Full of unexpected delights: Green Man Festival reviewed

One learns the strangest things at festivals. That, for instance, this summer has been a bit of a blackcurrant disaster in the UK because the extreme heat caused all the different varieties to ripen at the same time and fall from the bushes before they could be properly harvested. That fact came from a retired Kentish farmer called Ian, next to whom we were sitting at a £65-a-head dinner at this year’s Green Man, just outside Crickhowell in Wales.

That alone should spell the difference between Green Man and the scene depicted in the Netflix series Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99. No one here was getting mouth ulcers because the drinking water was running with sewage, or rioting, or burning the catering tents down (what a waste of slow-cooked Welsh lamb that would have been). And, naturally, there was nothing on the stages resembling nu-metal, the misbegotten hybrid of rap and metal that riled up the Woodstock masses, to mobilise any seething resentments about fractionally overdone falafel from the stalls.

One of the delights of festivals is catching up with acts you’d decided were one thing, only to discover they’re actually something else entirely. Take Penelope Isles, whom I had pegged as pleasant and slightly wispy indie-poppers (and, having just gone back to their recordings, I discovered that assessment was not entirely wrong). Their set on Thursday evening started that way, but then built and built until the last ten minutes were throbbingly intense, and not at all wispy.

See also Beach House, the Saturday night main-stage headliners, which seemed to me like a colossally misguided booking until they actually began. The US trio, permanently backlit so that their faces remained invisible, were a quiet storm of impassive grandeur, huge synth washes and pinpoint guitar arpeggios.