There's a particular kind of festival day that only works if you let go of having a plan, and Friday at Green Man is exactly that: on your feet for fifteen different acts before the headliners even show up, most of them names you didn't know this morning and will be telling people about by Monday. It rains, on and off, most of the afternoon. Nobody seems to mind.
Kiosk set the tone early, an unfairly high bar for a midday slot that most of the tent probably wandered into by accident and left rearranging their schedules. Hovvdy bring something gentler to the Walled Garden not long after, warm, unhurried songwriting straight out of Texas that asks nothing of you beyond standing still and letting it work.
Ears go the opposite way entirely: the frontman opens with "I'm so nervous I might pee myself," which turns out to be the most honest festival intro of the whole weekend, before a set with barely any discernible structure somehow builds all the momentum in the world anyway, half Jockstrap, half Frost Children, thrashing dance moves layered over deceptively mellow beats. It works better than it has any right to. Smerz, the Norwegian duo who've spent the last few years quietly becoming one of XL Recordings' most interesting signings, follow with something in a similar eccentric register, just far more natural sounding, less like a bit and more like a whole worldview.
Dry Cleaning are the one act all day that splits the room. Florence Shaw's spoken word delivery over the band's droning, unhurried post-punk feels like it belongs to a few years ago rather than right now, and there's a version of this set that drags. But caught in the setting sun, with the light doing exactly what festival lighting riggers dream about, it's hard to care too much about the tempo. It just looks class. Jeff Tweedy turns up as a surprise guest for one song too, hours before he's due back to headline with Wilco himself, a quietly funny bit of one legend supporting the upcoming talent on his own day off.
The real centrepoint of the afternoon, though, is Westside Cowboy's main stage debut, and it's the kind of thing you only get at a festival like this one. A band not even two years into releasing music, still riding the momentum of a first album that critics keep calling one of the year's best, pulling a genuinely huge main stage crowd who hold firm through steady rain rather than drift off to somewhere drier. Watching that many people commit to a band this new, this early, on a day this wet, is properly cathartic. It's exactly what you come to Green Man hoping to stumble into.
None of that quite prepares you for Sprints. The tent is already rammed before Karla Chubb says a word, and then she says the only words that matter: "There's only two things you need to know about Sprints: we like to make a lot of noise, and we like to make a lot of noise that matters." She parts the crowd from the front barrier to the very back of the tent with that single line, and everything after it plays out like a masterclass in how to be a punk band without softening a single edge to get there. Chants of trans rights and Free Palestine break out unprompted mid-set, nobody prompted or performative about it, just there because the band and the crowd both mean it. By the time the explosive closer hits, Chubb has thrown a fan up onto her own guitar and waded fully into the crowd herself, and the whole tent looks like it's been through something rather than just watched a gig. Touring behind 'All That Is Over', their excellent second album, this is a band operating at the exact moment where all the noise they've been making finally sounds like it matters as much as they've always said it does.
Getdown Services had genuinely one of the hardest follow-up slots of the whole weekend, walking on straight into Sprints' afterglow, and they more than survive it. Their own excellent second album 'Massive Champion' gives them plenty to draw from, sensitivity and slapstick sitting comfortably next to real weight, and the crowd chemistry is good enough that a chant of "can I get some crisps" actually ends with bags of crisps flying back at the band from the crowd. Politics never sits far behind the punchlines either, and it never feels forced; if there's a band right now who can make a joke and a genuine point in the same breath without either one undercutting the other, it's this one.
The day gets stranger and better from there. pollyfromthedirt, the masked Darlington artist who's built a whole persona out of glitchy production and acoustic wailing woven around hallucinatory takes on English identity, breaks his own rules for one song entirely: a startlingly raw, intimate track about a weekend in Mallorca, nothing like the rest of his set, and all the more affecting for it. Baxter Dury turns up not long after with the kind of high-energy frontman routine that comes from growing up around a legendary one (his dad wrote 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick', for anyone who needs reminding), some genuinely bonafide tunes, and a set of dance moves he clearly still enjoys pulling out. Wilco, meanwhile, headline to a noticeably quieter field than the day deserves. It's not that they're bad, exactly, more that a set this steady and unhurried feels better suited to a Sunday afternoon slot than a Friday night headline one, and the crowd seems to agree by voting with its feet.
Adult DVD close the whole night out properly, tearing into a full-throttle party set from their adrenaline-fuelled self-titled debut and holding back just enough of the rowdier newer material that its arrival mid-set still lands as a genuine surprise. PVA get one of the last slots of the night too, a bouncy, relentless run in the Walled Garden that keeps hyping the crowd right to the very last song, a medical scramble at the barrier along the way notwithstanding.
By the time Friday's done, you start noticing a pattern that repeats itself across the whole weekend: band after band mentioning, unprompted, that they've played Green Man before and it's remained their favourite show to do. It's not hard to see why. This is a festival that treats a discovery slot with the same care as a headline one, and gives new names room to actually become something rather than just filling time between the acts everyone already knows.
