Green Man Festival and the lost art of looking ahead
Fast forward a few years. Maybe five, maybe ten. If you were to ask any music lover what 2025 was known for, they’d probably say the Oasis reunion. Huge shows barrelling through old hits in a delirious deluge of warm nostalgia and flat lager. Perhaps some might even say the Black Sabbath farewell show, three weeks before Ozzy Osbourne’s tragic passing. Ask them about 2024, and it’d be hard not to mention Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour, which raced through her past discography with fervent engrossment.
Whatever happened to looking forward? Have we given up on the future of music?
Living in the past has its merits. The influx of reunion tours and reunited bands – Pulp, Black Sabbath, The Who, Linkin Park – provides a reservoir of potential futures. Their new becoming is a beacon of hope shining away from our current moment, where AI is prioritised over clunky creativity or streaming music is inextricably connected with military tech. But looking to the past to find music for the present is undoubtedly a quick way to ensure defeat.
In a conversation with prolific author and thinker Maggie Nelson, Iranian-born American artist Tala Madani deemed nostalgia “a dangerous position to have.” Nostalgia, she shared, “comes out of fear. It comes out of a disinterest in the now.” The idea that something better will always lie in the past eternally feeds the public the original issue that led to the here and now, rather than any solutions.
We need solutions. In times like these, people need a guiding hand to forge a new tunnel into the future that burrows through decadent green lands and intersects a sociopolitical heaven with an eco-friendly organisation. That hand has a name: Green Man Festival.
Situated in the Brecon Beacons in Wales, Green Man is an award-winning seven-day event that attracts 25,000 daily visitors from across the world. The festival is known for its genre-pushing musical offerings across ten unique stages, but it also spans comedy, literature, film, performance, and installation art. The facts speak for themselves: this year, it sold out in 60 minutes without announcing any line-up.
We might look in the most obvious spot as proof of their commitment to the most exciting emerging voices. Newcomers wing! will take to the Mountain stage. Wing! are a project from South London produced by Adam Swan, consisting of a live three-piece set-up tearing through trip-hop spectres and post-rock swamps all tied up by rattling bass lines.
Other newcomers include Truthpaste, a Mancunian five-piece dense with multi-instrumentalists carrying the recent emergence of folk art-pop forward with graceful experimentalism. Among the many others sharing the stage is Sarah Meth, who parcels lounge jazz and art-pop together like the most satisfying gulp of dark liquor, and Westside Cowboy, who recently won Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition and went on to pull a worthy crowd at Worthy Farm.
The Green Man Trust, the festival’s charitable arm, now in its 11th year, ensures the continued support of projects in their infancy. Alongside supporting musical endeavours, the trust also addresses the climate crisis by offering creative, educational, and social development opportunities within the arts, sciences and Welsh communities. Over five thousand artists have received development opportunities from the trust.
However, leading the pack doesn’t mean picking the youngest, newest candidates. Green Man continue their commitment to intersectional art that traverses boundaries so smoothly it all but eradicates them. Headliner Beth Gibbons has collaborated across genres with the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Annie Lennox and is still riding the waves of her 2024 release ‘Lives Outgrown’, which Far Out deemed “devastating and urgent”.
DJ Duo Underworld have been leading the way since 1987, and sound no less fresh. In fact, pop pioneers Sparks have deemed them the one act that can defy ageing and maintain their modern edge in an ever-shifting industry.
Despite growing up a mile from the Welsh border, I’d be stumped if asked to point Green Man out on a map. But the radio waves must reach out from even the deepest caverns between the Welsh highlands, as Green Man boasts an impressive American roster. Sex Week, a Brooklyn art-rock duo, bring a seductive sound to the fields. At the same time, MJ Lenderman will delight on the Mountain Stage after a solo album I know word-for-word, despite snobbily rejecting any country-rock attempt that preceded it.
Ask again the beady-eyed music fans living in the future what 2025 had in store for music, and they’d likely say this: Censorship. The Head of Music at BBC stepped down after a Glastonbury controversy saw a punk duo shout “death to the IDF” in a clumsily worded but sincere and justified reaction to the ever-worsening conflict in Gaza. Brian Eno and friends formed a supergroup to retaliate against “campaigns of attempted censorship” in the music industry.
Irish rap trio Kneecap are the face of this discourse, having been slammed with a terror charge by the British government. Keir Starmer deemed them “inappropriate.” A fruitless criminal investigation was opened into their Glastonbury set. A secret petition from a “very systemically powerful music agent” urging Glastonbury to remove Kneecap leaked to the press.
Music and politics have never been so embedded. And so, the need for a clear stance on the matter has never been more critical. Enter Green Man, giving Kneecap the first headline slot on the Thursday night. Another Irish lass, CMAT, will return on the back of a stand-out Glastonbury set to usher in her new era, not two weeks before her fourth album, Euro-Country, arrives.
Other festivals have been forced to pull Kneecap, or indeed, lost generous amounts of funding due to their involvement. Green Man is different; it’s the only large festival to refuse sponsorship, so curators retain programming freedom. No clunky statement distancing themselves from a dodgy owner has clogged up their social feed—only a warm, viscous green.
It’s all well and good, the act of signposting people towards the future of music. It’s another task altogether to ensure that it sticks. Green Man uniquely nurtures their community by offering a Settler’s Pass, a special ticket that includes discounts on local heritage sites, galleries, castles, and more. Attendees with the pass spend a week in the Welsh mountains. Music is politics. Music is also culture, a way of life. More than any other festival, it’s Green Man that knows this.
Sorry, Oasis. I won’t be looking back in anger; I’ll be looking forward, hopeful, proud. Green Man will lie in front of me, like a dream.
