With great power comes great responsibility

by Charlotte Otter

Another weekend, another festival – but this time New Noise is going as a steward. Can we stay sane without drugs while laden with authority?

"If you’re lucky you get really good shifts – ones minimising the amount of bands and hours sleep that you miss due to fire-watching duties, wristband-checking and finding those oh-so-elusive lost children."

Tent? Check. Welly boots? Check. Acceptance letter from the Oxfam team? Check. Another weekend, another festival, but this time, instead of going as a lowly paying punter, I’m going as an Oxfam steward.

And it's an entirely different experience. For a start, you’re expected to know all the intricate workings and details of the festival, so that when the inevitable questions come flying at you (“What time does Tai Chi start in the morning?” “Where is the box office?” “Where can I find a vegan-friendly, gluten-free macrobiotic sandwich stall?”) you can shrug your shoulders, smile sweetly and point to the harassed-looking Oxfam supervisor in the corner and direct the crowd in their direction.

If you’re lucky you get really good shifts. That is to say, the three eight-hour-long shifts allocated to you by the powers that be at Oxfam HQ will will be set on the days before and after the festival, thus minimising the amount of bands and hours sleep that you miss due to fire-watching duties, wristband-checking and finding those oh-so-elusive lost children. If you’re really, really lucky, not only will you get good shifts, but you’ll get placed in the cushiest jobs. These are the ones in the arena, next to the stages – keeping one eye on the crowd and an ear on the music – or the ones under cover, so when it’s pissing it down, and the welly boots start leaking, it doesn’t matter one tiny bit.

I'm stewarding at The Green Man Festival, a relatively new weekender set in the Brecon Beacons down in deepest darkest southern Wales. It's one of the most stunningly beautiful settings to house bands, with rolling, heather-covered hills surrounding the site, emerald-green grass and a big country manor house presiding over the site. As Green Man is still taking tiny baby steps towards the higher echelons where larger, more famous festivals reside, it feels smaller and more intimate than Glastonbury or The Carling Weekend. Everyone’s laid back, here to have a good time, and no one seems to mind that it’s raining either. Probably ‘cause the line-up is so good.

Green Man bills itself as a folk festival and so the line-up is set accordingly. The acts this year include Tuung, Bert Jansch, Adem, Gruff Rhys, Television Personalities, Archie Bronson Outfit and Viking Moses. Friday night’s over-hyped main act Donovan prov to be more of a disappointment than a delight, with over-zealous name-dropping (“When I was in India with the Beatles…”), uninspired singing and flagrant use of dad jokes.

Luckily, local Welsh singer Euro Childs, with a voice like a young, overactive choir boy, manages to get the crowd going the following day with his beautiful melodies about love and monkeys (but not the two together) in his native tongue, warming them up nicely for Scotland’s 'Fence Collective': King Creosote and James Yorkston. The latter mostly plays songs from his latest album ‘KC Rules OK’ – slow, mournful tunes such as ‘Favorite Girl’ and upbeat numbers complete with his trademark accordion, The Pictish Trail offering back up vocals and guitars.

Meanwhile, in the far-flung depths of the FokeyDokey tent (about a five-minute walk from the main stage), Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid engage in some mind-blowingly awesome jamming. With Reid grooving away to the rhythm of his internal beat, a huge grin adorning his face and Hebden adding little electronic bleeps and twiddles to Reid's funky racket, it's hard to not sit there and feel a little overwhelmed at how talented the pair are – and how maybe you're missing out on some wider musical point that, if only you knew a little bit more about what was going on, all the noises would somehow combine together and make sense.

Other highlights include: A Hawk And A Hacksaw – a bizarre mix of accordion playing, cymbal bashing and Russian folk tunes expectedly played on the violin; Circulus –the Middle Ages meets folk rock, or so it seemed; and Elaine Palmer, a singer with the ability to make a room fall silent with a strum of her guitar and break hearts with the crack in her voice. All in all it's a fantastic festival experience – less frantic and drug-fuelled than most, but still, you can't have everything.

But as a first-time steward, it's a success. Yes, we're raising money for charity, meeting lots of new people and winning hundreds of Oxfam-branded karma points, but once the crowds start leaving the site, people come up to me, easily recognisable, adorned in my high-visibility orange Day-Glo jacket, and thank me personally for what a great job I’ve done throughout the weekend. It's a sense of pride that the you don't usual get from a music weekender. And all I did was point out where the toilets were.

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