Green Man - Dyn Gwyrdd 2015 - Part 1

Did it rain?
Well yes, quite a lot to be honest. It was also a wonderful festival and that is certainly no lie. So how does one square this circle? A great deal of this was down to the way that the festival is organised. It is not possible to prevent it raining but there are things that can be done, and importantly were pre-emptively done, to minimize the problems it causes. It was a triumph.

That doesn't help me with where to start my commentary on the music or indeed anything else! What I have decided to do is start with two very different Welsh solo artists (who both performed the most part of their sets in the Welsh language) that are very different, indeed of different generations, but both of which I very much wanted to see live for the first time.
The first, and the younger generation, was represented by Gwenno who played songs from her recent LP 'Y Dydd Olaf' (The Final Day), which is a concept album based on a 1970's Welsh-language science fiction novel of the same title, about a dystopia ruled by patriarchs. Her comments about the songs were suitably political...  It hardly sounds like a trendsetting theme but, particularly if you are from outside the UK in 2015, you might easily underestimate the sentiment.

It took place in the Stygian gloom of the tented Far Out Stage on Thursday afternoon as a heavy and relentless drizzle fell outside.

In recent years I have been trying to catch up with what I see as the greats of the UK (and wider) folk scene from the 1960s onwards. Some are no longer with us of course, but otherwise I'm doing well and this is someone that I had somehow failed to notice, or had and then forgotten, in the releases before the event. I hot-footed it to the Mountain Stage, just as the rain was abating early Sunday afternoon, to catch this. It was worth it and then some.

Meic Stevens - Mountain Stage - Green Man Festival 2015.