Green Man Friday Review: Lobster Heads and Wet Leg supremacy
I knew deep down that the opportunity to go to Green Man Festival, the first UK festival to sell out for the 2025 season (and without any line-up, too), was something many could only dream of. But I wasn’t exactly excited for it.
All I had to go off were glowing reviews from an ex that I wished not to think of, and the ghost of a tent I’d accidentally left in a lime bike the day before haunting me with gleeful revenge. That, and the dreary August rain, had beaten me down. I was ready to be transported.
My friend, Angharad and I trekked into South Wales via a series of trains, deciding their platform like the leaves deciding direction in the wind. I shuffled my city-girl items, heavy with beers already turning lukewarm, up and across different platforms, breaking a nail in the process. I had traversed many seas and was yet to see a Welsh hill. I needed the thrum of live music to entice me out of my misery.
As soon as we hit the site, everything changed. Green, lucious green. Gaggles of half-dressed teens swanned in a stream, splashing under a hot blue sky. The hills curved up and above us, forever. The people, charming and insouciant. We grabbed our wristbands and were ushered in with not a second thought.
Past the helter-skelter and the Ferris wheel, the punters awash in neon colours, the hoards of hats and throngs of families, we saw the ‘Walled Garden’ sign stand tall. We zipped to the barrier just in time for Brooklyn duo Sex Week, who had all the charm and swagger to earn the trust of the crowd made up of shift workers who would pull my pints later in the evening.
They meow-ed through ‘Toad Mode’, their first-ever song, which was written about a friend’s cat. Richard Orofino played his guitar with a grunge-goth flourish, like Mk.gee without the latest album tarnishing his name. They finished triumphantly with ‘Coach’, Pearl Amanda Dickson’s green hair outfit only a symbol for the fact that they very much belonged at Green Man. I blushed with the slow bloom of a new crush. Two, in fact.
I did have a job to do, of course. Standing next to an over-priced bacon bap and coffee stall, we interviewed Silver Gore, the latest brain-child of David Byrne collaborator Ethan P Flynn. Flynn and classically-trained singer Ava Gore have a gold mine of tightly produced glitchy alt-rock tracks under their belt. Later, they played the Rising stage, boasting a set much bigger than the small space could hold.
“All the good men died on the continent,” Gore sang teasingly. Amen, sister. Slick music full of worldly wisdom. Their EP, Dogs in Heaven, is released on September 12th. Inside tip? Keep a very careful eye on this band.
Following signs for “Whimsy” and “Rendezvous,” we sank into the Mountain Hill to catch John Grant’s Mountain Stage set. Angharad had reassured me we were in for a run of ethereal sad songs, like those that soundtracked my favourite Andrew Haig movie, Weekend. Instead, we got a funk-heavy set that dripped with electronic quirks and a band decked out in the finest queer get-ups. Sold.
“It’s his form of creativity, what can I say?” Angharad shrugged happily, as we watched costume-clad fairies and knights, and a whole host of older attendees, shimmy in the sun. Bizarrely, it moved me to tears. Not quite the sound, but what it did for the people. I wanted to call my mum.
I had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Friends I made later likened him to Nickelback. Fair comment. I felt his obsession with the synth–smashing powerhouse vocals to traipse back to his keyboard with child-like wonderment at what one finger and a melody line could do–made him sound like an LCD Soundsystem specifically contained to the world of Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. Don’t ask me to explain myself.
As the sun dipped, so did my mood. I’d never been a big fan of Wunderhorse (lazy indie-rock for white guys, my sleep-deprived brain might quip here), and their Mountain Stage set did little to change my mind. A gaggle of melancholic men, holding their guitars like unwanted brattish children, raced through generic indie tracks.
Let’s go ahead and ask the bigger question at the heart of their stagnance–what do musicians owe us? A conversation largely shepherded into the limelight by Chappell Roan’s rejection of polite niceties, refuting fans’ parasocial tendency to feel entitled to all energy, all of the time. It’s unrealistic. It’s unhealthy. Women and queer people must assert their boundaries more (no good being heard if the thing you’re saying is what everybody wants to hear anyway)… But Wunderhorse? At Green Man? Surely, a “hello” would be polite.
After many lulls in an already deadbeat set left me dreary and drowsy, we swapped their masculine-bravado performance out for Panda Bear. Their effortless sound coasted alongside a charming animated backdrop. Cute and cool at the Far Out Stage.
Wet Leg were next. Wet Leg, whom I’ve seen several times this summer, none so good as their humble, playful headline set. Rhian Teasdale had the crowd in the palm of her hand; no one seemed to mind that a few of the guitar riffs sounded similar, though we’d found a group of lobsters who jumped effervescently no matter what track played. The Green Man gods were at it again.
Later, we caught the smutty goof of Hitech, harbringers of “the purest ghettotech music out of Detroit”, where the night took a turn for the intense, the dramatic. We pushed on, but without the lobsters, and the swinging jaws of those around me only a steel reminder of my drunkenness in fast waning, we called it a night. The likes of CMAT and MJ Lenderman would bring in a bright and chaotic Saturday, and I needed my head firmly screwed on. My nail was still broken. Me? Not so much anymore.
