The first Womad festival reviewed – archive, 1982
Shepton MalletThis was a strange, dreamlike occasion where it was hard to know if we were travelling 10 years back into the past or 10 years forward into the future. The Womad (“A World of Music, Art and Dance”) festival offered a stunning range of performers – Indian singers, Chinese dancers, African pop – to an audience schooled on rock. It provided a focus for rock’s new eclecticism and could well mark the birth of a new era, a melting pot of international styles.
But this festival was set in the West Country, an old hippy stronghold, and bore many of the hallmarks of those Sixties’ gatherings. There were the scarves and kaftans, the painted faces, the tatty clown costumes – all that arch, cloying, playground spirit that made hippies so tiresome.
At Womad these Glastonbury survivors sat on the grass alongside London punks whose own dress code is rapidly going ethnic. Meanwhile on stage the Chinese song and dance troupe, Tianjin, acted as polite cultural ambassadors, announcing a love song entitled If You Want To Meet Me Please Come To Our Youth Brigade.
All very surreal. But it was marvellously organised, and in the end the music turned this into a magical event. With five stages grouped around a carnival site, you could see the Dhrupal Singers from India, Prince Nico Mbarga’s glorious Nigerian High Life, King Trigger’s Jungle Rock, an Indonesian orchestra and the Jamaican trombonist, Rico, within a few hours of the afternoon.
After the daytime concerts, which allowed us to step into so many different worlds, the main evening performances, with their rock star line-ups, seemed drearily conventional: Saturday was enlivened by the drummers of Burundi, who made Echo and The Bunnymen seem gloomily off form.
The main star of the event, Peter Gabriel, deserves credit for his help in organising and financing Womad. But his own performance turned the music of Africa and the east into empty rock theatrics – a type of cultural imperialism which the new generation should at all costs try to avoid.