Greenbelt - a sort of review
What Greene felt and Walt said, and what I felt about Greenbelt
Graham Greene, blessed chronicler (or imaginer) of religious darkness and conflictedness, said that an autobiography “may contain less errors of fact than a biography,” but that it was, “of necessity even more selective”. He called his own first stab at autobiography A Sort of Life, writing that “any conclusion” that it might draw “must be arbitrary”.
All storytelling is editing, shaping, mythologising, even stories we tell about ourselves: the things we experienced first-hand.
Reviews, too, are autobiography, if we’re honest. I can present objective facts about a film or restaurant, piece of music or a live experience, but eventually I am going to tell you more about myself than the thing that I’m reviewing. About my personal experience, defined by contexts of time and mood I may not even consciously perceive, but also by who I am (or believe myself to be). And that, too, is defined by a life of choices, influences and overlapping contexts.
Anyway, here’s my review of the new Greggs sausage roll.
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That’s how it feels trying to sum up even three days of Greenbelt festival for a newsletter. My experience will not be your experience, partly because all perception and experience is subjective, but also because Greenbelt is large. It contains multitudes.
Like Walt Whitman said, it contradicts itself. It has to, if we are to learn, to avoid the stifling restraints of homogeneity and cultishness.
You could go to Greenbelt and spend all your time in crafting, visual arts and poetry, or immerse yourself in contemplation and spiritual practice. You could check out band after band across the spectrum of genres and still miss ten great acts, only ever crossing paths with someone on a diet of panels and lectures as you tramped between the many and varied venues across the site. And that’s just if you chose to leave the beer tent.
I spent at least half a day at Greenbelt 2024 in the Jesus Arms (Greenbelt’s beer tent/garden) listening to acts on the main stage, catching up with people I only ever see at Greenbelt and drinking many pints of cider. It felt lazy, irresponsible even, willingly to miss out on an education, a revelation — and all the more delicious for that.
But you can drink anywhere.
You can’t as easily see Bob Vylan, bright meteor of visceral leftist rap-infused punk, perform a chest-rocking set that seems both more confrontational and more charming than anything you’ve seen in years. Will Greenbelt get letters about strong language and the endorsement of violence as a method of struggle against oppression? Almost certainly. Should they pay even the slightest notice? I don’t think so.
Greenbelt really does contain multitudes. For every super-handsome front-man shouting Cunt at racists in a protest song, there are at least a few more gentle and ethereal acts singing pacifist entreaties to kindness or making polite and angst-free fun the liturgy of their performance. If Greenbelt is a space for challenge and liberation from unhealthy orthodoxies, that ethos could (and in this case did) reasonably apply to polite liberals as well as squirming conservatives.
Plus, and this is very important: it was a hell of a set. So good. Delightfully heavy without sacrificing hooks. Aggressive and angry, but always spiced with humour (swinging a cricket bat, FFS) and a reason for the anger. A reason to stoke some anger in us all.
But it wasn’t all (or even mostly) like that. If Bob Vylan was a Molotov, Dutty Moonshine Big Band was a less threatening cocktail. Like a cafe patron. Or a grimey espresso martini made with happy house, big beat, big band, ska, and tequila. Whatever drink gets you to forget your sciatica and start jumping like it’s 1994.
Dutty’s blend of brass and electronica, acid (molly? ket?) jazz vocals and proper Bri’ish grime is fun on paper, but in person, in a crowd, it’s sensational. Having Dutty and the Bobs play back to back on the main stage was brave, brilliant and, as the kids probs no longer say: bangin’.
So fun.
And if you didn’t feel like dancing, other stages and acts were available. Special mention goes out to the wonderful Siskin Green, whose feminist hymns of justice, memory and worship are as wistful as they are wonderful. In the kind of set that could make a folk fan out of Sid Vicious, Siskin filled their marquee with kindness, humour, strength and a purity of musical expression that is still making me swoon.
Flamy Grant (who we got to interview and is a certified hoot in person even more than on stage) brought authenticity and heartbreaking lived experience as well as lashings of laughs in surprisingly earnest original songs — and a notable cover at Communion, too. The fact that so many Americans (and easily manipulated Britons) have made enemies and monsters out of drag artists was bizarre to most of us already. But anyone listening to Flamy will have found the hate-mongering as bafflingly foundationless as it is angering. We love our drag family.
We love the supercool Palestinian rap group DAM, too (“If the message is to shoot, I’ma shoot the messenger”) and David Benjamin Blower covering Johnny Cash (and covering Johnny covering Trent) and all the singers, musicians and audio experimenters too numerous and diverse to mention.
And that’s just the music. The talks were phenomenal. Richard Rohr is still the man of God we need but don’t deserve. Brian McLaren is still the cautious figurehead of a movement that is deconstructing faster and in ways the scale of which nobody could have predicted, and leading it with admirable restraint. Gail Bradbrook is somehow still able to make us laugh even as the climate crisis spirals.
As ever, there was too much intellectual content at Greenbelt to fit on your plate, nevermind finish before bedtime. Your festival would have been so different from mine.
Poets talked about abuse and found brilliant beauty in it. Panels on resistance, justice, praxis and power provided seeds of inspiration and information whose fruit might be genuine positive change in the world. And Palestine, Gaza, the Occupation and the genocide were, gratifyingly, never far from the centre of concern. Not very Christian festival can say that. Not many gatherings in the world can.
And I’m probably leaving things out. Things you saw or would have seen.
I can’t remember it all. The past and present wilt too soon as you leave that joyful bubble of thought and experience. That three-day residential in the Kingdom.
I just felt sad to leave.
No epiphanies this year, no sense, for me this time, of being healed in some strange way, or even the lingering sense of the Spirit long after leaving the grounds (though that has been my experience before). Just a conviction that this is a good space. A good time. A good thing in the world, and a privilege to be a part of, while it lasts (while any of this, any of us last).
I have heard people call Greenbelt a glimpse of heaven. I may have called it that too, myself. Perhaps it is.
It’s also just a festival. With mud and pricey food trucks and unglamorous queues and unspeakable portaloos. It’s getting rained on and getting muddy and sunburnt (on the same day) and the endless admin of 'where we’ll meet up, when are they playing, who are we going to and where is the car. (To butcher Whitman even more than I have done: ‘Who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me?’) It’s the tabernacle and your sopping fucking tent collapsing. It’s bread and wine and beer and hymns and fish and chips in a cardboard tray with a wooden spork.
The life of Greenbelt is no different from the life that Greenbelt speakers talk about when they teach us to avoid dualistic thinking. There is no ‘spiritual life’ separate from the mundane drudgery, suffering and struggle of the body, the practical, ‘real life’. Or festival life. It’s all blessed, it’s all broken, it’s all beautiful and bloody tiring. Beneficial, we hope. Better than not showing up. Better than a lot of things.
I am grateful for it.
But that’s just how I feel. It’s just a sort of festival.
On the podcast
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Hey. It’s that bit at the end where I break the fourth wall. What a weird conceit. But here we are. I wish I was still at GB. Which is different from last year when I was on a bit of a high for a while. I hope you’re doing okay if you went. I also feel weird posting something this meandering and unfocused. But I wanted to reflect. Soz.
Also. There’s another line I couldn’t shoehorn in from Song of Myself that I just have to share. It feels like being cold and tired and needing to leave before the end but also having some thinker on the programme later that you’ll have to miss. Or that thing where you promise to catch up in the pub but don’t manage it even though you want to (sorry Sarah!). Actually the whole poem makes me chuckle when I think about it in purely practical GB terms. But these are the lines I was thinking as I left: ‘Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?’
Lol