Green Man: a festival as it was meant to be?
A reflection on the best of our music festivals
The Green Man Festival happens this coming weekend, and back when I did things like go to festivals, it was my favourite. The vibe, the music, the setting in the shadow of the rolling hills of the Glen Usk Estate. It was so much more intimate and sedate than something like Glastonbury or Reading. The golden age of rock festivals was the 1990s, when things were moving from rough n ready to slightly more hygienic. A good festival should feel like a rollercoaster — it should exist in the edges of what safe society usually allows, and yet also not actually kill you.
But, anyway… I won’t be going this year (for many reasons), and I haven’t been since something like 2017, back in the old times. But to celebrate it, here’s a piece I wrote in prep for one visit to Green Man, about the origins of the modern music festival.
In 1914, English composer Gustav Holst began renting a 300 year old cottage overlooking the Essex village of Thaxted as a weekend and holiday retreat for himself and his wife, a place to recuperate and fill his sickly lungs with fresh country air when away from his day job as a music teacher in London. It was there that Holst met the vicar of Thaxted’s St Mary’s Church, socialist and eccentric, Conrad Noel. Noel was known for disturbing the calm of village life with his vibrant May Day festivals filled with dances and jamborees, choral music and maypoles. The two became friends and soon Holst found himself enraptured by the unusual architectural space on offer in the cavernous St Mary’s Church’s main hall. For some time Holst had been listening to the enthusiasm with which his great friend Ralph Vaughan Williams had embraced the lessons of Cecil Sharpe’s English folk revivalism, and to how well Williams had incorporated these lessons into some of his finest music. It was in the halls of St Mary’s that Holst would partner this interest in the successes of Williams’ folkist experiments with Noel’s eccentric celebrations, and by the Whitsun of 1916 he had organised a music festival that brought together many styles of music. The Whitsun Festival, as it became known, was the apex of many years of English music’s search for a new identity that looked to its folk routes as closely as it looked to the classical composers of Europe. The nature of this gathering at Thaxted in 1916 is perhaps the thing of greatest interest here. Holst wrote in a letter to a friend:
It was a feast, an orgy. Four whole days of perpetual singing and playing, either properly arranged in the church or impromptu in various houses or still more impromptu in ploughed fields during thunderstorms, or in the train going home… the reason why we didn’t do more is that we were not capable mentally or physically of realising heaven any further.
It was, arguably, the first music festival as we know it today; the Grandaddy of them all. Holst wrote that it was a revelation to him, that it opened his eyes to the possible future of English music, and it was during this time also that he composed The Planets, an orchestral suite now so famous, it is almost the ubiquitous sonic language for the planetary characteristics the music represents.
In 1916 the Great War still pounded away at the fields of Europe, and the distrust of modernism by the great artists of the day, such as Holst and Yeats and Edward Thomas, was at an understandable peak. It was heavy machinery, albeit operated by men, that was tearing up the earth. When war was over (if it would ever be over) modernism would continue to bludgeon nature and heritage and gentility; the things perceived to be the very essence of English life. And so as the industrial world continued to flower its dense grey buds all over the world, so continued the core need for what was to become known as the counter-culture, a movement which found mainstream commentary by the time of the nineteen sixties as the political left got involved in the folkist non-agenda. Music festivals were gathering spots for people who wanted to escape the trappings of the modernist’s world.
Before long the modernism that Holst and Yeats et al. so feared and despised became corporatism, and corporatism, unlike the dreaded realities of industrial warfare, does not bludgeon, but it infests – a tactic in a foe just as fearsome. It was not long after this that the corporate world discovered the riches on offer in youth culture – and the music that youth culture embraced – that the corporate world began to get its gloopy fingers into the festivals as well. The modern totem of this complete up tip of the origins of the music festival is Glastonbury, which now houses over 400-odd bloated back-slapping BBC journalists every year without so much as a bray of burden. Around 3,000 acts performed there in 2013. It is not a music festival, it is the music business. The corporate end, anyhow; it’s their AGM.
Glastonbury is not the only festival, of course, thank goodness. And there is something for everyone across the isle. And in an imposing setting in a drastic dip of the Black Mountains is Green Man, held in the grounds of the Glanusk Estate. And it is decidedly closer to Thaxted than it is to Glastonbury.
It is a festival that almost immediately brings back the memory of the Thaxted story. Physically there is the raw green setting with dapples of permanent rurality: the stone walls of the estates, the walled garden (which now houses bands and the more eccentric side of the festival’s entertainers); and notionally the generosity of spirit that is palpable throughout the place. It has an unabashed liberal British folkist ideal underpinning it – and not the un-jilt-able generation of flower power, but the reserved intellectual reverence of the likes of Holst, Vaughan Williams, and before them Cecil Sharpe and Williams Morris.
Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is out now with Calon Books.