f44 Field Good Music
WOMAD meets Brexit and survives (sort of). Cathia Randrianarivo reports on the annual world picnic. Judith Burrows gets the shots.
A
nother year, another opportu- nity to discover, dance to, and enjoy great music from around the world. I want to write “the best music from around the
world” but I won’t, because if you’ve been keeping abreast of the press cover- age around WOMAD (before, during and after), you will have no doubt noticed that it was a little different this year – it wasn’t as “World-y”. Why? Well, as direc- tor Chris Smith, founder Peter Gabriel, and others have opened up about, the tight- ening up of UK immigration laws since (enter ominous theme tune) ‘Brexit’ has meant artists from beyond our shores have been prevented from or are less inclined to come here to perform.
Ahead of the festival, news of super- stars (and scene veterans) Amadou & Mari- am, Daara J, Tal National and Amparanoia (long-time favourites at fRoots HQ: they played at our 25th birthday party!) head- lining got me looking forward to another weekend in Malmesbury – that and the prospect of more excellent shopping and world-food-eating opportunities. But on the drive over on Friday afternoon, I spent a bit more time browsing the line-up and two elements struck me: 1) the headliners included artists I didn’t recognise, at all, and 2) the mix of artists had really changed compared to previous years.
First, let’s take the headliners. Prime time (9–11 pm), prime stage (Open Air stage), on Friday night was reserved for Leftfield (presenting Leftism Live) from the UK. Maybe we’ve been living under a rock, but neither I nor my festival pal Nicole knew of Leftfield, let alone had lis- tened to their clearly influential 1990s first LP Leftism. I write “influential” here because as via the printed programme, “NME suggested, it still feels as though it represents the future of sound… This is no mere nostalgia trip. This is music every bit as vital and vibrant as the day it was born.” This was clearly an iconic moment – confirmed via WOMAD’s Instagram account saying “What a NIGHT!” under an aerial snap of the crowd in their thousands at the Open Air stage – but we genuinely felt like we’d missed a whole musical movement, somewhere, somehow.
As we waited for Tal National’s set at 11.30 pm in front of the relatively smaller BBC Radio 3 stage, eating our yearly Hot Flavours jerk chicken with all of the sides (if you don’t know, get to know), I felt like I was in a twilight zone. Here I was, one hour and fifteen minutes in waiting, for a band from Niger who I knew I would be going nuts over – rhythmically and emo- tionally, they make me so happy and as hard as I try I can’t not dance – perfect for a Friday night! It felt surreal because as we waited, we bopped to what sounded like the same track blaring endlessly from the Open Air stage. At one point, Nicole had crossed the site to go to the ladies’, search out some dinner, buy half a pint, trekked back over to me, and her first comment was “Are they playing the same song or is it just me?” I had to laugh because my con- fusion at not knowing who Leftfield were made me feel like that odd kid in the play- ground again.
Second, the mix of artists has very obvi- ously changed. One of the first comments I made on the drive over was how a lot of the bill felt very “Europe and fusion” (I don’t like this word to describe anything but it’s the best description for Havana meets Kingston meets Australia, or Haiti meets France, or more subtly Côte d’Ivoire meets France via Dobet Gnahoré). The share of music from “across the globe” was over-indexing heavily on Europe, North America, Africa and North Asia, and severe- ly under-indexing on South-East Asia, Cen- tral/South America and, with the exception of Haiti (which we loved), island music.
I can only say all of this because I have been to WOMAD every year since I was seven and have seen the bill change and evolve, but also I work in data analytics and I find insights like this fascinating! The sad summary of it all is that a high proportion of this challenge is out of the WOMAD festival organisers’ hands. Chris Smith’s interview with Radio Times two days before the festival referenced how WOMAD had reached out to a mix of global artists but were actually rejected, due not only to the huge cost – financially and time-wise – for artists trying to get to the UK, but also the humiliation from the process they would have to undergo. This,
physically and mentally, hurts me. Having grown up around ‘world music’ (and WOMAD) I can’t marry up the Britain I know and love, which embraces other cul- tures from across the globe, with this obvious challenge that those not from Britain now feel like this country has cre- ated a huge hurdle for them to leap over. And to top it all off, Brexit has weakened the value of the pound so, aside from hav- ing the opportunity to “grace our devel- oped-country shores,” coming to Britain is no longer as attractive an earner for pro- fessional artists from developing coun- tries. Talk about double standards.
Political chat aside, I can’t fault WOMAD. Even with all of the above skirt- ing around the edges of the event, the organisers still managed to execute anoth- er wonderful weekend of music, uphold- ing its ethos of sharing the world’s music “that you might not have heard of” (the masses, not us specialist folk!) to an audi- ence that might love it and would not have otherwise heard it.
P
articular highlights for us over the weekend included our won- derful cover star Moonlight Ben- jamin from Haiti via France (think voodoo meets hard-hit- ting beats meets ethereal rhythms); the aforementioned Tal National from Niger – the four out of their five members who made it through our immigration process brought their hard-hitting party sounds that you’d struggle to not smile and dance the night away to; and headliners Amadou & Mariam from Mali, who had a huge crowd gleefully basking in the wonderful sounds of their country (despite the impromptu fifteen-minute British summer- time downpour), covering both new mate- rial and the classics – at one point I closed my eyes to and genuinely felt like I had been transported to a Dimanche à Bamako.
Daara J from Senegal may have been only two of the three original members but it didn’t sound like it; the energy, the sounds, the lyricism, the moves were all electric, rounded off nicely by a positive call out asking politicians to stop selling the “Western dream” to the youth of Africa, otherwise who would be left to
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