The Green Man Festival – Brecon Valley, 21st-23rd August 2009

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Words: Laura Snapes except Wilco review by Leah Pritchard // Photography: Leah Pritchard

Waking up to the sight of mist curled around the sleepy bosom of the Brecon Beacons is a festival sight so incongruously lovely that it feels as though Dylan Thomas’ words are the poles supporting our tents. There’s a poem of his, ‘Fern Hill’, that fits the weekend quite aptly – it starts bright with childlike wonder at “the night above the dingle starry” and being “green and carefree…green and golden” – as with most festivals, the sight of adults revelling in youthful abandon is a common one – but the extent to which innocence and charming guilelessness appear a permanent state of mind for many of the bands playing eventually induces a malaise at the intolerable niceness of everything on offer. The setting, jolly ambience and organisation are perfectly fine – as is the refreshingly relaxed attitude to BYO (that’s ‘Bring Your Own’ alcohol for you older types) – but musically, the weekend’s inoffensiveness undergoes a kind of dialectical transformation to become the most heinous Swellsian insult possible, to the extent that even much loved performers like Bon Iver become something of a chore to watch.

Green Man is a festival that can certainly take risks – knowing Animal Collective’s penchant for scientific, inconclusive live renderings of their records makes them a risky proposition for a Friday night headline set at a folk-oriented festival, and it’s similarly daring to put formerly troubled ‘60s psychedelic musician Roky Erickson so high up on the bill to bark his grouchy 12 bar blues, but both sets are packed (even though the main joy inherent in Erickson’s set comes from figuring out if he’s really singing, “Pritchard, give me head again”). Heads down, Animal Collective perform a constant, steady application of sound that burbles like the euphoric head rush near-drowning is said to induce. Unsatisfying as many well-studied fans of Merriweather Post Pavilion find their set – a shy rendition of ‘My Girls’ blooms understated from the rush of sound a few songs in – there’s surely something to be said for the boldness of continuing to play such a well-loved album in this esoteric and oft criticized style. Easily the best day of the weekend, Friday’s more inventive highlights include the fluorescent Rorschach blooms and roars of Gang Gang Dance and Wooden Shjips’ heavy, bleary eyed textures. Where they could easily elongate their songs into 12-minute smorgasbords of drone and incoherence, they’re surprisingly brief as well as far too quiet. It should be impossible for audience members to talk over them and still hear themselves, a problem which reoccurs throughout the weekend – with no houses or towns nearby, the volume should be erupting from the peaks of the surrounding hills. Luckily though they’ve got a brilliantly unrecognisable cover of Neil Young’s ‘Vampire Blues’ and authenticity on their side, which is more than can be said for Cate Le Bon’s Saturday morning set.

Gang Gang Dance

After a few songs we hit the biliously clichéd “bastard lovechild of X and Y on acid” of folk music – singing of tides coming in and being left on the shore by a lover, ‘Out to Sea’ is turgid, dreary and performed without a smidgen of humour, and the rest of her set fails to pick up with a shamanistic drone number that runs on autopilot. The Leisure Society perform an untitled new song, the chorus of which repeats, “If we only knew the answers we could print them up onto t-shirts” over a muted tropical organ rhythm. Even given the sublime songwriting on their debut, The Sleeper, musically it’s an ambitious song by their standards, and highlights the inventiveness that comes through on their cover of Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’. Yet there’s no escaping the fact that they perpetuate the lull of Saturday afternoon, which doesn’t alleviate during Peter Broderick or Beach House’s sets. It’s undeniable that Peter Broderick’s records and work with Efterklang are gorgeous and poignant, and there are moments live where he plays violin like a bird bone fragile Arthur Russell, but his in between song chatter is symptomatic of the lack of subtlety that runs through a great deal of the music on show this afternoon. On the motivation for writing his last song, he says, “it came from something I saw written on a bathroom wall, which said, “You’re probably stupid”. I never write on bathroom walls, but I got out my pen and added, “But you’re probably beautiful.”” Being up to the eyeballs in insipid sentiment and polite loveliness, things don’t bode well for Beach House, who labour over what seem to be the same few piano chords for the duration of their set – if they were playing a headline gig on their own terms then this might well be quite beautiful, but it’s the pitching of the day that renders it an undynamic burden.

All is not lost though as Beach House vocalist Victoria Legrand joins Grizzly Bear later on to sing the “ah-ah-aaaah-ah” parts of ‘Two Weeks’. Live, Grizzly Bear manage to pull off what it seems remains just out of grasp for a great many of the bands this weekend. Whether it’s the oblique resonance of the lyrics, the gut punch of Chris Taylor playing clarinet through a bass pedal or an absolute grasp and confidence in what they’re doing, they’re faultless. A group of guys near the front start a mass bear hug during ‘While You Wait For The Others’ and attempt to extend it across the whole crowd – the rest of the audience don’t bite, but it’s heartwarming reassurance that there’s no need for mawkish over-emphasis on emotion to get through to people.

Bon Iver

Happily, the band playing the main stage early Sunday afternoon seemingly couldn’t give an organic Goan fish curry as to whether they touch anyone or not. “We’ve noticed that to play Green Man, you’ve got to have an animal in your band name,” says Zun Zun Egui frontman Kushal, in pretty much the only instance of any band daring to make a joke at the festival’s expense. “Just look at the programme. So for this weekend, we’ve renamed ourselves Sexy Worm.” Yelping and howling in tongues like Melt Banana being fed poisonous frogs to the beat of polyrhythmic tribal drums, they’re on far too early in the day, but provide welcome noise respite before Scott Matthews’ bedwetting dirge. His first song could be a collaboration between Coldplay, Newton Faulkner, Snow Patrol and David Gray, such are its myriad chord changes, syncopated drum bursts and challenging lyrics… It’s music to read Dan Brown books and fall asleep to, the sound of ‘That’s Life!’-reading housewives sobbing into a cup of cold tea, and not even nuanced enough to nestle between Dulux’s ‘Magnolia’ and ‘Butterscotch’ swatches.

A performer who doesn’t seem to have undergone the complimentary humour lobotomy at the entrance gates is Jessica Larrabee from She Keeps Bees. If you watched Jonathan Ross interviewing Miley Cyrus, you’ll remember his look of equal parts tentative hysteria and sheer terror as she failed to stem the flow of verbal diarrhoea emanating from between her slightly weird gums – it’s a similar situation with Larrabee, to the extent that it’d be infinitely preferable to watch her in the stand up tent than to have to sit through their uninspiring bursts of garage rock (their sound recalls Lenny Kravitz more than once during their set) before getting to the next joke. Highlights include, “I know what you’re all thinking. When did Cat Power get fat?” and a story of her begging drummer Andy to “GIMME THE QUIDS!” to let her investigate the culinary delights of the food stands.

She Keeps Bees

Aside from a few pockets of blistering heat, the threat of rain has hung heavy in dark clouds over most of the weekend, but it doesn’t actually start until the Dirty Three come on stage, and fits their perversely apocalyptic sense of humour neatly. “It’s great to be back in Scotland,” jests Warren Ellis, who’s on excellently inebriated avuncular form. Jim White plays tentatively over the start of ‘Some Summers They Drop Like Flies’ whilst Ellis yells at photographers, punches the air, and windmills his arms, all the while looping his violin and playing with his whole body – even without words, this carries infinitely more feeling than the “my lover left me on the shore” crap from earlier on. “We haven’t released an album in four years because we’ve been having problems making one,” he says, before offering 50%, no, 40% of the songwriting royalties to anyone who sends in workable ideas. “Not too many chords – we’re not an emo band contrary to what you might think, nor one of those bedwetter bands.” But if he is telling the truth, you’d never tell that they’re apparently losing creative momentum, ‘Indian Love Song’ (apparently “Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ in reverse, down an octave and up a third.”) is as blistering now as it was when it was written 16 years ago.

Dirty Three

Those frustrated by the sweet and overly sincere acoustic balladry of the weekend breathe a collective sigh of relief as the first few notes of the dark groove of Wilco‘s ‘Bull Black Nova’ pulsate throughout the arena. The tension mounts until Nels Cline – a man so familiar with his instrument, he could tell you which chord would sound if he were to throw his guitar against a brick wall – slowly increases the intensity of his playing until all that can be heard behind Jeff Tweedy’s raspy cries of “OH, PICK UP!” is the sound of a Jaguar being brutally contorted into a screech that would make the majority of the weekend’s acts wet their proverbial musical pants.

“If you can’t play these songs at a folk festival, when can you?” jokes Tweedy, after a relatively mournful rendition of ‘Deeper Down’. By relatively, I mean that even a song like ‘Via Chicago’, essentially an acoustic ballad in its original incarnation, is completely reinvented in this live setting. Glenn Kotche’s assault on his drum kit during the second verse creates a tunnel of noise through which Tweedy seemingly obliviously travels through, refusing to fight the urge to increase his volume but, instead, continuing his heartfelt murmurs through to the other end, to be met by a huge cheer when the original beat comes back in.

“That guy who said he loved me,” Tweedy announces as he points into the audience, “this one’s for you.” The highlight of the set for anyone basking in the bromance of the hour comes in the form of this next track, too. Definitely a candidate for the ‘should-be-much-longer’ track of the year, ‘Wilco (The Song)’, with its tongue-in-cheek, anthemic lyrics, inspires the rowdiest sing-a-long of the weekend, at least in the front few rows.

Wilco

It’s a subtle “up yours” to those branding Wilco as ‘dad rock’, or in fact anyone who has attempted to pigeon-hole the band at all, that the set is arguably the most diverse of the weekend. The Queen-style clap-along during the 15 minute rendition of ‘Spiders (Kidsmoke)’ sits just as comfortably next to the wanky guitar battle between Pat Sansone and Nels Cline during ‘Hoodoo Voodoo’ (originally a collaboration with Billy Bragg) as it does next to the croons of “Jesus, don’t cry. You can rely on me, honey,” (with perfect harmonies provided by bassist John Stirratt) of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot favourite ‘Jesus, etc.’.

Wilco return to the stage for a short encore of two songs from A Ghost Is Born and, although the 75 minute headlining slot proves too short to properly satisfy the hardcore Wilco fans, it’s long enough to pack in Cline’s 3 minute guitar solo during ‘Impossible Germany’; to see Glenn Kotche stood atop his drum stool, arms high in the air before jumping down to hit the first cymbal crash of ‘I’m the Man Who Loves You’, as well as Pat Sansone’s windmilling and Jeff’s high-pitched scream during ‘I’m a Wheel’ and the rock-solid foundations provided by John Stirratt’s bass-playing and Mikael Jorgensen on keyboards (that’s not to say they don’t also have their moments). Much like their stage predecessors Dirty Three, the years of playing together have left Wilco as a tight unit, completely aware of every nuance of each other’s execution and in a completely different league, performance-wise, from almost every other act at the festival.

The Green Man Festival