Green Man Festival review starts with a cut, not a climax: the traditional closing ceremony was cancelled at Green Man because of fire risk in dangerously dry Wales. The festival still ended with Wolf Alice as the final headline set, but the ritual that usually closes the weekend did not happen.
Bannau Brycheiniog after 20 wildfires
The previous week, 20 wildfires blazed through south and west Wales, and the ground around the festival showed charred peat and grassland. That left the traditional burn of the towering Green Man effigy unsafe, especially because the figure is normally covered in punters’ handwritten wishes before it is set alight. For attendees, the change was practical as much as symbolic: the closing act that gathers the weekend’s loose threads was simply removed.
Friday afternoon to Wolf Alice
Friday afternoon opened with Westside Cowboy on the main stage arena, and Jimmy Bradbury set the tone with a blunt reminder of how long the band has been around: “We were over there last year,” he said. The Manchester quartet was one of the weekend’s early anchor points, before Ata Kak, Shame, Dry Cleaning, Sprints, Tamikrest, Suntou Susso and Daniel Avery pushed the programme in different directions.
Shame drove the crowd into moshpits and called for people to free Palestine. Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw brought out Jeff Tweedy for the first ever duo performance of My Soul/Half Pint, with Jeff Tweedy coming from Wilco. Sprints’ Karla Chubb gave a teenager her guitar during Little Fix and then crowd surfed after the handoff, while Suntou Susso orchestrated a giant conga line through the crowd.
Ellie Rowsell and the closing set
Four Tet’s headline slot climbed from ambient techno into body-rattling bass, and Wolf Alice followed with the weekend’s final headline set. Ellie Rowsell wore leather head to toe and commanded the stage with powerhouse vocals, a sharper ending than the cancelled burn could have delivered. Scotland’s Pictish Trail also led an acoustic performance of the Waterboys’ The Who, but the last night still ended on the weight of Wolf Alice rather than the fire ritual.
The sensible call was the one that kept the crowd and the land out of danger. What will linger now is the unanswered question that sits where the flames would have been: what happened to the handwritten wishes that would normally have burned with the Green Man effigy?
