Green Man 2014 - Part 3 - other things and other stages

The rather nebulous title of this post tells a story. I haven't quite decided on the direction of this post really but, with End Of The Road 2014 less than a week away, I feel the need to put keyboard to screen. If it is a bit rambling then I'm not really going to apologise. Festivals are like that anyway. It is part of the charm.
Like some others, Glastonbury most notably, Green Man holds a competition to seek out new talent. It clearly has some traction because this year there were around five-hundred entrants. The prize is an opening slot on the Mountain Stage on Saturday morning. The winners were London based duo Wildest Dreams.

Or they were Wildest Dreams when they won. Last Saturday they announced, during the set, that they were now simply Wyldest. The implication is that the dream had been realised. In accord with my policy concerning opening acts (Wildest) Dreams were right there on my must-see list.
Essentially a dream-pop (not a bad word in my lexicon) duo, this a big stage to fill. I have to say that during sound check Zoe Mead (vocals, synth, loops and occasionally guitar) and Holly Mullineaux (guitar, vocals) looked pretty nervous. They pulled it off perfectly - all the more remarkable when they announced "this is one of our older songs, it was written in June". The band only formed in April 2014.

Until now I have not transported to the tented 'Far Out' stage although it was where I spent all of Thursday evening. This provided, amongst other things, my first chance to see The Waterboys live. When I worked in Bristol in the early 1990s Waterboys cassettes, along with The Levellers (see here), were an integral part of the soundtrack in the lab!

Early on a sunny Sunday afternoon I made a pre-planned visit to the darkness of the Far Out stage. Samaris was the reason - it was like Christmas and Iceland winning Eurovision combined.  This is not as silly as it might seem - I have been aware of Samaris for some time, indeed here, and that was just another addition to the Green Man line-up that convinced me of its virtue. I was aware as a result of the 2011 self-released EP Hljóma Þú.

The three-piece combine total electronica with clarinet and vocals and it works. It simply would not work on an outdoor stage in daylight, however. That, at least in part, is why I think it could take Eurovision to pieces. All the songs are sung in Icelandic, which sounds beautiful incidentally, and means any lyrical concerns are entirely self-limiting.

Green Man 2014 - a preview.

Green Man 2014 is now sold out. I am in anticipation of my first ever visit and to be quite honest the line up looks as though it might present one of the most clashes between stages that I have ever tried to square.
I can even get a readable image of the list into a single screen-full that you can read but still be prepared to scroll and/or zoom.

I'll be busy.

Would I like to chose a pre-festival must see list? Quite frankly, no!

I wouldn't want to do it for just one stage let alone the combination of them. One thing that makes things easier in some ways is that there are quite a few acts that I have seen before. That of course doesn't mean I don't want to see them again, because for the most part I do, but they are something of a known quantity live. On the other hand there is almost no overlap with Truck Festival 2014, which I went to last month or End of the Road 2014 in a fortnight's time

Here as a compromise is a short list, in alphabetical order, of eight acts that I have never seen live before but are on my "list of ones to see". None are appearing at EOTR 2014 unless I'm mistaken. It covers all stages and many of them have appeared in these posts before:

• Angel Olsen
• Fat White Family
• Georgia Ruth
• Joanna Gruesome
• Laura Groves
• O'Hooley & Tidow
• Samaris
• Wildest Dreams

The links were chosen on the basis of what attracted me to seeing them live although this is likely not where I first got that information. I deliberately have not included amongst them anything that I have written. In the case of Joanna Gruesome the link was chosen on the basis of its explanation of the bands formation. It maybe quite the urban myth but who wants the truth to get in the way of a good tale?
There's some variety of music in the list, I think.