Photos and Review: This Year’s Glorious Sunny WOMAD Festival Once More Confirms Music As One of Humanity’s Greatest Gifts

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In a world wracked by climate collapse and a uniquely shocking western-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip, reasons for believing that there is an essential goodness to humanity can be difficult to perceive, beyond the actions of brave climate activists and the millions of ordinary people who have repeatedly protested to try to bring an end to Israel’s indefensible industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinian civilians.

Ii may have been a small gesture in response, but, in its 42nd year, WOMAD, the world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel and colleagues in 1982 and located, since 2007, in the grounds of Charlton Park, a stately home in Wiltshire, brought its usual vivid and vibrant reminder that human beings, for all their failings, are also capable of great creativity and love.

I’ve been attending WOMAD every year since 2002 (with the exception of the COVID years, in 2021 and 2022, when it was cancelled) as part of Dot to Dot, a children’s workshop crew run by my wife Dot in the World of Children area, one of the festival’s great examples of inclusivity from its very earliest incarnation. As Chris Pritchard, one of WOMAD’s founders, explained in the liner notes for ‘Live at WOMAD 1982’, released last year, “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.”

Children have remained a key focal point of the festival ever since, making it a genuinely family-friendly experience, in contrast to the adult-only hedonism of so many festivals, with countless activities in the World of Children area, culminating in a procession of giant figures, made by the various workshop groups, on the Sunday evening, which snakes its way through the festival site, accompanied by samba bands and eager children, as the music on the stages takes a break to focus solely on the colourful themed figures, and the kids and their creations.

This year’s theme was super-heroes, and our figure, Queenie, was a charming, child-friendly giant bee, a reminder that, for life on earth, bees are the biggest super-heroes of all, pollinators responsible for the growth of much of our food, fruit and flowers.

While those of us involved in the children’s workshops are fully committed to entertaining and educating the festival’s children, WOMAD’s main attraction is, of course, its music, and this year, on six stages, over 80 artists from around the world demonstrated why, when so many animals on earth are understandably wary of humans, musicians so often have the power to attract those with whom we share this miraculous planet.

Many times over the weekend, it struck me that, although located, of course, in the capitalist world that dominates so much — too much — of human endeavour, music, when performed from the heart, rather than simply for wealth or status, is one of the most emotionally resonant of all our creative abilities.

As always, the festival’s founding spirit — providing a platform for extraordinary musicians from around the world, beyond what is often a fixation with western models of musical consumption — was abundantly in evidence, from headliners like Senegal’s Baaba Maal, who closed the festival’s main stage on Sunday evening, to brand-new or relatively unknown artists from every corner of the world.

Those of us who work in the World of Children don’t have the luxury of watching music for eleven or 12 hours a day, even if we had the stamina. Since 2022, we have moved out of the children’s workshop marquees, and we now take it in turns to walk around the children’s area for several hours a day inside the giant figure, interacting with the children (and also interacting via our child-sized mouse puppet, Oke, introduced in 2022, and who is now a permanent feature). We also put on a performance in the Happening Tent, on Saturday lunchtime, and this year we also engaged in al fresco workshops with the smallest children, while Queenie was on walkabout, making little bees out of baby potatoes.

Outside of the demands of our work, we’re free to wander from stage to stage seeking out acts we’d like to see or stumbling on unexpected gems, but even so we only caught glimpses of everything on offer, as I realised when I read the Guardian review, which featured so many artists that I hadn’t seen that I felt like I’d been at a different festival.

Despite this, what I saw was, for the most part, extremely rewarding, and often quite intensely politically charged. It was easy to forget, as we basked in summer sunshine that has been so generally elusive since the startling heatwave of 2021, when temperatures reached 40°C, that other parts of the world are rapidly becoming uninhabitable, with temperatures over 50°C recorded in ten countries so far this year, and with droughts adding to the deadly economic legacy of colonial and post-colonial exploitation.

This was prominently raised by Baaba Maal, when he called for an urgent end to fossil fuel use, and a transition to renewable energy — a message that was not at all theoretical, as, in March and April this year, the Sahel (including Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Chad) experienced extreme heatwaves that will only become more severe in the years to come unless drastic action is undertaken worldwide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I’ve been writing about climate change in relation to WOMAD since 2019, and it is noticeable that, since then, the climate change that Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg did so much to bring to public attention at that time has already begun to turn into runaway climate collapse.

While climate change is the biggest disaster story of all our lifetimes, even as its disastrous and ever-increasing impacts are, for the most part, still studiously ignored by politicians and the mainstream media, another disaster — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — was powerfully addressed through the inclusion in the programme of DAM, the most celebrated Palestinian hip-hop group, formed in 1999 by the brothers Tamer and Suhell Nafar and Mahmoud Jreri, from Lod in Israel, formerly the Palestinian city of Lyd, from which between 50,000 and 70,000 Palestinians were expelled during the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered and 700,000 exiled from their homes during the bloody establishment of the State of Israel.

I had the great privilege to see Tamer Nafar at ‘Palestine Vision’, an evening of Palestinian music at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, in April, which I wrote about here. and DAM’s appearance at WOMAD — featuring the three original members and the female rapper and singer Maysa Daw, who joined in 2015 — was electrifying, as they brought the realities of life under Israel apartheid (and the shadow of genocide in Gaza) to urgent, agonizing life, as Palestinian flags waved, and, as at the Tabernacle during Tamer’s set, I felt uncomfortably privileged to be living in safety, and ashamed that my government continues to support Israel’s unforgivable and genocidal brutality.

Afterwards, I hurried to the WOMAD Shop to buy their only available CD, 2019’s ‘Ben Haana Wa Maana’, and then headed to the backstage artists’ area to find them and to thank them for their set, even though I felt that everything I had to say was thoroughly inadequate.

Below are some other photos I took over the WOMAD weekend, with some background information that I hope you enjoy. Missing is a photo of a group that, unexpectedly, turned out to be one of my favourite acts — Henge, an almost uncategorisable four-piece from Manchester, who rocked the crowd at Molly’s Bar at the end of Sunday’s live performances with their charmingly playful mix of musical genres (everything from happy hardcore to Shadows-style Wild West guitar lines, all accompanied by spacey acid rock motifs), and their personae (complete with masks and space paraphernalia) as alien visitors from another planet, running the gamut from the ridiculous (the question, “Are there any non-humans in the audience?”) to the surprisingly profound, via the extended closing song, ‘Demilitarise’, in which the crowd was urged to sing along with the following, and surprisingly poignant appeal for world peace:

We demand
That the weapons of war
Are manufactured no more
Demilitarise

We demand
That we have in its place
The means to unite
And colonise space

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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 (see the ongoing 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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