Green Man Festival 2019 review

Green Man
Glanusk Park, Crickhowell, Wales
August 15-18 2019

This year, the looming Green Man effigy, always central to this pagan-worship music festival, was wearing what looked like a long-flowing flamenco dancer skirt. There would be a ceremonial burning at the end of the long weekend, even after the sodden hell of Friday’s unrelenting downpour. The other three days were reasonably good, weather-wise, with sun and wind combined, quite restrained for the always-volatile conditions in this stunning Welsh Black Mountains setting.

While thinking-person’s rock music and singer-songwriter soloists are the majority acts of Green Man, its core ethos has always sprung from the heart of folk music, planted in tradition. That’s the foundation from which electric descendants grow. For the Songlines reader, there were the expected number of artists representing those roots.

A listener can almost become jaded by the prospect of yet another Richard Thompson acoustic set. These are way more frequent than his electric band shows. Thompson’s prime-slot Saturday night appearance in the Far Out tent was one of his very best, electric in nature, if not guitar. Thompson seemed invigorated by the festival aura, having been interviewed in the Babbling Tongues tent only a few hours earlier, giving him time to marinate in the Green Man sap. Thompson was visibly at one with himself, relaxed into a performance that wound vocals and guitar lines into a complicated solo and rhythmic flow, inspiring on both technical and emotional planes. His songbook is magisterial, spinning out classic numbers such as ‘Valerie’ and ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’, blending violently contrasting tones as he went from the bitterly biting ‘Crocodile Tears’ to the delicately doomed romance of ‘Beeswing’. Thompson also selected his lesser-aired Fairport and Richard/Linda classics ‘I Want to See the Bright Lights’ and ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, both manifesting in exceptional readings.

Thompson’s patter is equally fine, as also demonstrated during that very informal interview, which didn’t get much beyond the early Fairport Convention days, loaded with laughs, packed with observational insights. Thompson mulled over how many of his songs might shift their meanings with time, telling him things that he didn’t intend at the time of writing. At the next day’s interview with Stateside singer-guitarist Anaïs Mitchell, she ended up echoing this experience, when she discussed meanings that later became apparent, due to changes in her life. Mitchell played half an hour later on the main Mountain Stage, projecting closeness across this vast natural amphitheatre.

The Mama’s Broke duo arrived from Nova Scotia, playing on the Rising stage, always a good place to make an annual discovery of fresh talent. Swapping around guitar, banjo, mandolin and fiddle, their keenly harmonised voices mostly inhabited Appalachian and Québécois tradition with flecks of old timey blues and hardcore country. It was an intimate midday sitting-around set, before the Friday rains flooded down. The noon slot on Sunday was taken by Welsh native Gwenifer Raymond, another rising star of country and blues guitar and banjo. At first, her fast runs sounded too aggressively stacked, perhaps filled out too much by the sound desk’s enthusiastic reverb levels, and some of her rhythms sounded a touch ungainly. The banjo tunes were the best, her attack detailed, steely, percussive and fleetly delineated. It was also a wise move when Raymond stepped further towards the slower and more spacious blues, setting some spaces around her licks. She could also aim for either conjuring up some sharp stage patter, or just shutting up and playing her guitar, but perhaps we were suffering from the post-Thompson effect, where all solo artists must strive harder to inch up to his exalted level.

The Chai Wallahs tent always offers a range of smaller acts that play jazz, folk, reggae, funk, soul and hip-hop, a sanctuary if in doubt and seeking the unfamiliar. The Diplomats of Sound DJ team spun a compulsive collection of tropical Afro-Latin platters when a Norwegian jazz combo left a gap by switching their set to the following day. As an alternative to the blandly disappointing Father John Misty, the Urban Folk Quartet offered their hyperactive, exuberant and entertaining compression of the tradition, doubled in size to an octet and somehow getting away with some heavy crowd-poking tricks, just by sheer force of fiddler Joe Broughton’s humorous personality. This was a fine way to prepare for the closing firework ceremonials, and the flame-licking destruction of the Green Man itself, straight after their set. The effigy’s large drum mallet, held aloft, was almost indestructible, refusing to be consumed by the flames.