The sheer quantity of festivals on the calender in the U.K alone has begun to reach far into the hundreds. Every 60’s throw back farmer with a field in Suffolk or any double-barreled named family with an estate in some sparse woods between villages in Norfolk seem to be more than happy to allow the cider swilling, barefoot, dancing masses to camp with them for three days. What’s becoming harder and harder is deciding which ones to get yourself to.

Green Man Festival in Glanusk Park, Wales felt right this time around; It was my birthday weekend, it was a relatively young festival (6 years old), only 15000 tickets and 100 bands on a small beautifully kept site which, as local legend would have it, harbors 3,000 mischievous spirits… cool.

All of this and, as a completely independent music festival, not a pint of Carling or a pink skinned, sun stroked Oasis fan in sight.

The main stage at Green Man sits in a carved out grassy amphitheater below the giant Sugar-loaf Mountain and holds the one of the best views from any festival I’ve been to. As the day wears out it’s a perfect place to lay and wait for bands to kick off. The Green Man Pub Stage and the Far out Tent offer more beautiful views and, as it turned out, some ludicrously underrated bands, while the cinema and literature tents sit side by side waiting for the 4am night hawks.

Of course, there was also all kind of wonderful musicians waiting in the wings, all greased up with album of the year hype lubricant: The totally free and searing sound of The Animal Collective’s gorgeous Meriweather Post Pavilion, the incredibly recorded Grizzly Bear opus, Veckatimest, and the darkly tinged twee beauty of Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin Career, all ready to be unleashed upon a blissfully happy crowd. Not to mention, snake hipped geek face Jarvis Cocker, the immensely powerful Dirty Three, woodsman Bon Iver and rockers Wilco set to close down things on Sunday night.

After a seriously unquiet festival eve-night, it took Liverpool’s Wave Machines and few pints of hangover curing Love Monkey Ale (no… really) to get things off the ground on Friday morning. Their darkness and sunshine disco pop mimicking the weather and getting the very, very manageable crowd digging their heels in to the grass. While over at the Far Out Tent the amazing Battles-esque math-rock grind of Warp Record’s Pivot took the crowd to a darker place with an incredibly powerful albeit short set of massive complex rhythms and the Welsh sun shone on. After further lessons in percussion from the smashing Gang Gang Dance it was the closing love it or hate it set from The Animal Collective that ruled the day for me. Notoriously sketchy live shows after major LP releases are often reported with the psych influenced (now) three piece. Bored with the songs they’ve perfected for their record they often stretch to incorporate new and unheard material, which on a LP tour can be met with a little disdain. Not here though, as they bashed through the best tracks on Merriweather and into Strawberry Jam’s epic Fireworks and beyond.

The second day held many, many highlights including a stand out set from The Phantom Band, a completely wasted set (in the best possible way) from ex Beta Band-ers The Aliens, a pitch perfect (in fact, perfect in every way) Grizzly Bear performance and an other-worldly sounding Bon Iver pitching himself somewhere between a one man devil possessed gospel choir and the humble cabin man whose short and sweet debut long player, For Emma, Forever Ago instantly put itself onto everyone’s best of lists in 2008. The real surprise, for me, came with the slow talking, hard-dancing, genius-bantering, juggernaut of Mr Jarvis Cocker. I stood slack jawed as the ex Pulp front man freewheeled, convulsed and karate kicked his way though a few sly stompers from his second solo record Further Complications.

There was no let up on Sunday either with the gorgeous Rozi Plain, The Three Craws and The Pictish Trail one, two, three-ing it over at the Far Out Tent and soothing some very very bad heads indeed with their clanking folk-ing goodness as we lay in the, miraculously, still shining sun. From what I thought was a slightly off step set from the usually beautiful Camera Obscura, the wonderful Rodriguez performed some classics from his infamous, almost lost 1970 record Cold Fact, including, Sugar Man and made everything better before the epic and festival-beating set from the Dirty Three brought their soaring, heartbreaking instrumentals down upon everyone’s blissed out heads, shamelessly leaving Wilco to pick up the pieces and send us all off to our tents, safe in the knowledge that everything was kinda gonna be OK… maybe.

I guess, all in all, to read through this right after I pieced together my hazy steps from the four days under the welsh sky, it might seem from a readers perspective to be “just another small festival” but that really couldn’t be any further from the truth. Green Man is like most great things in life, small but perfectly formed and in all the right places, loud when you want it to be and quiet when you need it, nothing ever reaches “hassle” status and best of all, it’s far closer than you think (I returned in 4 hours from our campsite in Wales to London).

Put simply, its perfect in every way, totally stress free and has a feel to it that unique to any festival on these fair isles. So next year, if you need a break from an underage Carling Tent wonderland full of spandex and hair… pop Green Man on your calender.

… and seeing as it’s my birthday you can buy me a drink.

Mine’s a Love Monkey.