Radio #003: Green Man pt 1

... which becomes a love letter to Ben 'Soundhog' Hayes.

Photo courtesy of Gail Watt.

I’m not a natural festival-goer. Hoards of people - even like-minded people - make me feel hot and wriggly. I think it’s because other people look like they know how to have a good time without too much effort or without feeling overcome by awkwardness every time they’re expected to indulge in small talk.

And at festivals there is a lot of small talk.

“Hey man! Did you hear Mogwai? Didn’t they sound fucking off the scale? My ears are still ringing. They were awessssoooome!”

“Yes, I did hear them, but I listened hidden in a grove of trees half a mile from the stage, hoping to high heaven that no one would spot the glow of my cigarette and come to investigate,” would be the truth, but not one to share with a stranger at the communal urinal.

His attention is making it difficult for me to go.

I nod, zip myself up still needing a piss, and leg it back to the the grove of trees. Like a weirdo.

I’m supposed to be writing about Green Man but this is already turning into a therapy session. Charlie Brown is strong in me today. Must be the manflu that’s still aching through my dilapidated veins. Not that I like to mention the manflu. Stoic, me.

Actually, by happen-chance, this might be the perfect place for me to start.

Green Man, you see, for the ten plus years I’ve been going (a mere bandwagon-jumping Johnny-Come-Lately compared to many) has been such a therapeutic and broadening experience. Almost all of my phobias and tics have been allayed by this most magical and wondrous event in the transcendent and misty surroundings of the Black Mountains.

Other festivals still give me the heebie jeebies, though. I continue to have Festival No. 6*-induced sleep terrors. I know other people enjoyed its boutique, VIP-partitioned, claustrophobic, noise bleed of smugness (we were all numbers at Festival No.6… hard to imagine an event more diametrically opposed to The Prisoner’s philosophies) but not me. Definitely indubitably not me.

I celebrated Green Man on my show from its inception (more or less), previewing it on air with one of the festival’s co-founders, Jo Bartlett. I really enjoyed our conversations and I had great respect for Jo and Danny’s musical and ecological vision for the festival.

Green Man sounded great as long as I didn’t have to actually go. Jo would invite me every year and I’d misplace the invitation, muttering lies to myself about wanting to be there but having to prioritise my Saturday night show. I can’t miss my reson d’etre - The Saturday Night Show - to gallivant in a field!!

The camping didn’t put me off. I am still - at heart - a member of the Rhosesmor Cub Scout pack… with two sleevefuls of badges… two columns on each arm. I grew up in the countryside. I love a night under occluded stars, drizzle and owl hoots, I really do. I just don’t want to have to share that space with anyone I don’t know I already like. Certainly not anyone with a didgeri-fucking-doo.

Sorry about the language. I’ve been reading ‘Money’ by Martin Amis, and it’s having the same effect on my malleable child’s mind as Elliott Smith’s music had on my songwriting.

My attitude about going to festivals changed when we started Crackling Vinyl***. “We” was Ben, Elin and I. And “we” was mostly “me” roping Ben into things he didn’t really - or at all - want to do.

I cajoled him so that I could bask in the reflected glory of his truly encyclopaedic knowledge of music. I very nearly wrote ‘love of music’ but Ben is also characterised by an implacable and fervent understanding of what he doesn’t like. Some might call it an evangelical hatred of The Stone Roses, but it’s more wide-ranging than that, and borne out of the very opposite of ignorance.

Ben knows more about music than anyone I’ve ever known. We could stitch all of the people I’ve known previously’s knowledge of music together into a Frankenstein’s patchwork of au faitness with recordings from the mid-50’s onwards, like a fabric WMD for pop quizzes, and it still couldn’t beat him. His musical erudition would exponentially dwarf the institutional dilettantism of 6Music, for example.

Yes, I know there are exceptions… I would feel bereft without Lauren, Gid, Huw-sitting-in, Marc and the Tom(s) but… but… WHY HAVE THEY NEVER GIVEN ME A JOB?… sorry… true colours showing through the smoke rising off an irreparably burnt bridge.

Anyway… Ben. He knows his onions. Before I compromised one of the few friendships I’ve cherished in my life by jibbing him from my show and then hurting one of his friends, I learnt so much courtesy of Ben. Listening to him DJ’ing for the fun of it, playing music at long, line-cleaning lock-ins in Telford’s Warehouse, Chester, is such a fundamental part of my musical education.

I wish we could still do those nights but staying up until 5am, going one on / one off with Ben and Tony Bear, on a seemingly endless spiral of line-cleaning Guinness (or whatever happened to be left at 4:37am); hundreds of rollies that would sometimes get confused with someone else’s joints (and they - Daily Mail - really were someone else’s joints); and relatively obscure records Ben, Tony and I had gathered together to share with each other… sorry, this sentence has gone on for so long I need to email its beginning to find out how things was supposed to end.

In short-ish, Ben’s ears should be lionised and far better and more widely appreciated than they are. He’s a lovely chap, too, and although he could give me a run in the grumpy bugger stakes, I’ve rarely known anyone with his integrity and generosity. He’s very good with people and can spot a feckless poseur bullshit merchant at many paces. Which is why I keep out of his way, these days.

So, dirty laundry and chips on shoulders…. my, reader, you are being spoilt.

I’ve overlooked Elin at this point, but you will hear about Elin in the future: magical, original, no-two-fucks Elin and her inexplicable adoration of ‘Zabadak!’, but she would prefer I continued to bang on about Ben despite - and probably because of - sensing the megaton grump emanating from the outskirts of Ruthin.

Not that Ben would be reading this. He’d prefer a night with an oscilloscope attached to lord knows what; a Babycham and cherryade cocktail, and a vintage episode of Seaside Special over this waffle.

We should all be a bit more like Ben.

If I am an unlikely festival-goer, then Ben makes even me look like a didg-wielding, renovated VW camper van-driving, surfing hipster wristband junkie in comparison. Perhaps the most bewildering achievement of my life, the one that had actual gods scratching their chins muttering, “How has he managed to persuade him to do that?” is that I talked Ben into DJ’ing - and camping - at a festival.

The word ‘festival’ - especially when spoken in Lamacq-ian tones - does the kind of things to Ben’s blood pressure that could power large rockets across many lightyears of space.

He is to festivals what Kate Middleton is to Crocs.

Somehow, though - maybe a weird variation on Stockholm Syndrome after all of the awful, dispiriting DJ’ing gigs I talked him into and the bust coccyx in Cardiff - I was sat outside his house in Ruthin, on the most potholey road in Christendom, picking Ben up to take him to DJ with me at Green Man Festival.

I’ve never seen so much camping gear.

I’ve never seen so many eggs.

An eggstrordinary amount of eggs.

Charles Darwin packed less outdoor equipment onto The Beagle than Ben tried to squeeze into my Peugeot. Of the same vintage too.

If you can go viral at a festival where there’s as much access to wifi as 1989, then Ben went viral at 2012’s Green Man Festival.

His impeccable, tweed-clad appearance, including a sartorially pitch perfect Deer Stalker, invited damp smiles and nods of muddy respect wherever we went. Watching him dance (not really the right word) around his umbrella, in the Far Out tent at 3am to The Grid is one of my favourite ever memories of the festival.

“What about seeing Patti Smith, or Television, or Kraftwerk or Super Furry Animals when the heavens came down and we were soaked in their sublime bliss?”

No, Ben and his umbrella trumped them all.

Oh my. This is a lot of words. And it really wasn’t where I was intending to go with this piece. I’m addled by manflu. My stoicism is confusing me.

I will come back to Green Man again in due course. I have seen and heard more magical things at Glanusk than anywhere else.

I think Ben must be at the forefront of my subconscious this week as I prepare to pack my exponentially inferior records into boxes for my annual trip to Crickhowell, this coming Thursday.

Before I move on, Ben currently runs PlastiDisc ( https://www.plastidisc.com ), a bespoke ‘lathe cut records creation service’. I know how committed he is to getting the details right.  He knows more about making a recording right for a lathe cut than anyone, I’d wager. If you employ his services, and he’s prepared to give his time and expertise to cut you a record, he will do the best job imaginable for you.

Somewhere on line (oh, here: http://soundhog.co.uk ) you’ll also find his legendary bootlegs and Radio Soundhog mixes. Again, and minus the empty and usually baseless hyperbole you might have come to expect from me, many of these are technically so accomplished and intuitive in equal measure. They verge on genius. The work of someone who doesn’t feign an iota of his love for music and writes it neon bright through his own work.

So I will miss him next week, despite the fact that he hasn’t been to Green Man since 2014. Many of the crew remember him with fondness too: because of the amazing music he played; because of his excellent manners; and because he mucked in to help artists carry amplifiers through knee-deep mud, doing much more to keep things going smoothly than is generally expected of decks monkeys.

And somewhere there is a wicker weave of former Green Man attendees who still bore friends about the amazing trip they experienced at Green Man in 2012, when they hallucinated Sherlock Holmes in the universe’s most expansive rippling tent, losing his shit to The Grid.