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.”
Photos: The WOMAD World Music Festival 2018 – Global Joy and Creativity, Threatened by Brexit
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Since 2002, the end of July every year has been defined for me by my participation in WOMAD (World of Music, Art and Dance), the world music festival founded in 1982, which I attend with family and friends, working at the children’s workshops. These involve hundreds of children making all manner of wonderful creations, and they culminate in a childrens’ procession on Sunday evening through the whole of the festival site.
I’ve taken photos of the festival every year, and have made them available on Flickr since 2012 — see the photos from 2012 here and here, from 2014 here, from 2015 here, from 2016 here and from 2017 here.
This year everyone expected that the heatwave that began at the end of May would continue throughout the festival, but although Friday, the first day of the festival (and the two days before when we were setting up) were deliriously hot, the weather turned on the Saturday, although the festival-goers’ spirits were generally undimmed.
I had a wonderful time this year, thanks to the great company, in particular, as well as — of course — great music as always from around the world. I also particularly enjoyed helping to facilitate the children’s creativity during the workshops, and also enjoyed playing with Richard from The Four Fathers at the Open Mic at Molly’s Bar (where my son Tyler joined us beatboxing) and also watching Tyler perform with his friends Caleb and Haroun, and, on Sunday evening, taking part in a wonderfully successful workshop with two other members of the BAC Beatbox Academy, Conrad and Nate, who came from London to give a WOMAD audience an exhilarating masterclass in the art of beatboxing. Read the rest of this entry »
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