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.”
Palestine Vision: An Astonishing Night of Music at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill as an Alternative to the Tainted Eurovision Song Contest
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On Tuesday evening (May 7), I was humbled, honoured and privileged to attend ‘Palestine Vision’, an evening of Palestinian music at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, London W11, which featured Palestinian musicians from the global diaspora of Palestinian refugees, as well as performances by Palestinian musicians flown in from the Occupied Territories, and from Israel itself. The programme is available here.
Sadly, but understandably, there were no musicians from the Gaza Strip, essentially because those musicians who have not been murdered by Israel since October 7 — as part of targeted bombings aimed specifically at cultural figures, or via the ceaseless and indiscriminate carpet bombing — are trapped in what, for many years, has been described as an “open-air prison”, but which, since Israel’s genocide began seven months ago, has become the world’s largest concentration camp.
The event was organized by the Bethlehem Cultural Festival, established in 2020, and was specifically labeled as an alternative to the Eurovision Song Contest, timed to coincide with Eurovision’s first round of semi-finals, prior to the grand final this Saturday, in Malmö, Sweden, in which, disgracefully, Israel is taking part, despite being engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
