock material, and astonishing virtuoso guitar style woke up a snoozy Sunday crowd, pitched somewhere between Nick Cave and PJ Harvey.

After a disappointingly shambolic half-hour from the cult act Neutral Milk Hotel, the last word of the weekend went to Kurt Vile. Laid-back yet anthemic, the crowd bonded over the horizontal charm of Vile’s understated hits, providing the perfect round up to to a weekend spent enjoying one of Green Man’s strongest line-ups to date.

Photography: Polly Thomas & Matthew Pontin