My Photos: The Wet But Still Wonderful WOMAD Festival 2017

The WOMAD festival (World of Music, Art and Dance) takes place on the last weekend of July, and since 2002 I have attended the festival every year — first at Reading, and, since 2007, at Charlton Park in Wiltshire — with my family and friends, as my wife runs children’s workshops, culminating in the children’s procession on Sunday evening that snakes through the entire 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, and from 2016 here.

This year the weather was quite challenging, but we all had a great time anyway. The camaraderie was great in our camp, and there was wonderful music everyday — starting on the Thursday night before most people were there with my favourite band of the festival, who I had never heard of before — Bixiga 70, a Brazilian Afrobeat band — and an old favourite, Orchestra Baobab, from Senegal, and continuing with Junun (from Israel and Rajasthan) and Oumou Sangare (from Mali) on Friday, young rapper Loyle Carner (from Croydon), kora legend Toumani Diabate (from Mali) and Toots and the Maytals (from Jamaica) on Saturday, and whirling dervishes from Syria, Benjamin Zephaniah from the UK, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 from Nigeria, and US vibes legend Roy Ayers on Sunday.

My son Tyler also performed, at the Hip Yak Poetry Shack, and there was a wonderful procession, featuring the phoenix Dot designed. My band The Four Fathers missed the boat when it came to the Open Mic at Molly’s Bar, where we’ve played before, but we did play at the camp, along with other musically-inclined campers.

If you haven’t yet been to a WOMAD festival, I can’t recommend them highly enough. Please check out the UK site, and also the international site for other events worldwide.

Also see the album here:

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, 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 (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) 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 here for the US).