The Triumphant Return of the WOMAD Global Music Festival on its 40th Anniversary and Reflections on its History

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Check out my photos from this year’s WOMAD on Flickr here.

It’s hard to believe now, when hundreds of festivals take place every summer in the UK, but back in 1982, when Peter Gabriel set up the first WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) in Shepton Mallet, only a handful of festivals took place on a regular basis; primarily, Reading Festival, which had evolved from a jazz festival first established in the 1960s, and which was, by the early ‘80s, dominated by heavy rock, Glastonbury Festival, revived in 1979 after its hippie origins in 1970 and ’71, and the Stonehenge Free Festival, which had been taking place since 1974, and which was growing larger every year — eventually prompting the Thatcher government to suppress it with unprecedented violence in 1985 at The Battle of the Beanfield.

Promoting music from around the world was a bold move back in 1982. Although Bob Marley had firmly put reggae and Jamaica on the map through his extraordinary global success in the 1970s, few other performers from Jamaica or elsewhere had crossed over prominently into the western mainstream.

Gabriel, however, as he explained ten years ago, on WOMAD’s 30th anniversary, became fascinated by world music after the murder of the black activist Steve Biko in apartheid South Africa in 1977. As he explained to the Guardian, he “was thinking of writing a song about Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid activist who died in police custody in 1977, when he came across a Dutch radio station playing African music”, and “was sufficiently entranced to explore further and work these influences” into his subsequent record, ’Biko’, released in 1980, a ”graceful, haunting” song that “became one of the first songs about apartheid by a major western artist.”

As Dorian Lynskey explained in the Guardian article, “The same year, he began dreaming up a festival that would offer a platform to some of the artists he had recently fallen in love with.” At the time, “the term ‘world music’ didn’t even exist”, and Gabriel described music from around the world as generally being regarded as “an academic pursuit rather than a vibrant, sexy or spiritual thing.”

Despite Gabriel’s enthusiasm, and an impressive line-up of 60 artists from over 20 countries, mixing performances by artists including the Drummers of Burundi and the Musicians of the Nile with prominent UK acts including Gabriel himself, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Beat and Simple Minds, “Ambition got ahead of reality”, as he explained, adding, “We went in there with evangelical fervour and we thought everyone else was going to be as excited as we were. It became a nightmare experience when we realised there was no way we were getting the tickets to cover our costs.”

The festival only survived because it was bailed out by Genesis, Gabriel’s former band, staging a one-off reunion as a fundraiser. It then moved around the country throughout the 1980s, introducing those attending to an array of music legends from around the world, including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N’Dour and Hugh Masekela, before settling at Reading Rivermead in 1990, where it continued to introduce audiences to performers like Thomas Mapfumo and Baaba Maal, and where it stayed until its move to its current home, at Charlton Park in Wiltshire, in 2007. Throughout this period, it also expanded to include festivals in other countries — including Cáceres in Spain, and WOMADelaide in Australia. Since 1988, and the first international WOMAD festival at Roskilde in Denmark, WOMAD festivals “have been staged in more than 30 countries, as far and wide as New Zealand, Chile, Gran Canaria, Finland, and Mexico”, as Access All Areas noted in a detailed article in June.

WOMAD’s focus on children — via workshops and the children’s procession

My first WOMAD was in Reading in 2002, when my wife Dot and I — just days after our wedding — began working, with other friends and families, on the children’s workshops that are such a huge part of the WOMAD experience, and have been from the beginning.

As Stephen Pritchard, one of the founders of WOMAD, explained in the liner notes for ‘Live at WOMAD 1982’, released last week, “A huge procession of children opened the [first] festival, wearing masks and wielding musical instruments made with the help of the teaching pack. Giant Indonesian puppets, created by Welfare State International, led them to the main stage.”

I was delighted to read that the very first WOMAD had opened with a “huge procession of children”, because it so firmly established a template that remains in place to this day — tents full of artists and craftspeople running workshops for the festival’s children, culminating in the children’s procession on the last evening, as the music comes to a halt on the stages, and samba bands lead giant figures snaking though the festival, accompanied by hundreds of children wearing the hats and carrying the objects they’ve been making over the weekend, while thousands of festival-goers line the route.

In addition, the festival’s family focus also means that it is constantly adapting to its changing demographics, as its children grow up. Our son Tyler, who is now 22, was just two years old at our first WOMAD, and has grown up with the festival as part of his life ever since, as have so many of the festival’s youth, first wheeled around in buggies, then careering around the festival site as children, as teenagers, and now as young men and women with their own attachment to the music on offer, which has, over the years, adjusted to reflect their changing tastes.

Some of these changes have involved putting on DJs, for example, in areas largely taken over by young people, although other changes have involved that economic bottom line that so nearly sank WOMAD in its first year. As Peter Gabriel explained ten years ago, the UK festival, at that point, had “only made a profit three years out of the last 30”, requiring him undertake a North American tour to keep it going, but there have also been other challenges. WOMAD barely survived its first year at Charlton Park, when heavy rain, in the run-up to the festival, turned the entire site into a mud bath, and this was followed by the global economic crash of 2008, which dealt a major blow to the viability of international touring.

More particularly, the Tory governments we’ve been plagued with since 2010 have enacted ever more racist policies, often refusing to issue visas to touring artists, particularly from Africa, a situation only made worse since the dreadful, suicidal, isolationist Brexit vote in 2016.

WOMAD’s evolution

Undeterred, however, the festival’s organisers seized on the ‘hostile environment’ — and tightened economic circumstances — as an opportunity to finally do away with the lingering prejudice that saw most British and American acts excluded from the festival unless they played authentic folk music by opening up the programme to acts like the Alabama 3, who rocked the Siam Tent with their hard rocking acid house-tinged gospel and country pastiche in 2011.

It may have been necessity that finally did away with the inadvertent ghetto that the ‘world music’ tag was digging itself into, but the outcome has been inspiring, with all manner of homegrown acts — Leftfield in 2018 and Orbital in 2019, to name just two examples — now joining the festival’s traditional international base for what is now more generally defined as ‘global music’ rather than ‘world music’, although I wouldn’t like to give the impression that I haven’t experienced the giddiest heights of musical pleasure from numerous acts who have made it through the UK’s racist dragnet in all these years, some particular highlights being the extraordinary Manganiyar Seduction from Rajasthan in 2012, the desert blues of Tinariwen in 2015, Brazil’s Bixiga 70 playing Afrobeat and Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab in 2017, and Salif Keita in 2019, when, as I explained at the time, “There were times in his set when the music took off to such an extent that I had no doubt that I was watching the greatest band in the world.”

The festival’s last great challenge, of course, came in 2020 and 2021, when it was shut down completely, firstly because of Covid (in 2020), and then last year because of the government’s refusal to underwrite insurance costs. As Access All Areas explained, discussing the situation with Chris Smith, WOMAD’s director, “WOMAD’s organisers have overcome their fair share of challenges in the past four decades, but one of the most considerable came last summer when they were forced to cancel the event at the eleventh hour due to a lack of Government support. Rather than choosing to back independent festivals owned by UK businesses, the Government instead used its Events Research Programme to enable festivals staged by US conglomerates to take place the same weekend.”

As Smith said, “That was emotionally and psychologically challenging for everybody.” He added, “I won’t pretend that financially we’re as strong as we were, but it wasn’t the disaster that it might have been because we have good long relationships with a huge number of our suppliers, and they supported us.”

WOMAD 2022

And so to this year, and the festival’s triumphant return. As Smith noted in June, “Despite ticket prices having been raised … due to soaring supply chain-related production costs”, they were “selling faster than ever.” As he explained, “We are lucky to have long-term relationships with many of our audience — around 80% are returners — so having those relationships, that trust and the respect on both sides, makes a real difference.”

That sense of WOMAD as one huge family is readily apparent to those of us who work there, as we see the same faces year after year-end hangout with them in backstage camping and in the children’s area, but with 80% of attendees being regulars, it also makes the entire festival into a kind of super-friendly alternative town of 40,000 people that comes to life every July.

This year, WOMAD’s global reach and diversity was as exciting as ever, with numerous powerful women from Africa very vocally challenging sexism and exploitation, and with standout performances, from my perspective, from Mali’s Fatoumata Diawara, and, from the UK, Kae Tempest and The Hempolics, although, as I explained in a post on Facebook, “there were many other great performances, and I’m well aware that there were probably other acts that I never even saw who would also have blown me away.”

As I also explained, “WOMAD is never just about the music, however”, and this year, after running children’s workshops every year from 2002 to 2019, Dot came up with an idea for a full-size lion, as featured on WOMAD’s logo, to walk around the children’s area to mark the anniversary, and also to be part of a storytelling session, based on Aesop’s fable ‘The Lion and the Mouse’, for which the lion, voiced by Richard Clare, a key member of our WOMAD team, was accompanied by a small and sweet mouse puppet operated by my son Tyler, who brought Aesop into the 21st century by adding beatboxing to the mouse’s lion-freeing skills.

I’m pleased to say that the lion — and the mouse — were a big hit with the kids, as well as with all the adults we encountered while walking it to and from the backstage artists’ catering area, where it was displayed when it wasn’t performing, and we were all delighted to have been chosen to lead the children’s procession through the festival site on the Sunday evening.

And while the elephant in the room at WOMAD — the climate crisis — cannot be thoroughly addressed by a festival that involves touring artists, WOMAD is also doing its best to address these issues, banning traders from using single use plastics, and supporting, since 2014, “a waste to energy scheme”, meaning that, “after metal, wood, glass, and some plastics are removed for specialised recycling, 100% of our remaining waste is diverted from landfill and recycled into energy”, compared to just 16% recycling in 2012.

As WOMAD’s website explains, “The cleanliness of your campsite after the festival shows us that you care and don’t abandon tents and other waste. You have done this long before it was fashionable. Thank you. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t still waste but that you are already leaving less waste than any other comparable festival in the country.”

Additionally, this year, for the first time, compost toilets replaced some of the horrible chemical toilets that are a mainstay of festivals — and, I hope, will completely replace chemical toilets next year — and on energy use, as Access All Areas explained, ”Key initiatives include working with renewable power supply partner Ecotricity to switch from diesel generators to green power directly from the grid.” Chris Smith explained that, because WOMAD has a long lease at Charlton Park, “that enables us to make the investment into some real energy infrastructure that will enable us to power key pieces of infrastructure, including stages, from sustainable energy sources that are hard wired in.”

All that remains, then, is for us to get rid of the nasty racist government that is still blocking entry to the UK for so many foreign musicians. As Peter Gabriel explained to the BBC as this year’s festival started, in response to the BBC noting that “[s]ome artists have been unable to perform this year after they were refused UK visas”, “It’s damaging to the economy as well as to the cultural life of the country. We have absurd situations where with a group of five, three of them will get visas and two won’t.”

He added, “The sense of isolationism and populism and the way social media is manipulating polarisation to make profit, it’s very dangerous. I think the government should understand the importance of free-flowing culture. I am a passionate European and a passionate globalist. We need to melt those barriers and borders as fast as we can.”

I couldn’t agree more!

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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