Departure lounge ramblings on music, places, climate change and stuff outdoors

Posts tagged ‘Green Man Festival’

Green Man 2025

This was a sun-drenched, chilled-out Green Man festival, which reverberated to Free Palestine chants, celebrated tolerance and diversity, and delivered joyous moment after joyous moment. As always, the line-up was full of wonderful introductions as well as old favourites. The food and drink were next level compared with most festivals (the variety of cakes on the Llangattock School stall making up for the lack of mango ale or cider this year) and the rolling hills of the Bannau Brycheniog providing the ultimate framing.

Green Man 2024

Given tickets for Green Man sold out in 2 hours for this year’s event, I am hesitant about adding to the growing list of rave reviews for this carnival of music, comedy, crafts and beer that consistently delivers the best vibes of the British festival scene. But Green Man 2024 was SO good.

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating through the Bannau Brycheiniog: Green Man 2023

A festival that merely by virtue of its stunning location is as much a celebration of Cymru/Wales as it is the glorious music that drifts out around Bannau Brycheiniog national park for four days at the end of August. 2023 was a year of discovering lots of exciting new bands, mixed with a bit of eye-misting nostalgia, the largest selection of beers of any festival markontour has ever been too (and thanks to the wonderful staff at the Mantle/Brecon end of the bar, who put up with our chat-filled procrastination for another year), and that gorgeous, gorgeous Welsh hill scenery for a backdrop. Here follows markontour’s round-up of Green Man Festival 2023:

Green Man Festival 2022

Nestled between the west bank of the river Usk and the eastern side of the Monmouth and Brecon canal, protected by the gently rolling hulk of the Black Mountains, and boasting the best selection of beers and ciders at any festival I’ve ever been too, Green Man is much more than a music event. Here follows markontour’s review of the bliss that was Green Man 2022.

Green-robed senators of mighty woods

This week has been all about oaks, Keats’ “green-robed senators of mighty woods”. In Richard Powers’ extraordinary novel, ‘The Overstory’, the collaborative endurance of the quercus genus is counterposed to the transient destruction of homo sapiens. I had been eking the book so that I could finish it on holiday surrounded by trees, rather than tower blocks, and so yesterday I allowed myself to turn the last page after a wonderful autumnal stroll around the Glanusk Estate in the Brecon Beacons, made all the more magical by being able to enjoy it with my parents.

Green Man 2019

Having the hills and mountains of Wales as a backdrop helps make Green Man the most beautiful of British music festivals, a visual winning card that was matched this year by a gorgeous programme of folk-influenced performers, surely the largest array of decent ales and ciders outside of a beer festival, and the ritual of burning the eponymous green man, taking with it to the skies hand-written messages of the festival-goers hopes and dreams.

Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks

Seven days after seeing The National I still have ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’ on repeat in my head. London does a nice line in chilled-out summer festivals these days and last Saturday The National were the perfect headliners in Victoria Park, somehow invoking audience euphoria from a set-list that veritably wallowed in melancholy. The previous night I had enjoyed a different kind up uplift in Brixton, with Loyle Carner singing about his mum again and Erykah Badu suitably eccentric in a stetson.