Photos: Mud and Magic at WOMAD 2015

See my photo set on Flickr here!

I have been visiting WOMAD — World of Music, Arts and Dance, the world music festival established by Peter Gabriel and a number of colleagues in 1982 — as an artist since 2002, helping my wife run children’s workshops with a number of other friends, and this year our posse — eight adults, five teenagers and two children — survived the rainiest WOMAD in our collective experience, although it couldn’t dampen our spirits, or that of WOMAD as a whole. (See here and here for my photos from 2012, and here for 2014).

WOMAD has been based at Charlton Park in Wiltshire, in the grounds of a stately home, since 2007, notorious in WOMAD’s history as the year when the new site was churned up before the festival even began and turned into an unparalleled mudfest as soon as the festival-goers arrived. This year wasn’t quite as arduous as 2007, but it wasn’t far off. Friday began and ended with rain (often torrential), and although Saturday was sunny, it began raining again on the Sunday and didn’t let up much for the rest of the day — although there was a wonderful interlude when the sun shone for the children’s procession, an annual highlight of the festival.

So while we were inconvenienced and tested by the weather, we continued to take in the great music that is always on offer, and this year my discoveries included Pascuala Ilabaca, a Chilean singer and accordion player, with the voice of an angel, the powerful African reggae singer Tiken Jah Fakoly, and the Atomic Bomb! Band playing the music of the reclusive Nigerian funk star William Onyeabor, while old faves included the Tuareg desert blues of Tinariwen.

As always, the music is just part of WOMAD’s magic. Our children’s workshop collective always has a great time, both at our camp and out and about in the festival as a whole, and this year was no exception. As well as there being great food as always (hello, Madras Cafe and the Goan Seafood Company), there was excellent music backstage, because, in the last year, I have got a band together, The Four Fathers, and our campsite playing is rather better than it used to be. On the last night, we played an open mic session at Molly’s Bar, where we hit the crowd with my songs ‘Fighting Injustice’ (a roots rocking anthem that everyone seems to love) and ‘Tory Bullshit Blues‘, as well as ‘Rebel Soldier’, an old English folk song that I put to a reggae tune back in the 1980s in Brixton. All are featured on our debut album, ‘Love and War’, available here for just £7/$11 + P&P.

Later that night, we sat up for three hours playing pretty much everything we have ever learned to play, in an epic session that drew in a few passers-by and was wonderful to take part in. In the absence of two of The Four Fathers — Bren Horstead (drums) and Andrew Fifield (flute and harmonica) — Seb Sills-Clare (flute), Will Pearce Hamilton (percussion/guitar) and my son Tyler (beatboxing) got involved, joining myself on lead vocals and guitar, Richard Clare on guitar and backing vocals and Louis Sills-Clare on bass, and I was sorry when it all had to come to an end. We are currently looking for gigs for the autumn, and festival gigs for next summer, so do get in touch if you’re interested in having us play.

And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the photos.

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 debut album, ‘Love and War,’ was released in July 2015). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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).

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