Green Man Festival Announces Final Headliners
Now into its 10th year, Green Man has evolved from a folk festival attended by just a few hundred people into a major event that welcomes more than 10,000 punters. While it still features plenty of acts from the more pastoral end of the spectrum, the musical policy has widened significantly to encompass everything from rock to electronica. Previous festivals have featured a roll call of disparate names including Fleet Foxes, Jarvis Cocker, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver.
They may have dropped the ‘Midnight Runners’, but today’s Dexys are still possessed of the energy that made songs like ‘Geno’ such irrepressible and timeless hits. Recent shows have received ecstatic reviews and it’s a certainty that the inevitable live rendition of ‘Come On Eileen’ will provoke one of those ‘festival moments’ that we hear so much about these days.
Mogwai are a very different prospect. For more than 15 years the band have been mining their own particular sonic furrow, becoming one of the cornerstones of the horribly named ‘post-rock’ scene in the process. They play the Friday night headline spot occupied by the similarly epic Explosions In The Sky at last year’s festival.
The latest additions round out a bill already packed with big names. Feist may be best known for her iPod commercial soundtracking ‘1234’, but her work as a solo artists and a member of Broken Social Scene mark her out as one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. Van Morrison has made a decades long journey from young soul rebel to elder statesman of sounds. He’ll be drawing on a back catalogue of truly titanic scope.
Alongside the more established acts the festival will be packed with up and coming artists, including the Mercury Music Prize-winning Ghostpoet, hotly-tipped singer songwriter Benjamin Francis Leftwich and nu-dubstep luminary James Blake.
Green Man takes place in the appropriately lush Usk Valley in South Wales between 17-19 August. Check the website for further details.
