I’m Off to WOMAD, Back on Monday: Lee Perry and Seun Kuti on the Bill!

Since 2002, my family and I, along with a crew of friends, including our kids, have been regulars visitors at the WOMAD festival (World of Music Art and Dance), originally in Reading but, since 2007, at Charlton Park in north Wiltshire, where my wife runs children’s workshops, and we get backstage passes to mingle with the great and good of the world music scene.

The festival is a world music lover’s dream, and this year I’m looking forward to seeing my hero, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (now, astonishingly, 77 years old!), appearing with Max Romeo, with whom, of course, Perry produced the extraordinary “War Ina Babylon” album, in 1976, featuring “War Ina Babylon,” a perennial favourite (and the song that Bob Marley begged to have for himself), which I’m posting below. That album also featured other timeless classics, including “Chase the Devil“:

Also appearing is Seun Kuti, one of the sons of the inimitable Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician and political activist who waged musical war on the corrupt Nigerian establishment throughout his life. Seun has appeared at WOMAD before, in and I’m looking forward to seeing him again, as he and his band definitely capture the spirit of Fela. See below for his version of Fela’s song “Zombie,” satirizing the corrupt police, filmed at a concert in Brooklyn in 2011:

Have a great weekend, wherever you are. I need a break to recharge my batteries, as I seem to have been working non-stop on Guantánamo since early March, when I first wrote about the prison-wide hunger strike, which has now been ongoing for nearly six months. If you want to do something over the next few days, you can always write to the prisoners, as described in my article, “For Ramadan, Please Write to the Hunger Striking Prisoners at Guantánamo.”

See you on Monday!

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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).

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Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.