WOEBOT

I went to The Green Man Festival over the weekend. The line-up was, to be honest, pretty unremarkable. I just wanted to go to scarf up some excellent food, check out the beautiful countryside and sleep in the van. The festival itself is problematic in loads of ways, most obviously because it is so bloody "civilised", so comfortably comfortable. Most of the people in attendance were in their thirties or forties. There were no pile-driving bpms, no fires made from plastic cider bottles, no proper travelers in squatting out of converted lorries like I remember from festivals I'd been to in the past, no dogs on strings, no day-glo-attired freaks rushing on bad amphetamines, hardly any gross drunkenness.

I thought I'd miss all that more than I did but I was too busy enjoying not being kept up all night by jabbering teds, loos which weren't caked with shit, the aforementioned nosh and the peaceful and unassumingly friendly air of folks. Of the set of festie characters: goths in fancy dress, screw-face pikeys, studded-leather-jacket-clad trad punks, and righteous, drunkenly pontificating students I only had to tolerate the latter (though technically speaking she wasn't a student...)

The Main Stage

The first thing I caught was the last third of Donovan's set. The hits bit. God Donovan is such an eedjut! If you haven't seen him being interviewed on telly, well you've been spared I guess. He has the most absurd, fey, supercilious manner. He almost seems to revel in his own plummy ridiculousness, in the middle of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" breaking into a spoken word skit about his time in Rishikesh with "Four Beatles, A Beach Boy and Mia Farrow". It was (still cringing) one of the most embarrassing things I've ever witnessed. It's almost as though he was trying, by force of character and tenaciousness to his idiot-savant pose, to break through his own bullshit to some transcendental post-societal mores, to some new progressive trope for talking and walking. Let me assure you it wasn't happening for him. But only a fool would diss "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and as for "Season of the Witch" and "Mellow Yellow" we-e-e-l they're rather lovely. Even if his Crown Prince of UK Folk shtick is wrong-headed I really enjoyed seeing him.

That night the DJ Tent was absolutely kicking, courtesy of the brilliant Gareth Cherrystone. Gareth is the veritable boondog, the king of the library breaks bods. Gareth's obscurely-sourced grooves actually emote and connect. He was tearing the house down with these unfeasibly funky hard rock tunes. The only one I recognised being Sabbath's "War Pigs", lord that (brum) drum and bass backing is phenomenal. Other tracks I could only fumble at identifying: a Dylan-meets-New-Orleans hoodoo rock number called "Me and Mr.Horner" something which sounded exactly like The Rolling Stones title vaguely suggested "Smiling Faces" (could have been The Undisputed Truth?). I wish to god I had a tape of his set. Flashos and I speculated about what other tunes he could have spun on a World tip: Quella Vecchia Locanda's "Un Villaggio, un'Illusione" and Gilbert Gil's "Aquele Abraco" tunes which might have really set the fox amongst the chickens.

John Renbourn

John Renbourn's set the following evening was also magnificent. In his early seventies, Renbourn (UK folk stalwart, Pentangle member) busted some fantastic moves. His acoustic guitar sparked like a mountain brook. Raining, ranging and ringing. Renbourn was hugely charming, curmudgeonly, tender. His oeuvre revealed a journeyman's enthusiasm for all manners of music: blues, shanties, hymns, calpysos, bluesgrass all digested with his critical ear but presented so casually within the frame of "here's something an old boy taught me". The crowd adored him like an errant grandfather, loved his stories like the one he told about his neighbor in Scotland. Renbourn: "The weather has been lovely these past few weeks Angus!" Farmer Angus: "Ay, but we'll pay for it..."

...in the rain

There was a glut of disappointing music. Lots of the sort of bands who get saddled with the epithet "Really Good Live Bands", Levellers-a-alike who were plain atrocious. Plenty of worthy but dull things like the woeful Jose Gonzales. This guy sounds bored to sobs. Bored with himself, his own voice and with his leaden guitar work (like pylon cables to John Renbourn's proverbial country stream). Jose's music sounds similar lots of things: Bill Withers, Arthur Russell, Nick Drake circa Pink Moon all with with a dose of flamenco. It's a unique enough fusion but lacks any intensity from Gonzales himself. Reports that he hates performing at festivals only compound the image I have of him as a reluctant (and thus undeserving!) star.

Steve Reid and Kieran Hebden

Something that snuck up on me was Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid. Marcus at Dissensus told me their collaboration was worth checking out and he was not wrong. There's an unusual empathy these two have with each-other, separated as they are by a gulf of years. Their quasi-harmolodic pile-up of heavy synth fx and martial, often Hard Bop-esque drumming is bracing like a storm in the mountains. Hebden, who I've never had much time for, only because he seems like a nice middle-class boy like myself, has acquired something like a midi-patch virtuosity wringing violent abruptly-conjoured stabs from his array of powerbook, mixer and key-pad. Reid, on the other hand, a veteran of the peerless Strata-East stable really sweated and pounded, heavy riddim shaking his tiny wirey frame as he rolled out Liebezeit-esque tom-tom salvos*, delicate hi-hat filigrees and positively thunderous kick-drum. These cats jammed! And the crowd (amazingly) seemed to lap up this near-improv sonic white-storm. Old head that I am the highlight had to be Hebden's almost unexpected hijacking of Rhythm is Rhythm's ambient mix of "Strings of Life", I say almost unexpected because it sort of made explicit the connection running from the Strata East cosmic heavyweights through Defunkt, James Blood Ulmer, Jamaaladeen Tacuma into Detroit Techno and beyond.

In the way of things it might have been that my most cherished musical memory of the weekend was leaving The Green Man behind, setting off up across the Black Mountains in the van to visit an old friend (dare I say hermit?) high in the peaks in his wild hill farm to Led Zeppelin III. Weaving through impossibly beautiful scenery to the tune of "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp".

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*Note the back-of-Ege-Bamyasi quality of my photo ;-)