By Sunday, something shifts. You stop moving between stages on a schedule and start just existing inside the place for a day, and Green Man's main stage, sat inside genuinely beautiful countryside that turns into a proper character in its own right once the sun's out, is exactly where you want to be doing that existing. Half the weekend's lineup seems to agree: Lime Garden, Westside Cowboy, Daniel Avery, even Four Tet himself, all still around the site well into the weekend, in no apparent hurry to take the fee and leave. It says a lot about a festival when the people playing it don't want to go home either.
It says a lot about a festival when the people playing it don't want to go home either.
Musically, the day opens on jazz. Knats, fresh off an "absolutely mental" Mercury Prize nomination for their latest record, bookend their own set with two versions of the same idea, opening and closing on new material either side of a set built around the jazz-funk chops of a seven-piece band. The real focal point is the drummer, stationed right at the front of the stage rather than tucked away behind everyone else, an absolute beast of a player who tears closer 'Never Boxer' apart in the best possible way.
Elsewhere on the site, Richard Russell is having one of the more interesting Sundays of anyone here. He plays the main stage earlier in the day as Everything Is Recorded, his long-running collaborative project that always turns up with a different rotating cast rather than a fixed band, and today's guest is a proper surprise: it includes Samantha Morton, the actress, joining him on stage having spent part of the afternoon over at Babbling Tongues talking through her own "Honest Playlist." It's less a backing band than a philosophy, removing ego, making space, and letting the music lead, and it tells you almost everything about how Russell approaches a set before he's said a word about it.
It's less a backing band than a philosophy, removing ego, making space, and letting the music lead
Dove Ellis, the Irish singer-songwriter behind this year's stunning debut 'Blizzard', catches some of that same relaxed Sunday energy on the main stage not long after, chill indie folk that suits the setting perfectly and asks nothing more of the crowd than to lie back in the sun. Then Russell turns up on the talks stage to do something Green Man does better than almost anywhere else: treat a music industry legend's career as a genuine draw in its own right, not just a curiosity between sets. He discovered Adele and helped build the label, XL Recordings, behind The Prodigy, and he's disarmingly blunt about how much the industry has changed underneath him since. Where labels used to compete over thirty or fifty new singles a week, he says, it's closer to half a million now. "There is no way anyone could know everything going on," he tells the room, and there's no arrogance in it, just a kind of resigned honesty about an industry that's outgrown anyone's ability to fully track it.
If you want proof this festival offers more than just a lineup, continue to look past the stages entirely.
If you want proof this festival offers more than just a lineup, continue to look past the stages entirely. Craig Roberts introduces a screening of 'Submarine', the film that made his name as a teenager and connected him with Richard Ayoade, the director who's remained his mentor ever since. He didn't even know Alex Turner had scored the soundtrack until after filming had wrapped, but it's arguably that soundtrack more than anything else that's kept the film so beloved, especially among a crowd of music obsessives exactly like this one. It's a lovely, slightly unexpected thread to pull on a Welsh festival site, the local boy's breakout film getting its own moment of reverence a stone's throw from the stage he grew up watching other people play. 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' gets its own screening too, and Green Man picks both films perfectly: two stories that, in very different ways, run entirely on British countryside and music, the same two things the festival itself trades in.
Then the sun starts going down, and it's time for the two sets that were always going to close the weekend out. Fcukers bring exactly the same all-party, no-fuss energy that's carried them through a hell of a touring summer, the kind of set that asks its crowd outright if they've "got any dopamine left" and mostly gets a yes back. It's loud, loose, and precisely what a Sunday night here calls for right before the headliners take over.
And that headline set belongs entirely to Wolf Alice. Playing Green Man for the first time despite a summer that's been almost entirely theirs, they arrive with 'The Clearing' era pulling their whole back catalogue into sharper, more confident focus than it's ever sounded live, newer and heavier songs sitting completely at ease next to the old favourites. Dove Ellis and Anna Calvi both get pulled up as guests mid-set, joining for a cover of Mazzy Star's 'Fade Into You' alongside the band's own 'Sunday Light,' a genuinely lovely, unexpected pairing that only a festival this size and this friendly could really pull off. Ellie Rowsell tells the crowd at one point that they're "feral," and from the pit it's hard to argue.
It should have ended with fire. Green Man's traditional closing ritual, burning its towering wooden effigy in front of the whole site, got scrapped days before the gates even opened, the same dry summer that had scorched most of Wales leaving the ground too much of a fire risk to justify an open flame anywhere near it. What replaced it was a show of light and movement instead, no smoke required, and while it's hard to call it a genuine improvement on the real thing, more a best-case compromise for a genuinely difficult year, it's equally hard to feel short-changed watching a whole field of umbrellas and aerial dancers do their best to fill the gap, with Wolf Alice's set still ringing in everyone's ears and the crowd singing snatches of the Waterboys and Springsteen into the dark. Whatever was missing from the bonfire, the weekend had already given you more than enough to be sending home with.
