The actor and musician spoke at our Guardian Live ‘Honest Playlist’ event at Green Man festival about growing up in Nottingham on the free-party scene, and the healing powers of music

On the Sunday afternoon of Green Man Festival in August, Samantha Morton joined me onstage in the Talking Shop tent to discuss her life in music. The celebrated actor and director is currently in cinemas as the scene-stealing Circe in The Odyssey, but she is also a musician. Later that day, she performed on the main stage later with Everything Is Recorded, the supergroup led by XL label boss Richard Russell, who also collaborated with Morton on her 2024 solo album Daffodils & Dirt. More recently, she voiced her character’s title song on The Odyssey soundtrack. “I love talking about music,” she says. “I never really get asked enough to talk about music.”

For this in-depth conversation with Guardian Live, Morton took us through her Honest Playlist of songs on various themes that have meant something to her, including the first single she bought, Musical Youth’s reggae-pop hit Pass The Dutchie, the song she’d do at karaoke, Michael Prophet and Ricky Tuffy’s Your Love, and a great song to fall in love to (Moments In Love by Art of Noise). She thinks about playlists often, revealing that she makes them whenever she needs to get into character for a role and used to “carry tapes in my back pocket everywhere I went because I couldn’t have bad music.”

Bannau Brycheiniog, Wales
The traditional fire might be banned this year, but festivalgoers are treated by energetic performances by Four Tet, Tamikrest and Westside Cowboy

Driving towards the bucolic Welsh valley that’s home to the Green Man festival feels a little apocalyptic this year. Charred peat and grassland smoulder on the hillsides, the remnants of one of the 20 wildfires that blazed through south and west Wales the previous week. The dangerously dry conditions pose a problem for the festival organisers: the traditional closing ceremony, during which a towering effigy of the titular Green Man adorned with punters’ handwritten wishes is set alight, has been cancelled. A sensible decision, but one that left longtime festival-goers with a serious question: where would all those wishes go?

Then, the heavens open. Manchester quartet Westside Cowboy pack out the main stage arena on Friday afternoon, thousands of soggy cagoules bobbing along to the band’s charmingly ramshackle blend of British indie and amiable Americana. “We were over there last year,” grins vocalist and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury, gesturing towards the significantly smaller Rising stage. They’re clearly over the moon – and it’s infectious. To close the set, the band down instruments – save a guitar and a handheld drum – and gather round one mic for a rallying performance of In the Morning. The recorded version sounds like a lullaby, but here they transform it into a euphoric boot-stomping finale.

Welsh festival helps asylum seekers gain confidence and skills while settling in to a new life in the UK

For many young people growing up in Britain, their first music festival is a rite of passage; watching live music in a field with thousands of others, sleeping under the stars, and spending time with friends old and new.

Green Man festival in Wales has been extending that formative experience to refugees and asylum seekers – who are offered training placements that help them develop valuable skills as they work to build new lives in Britain.