Womadelaide 1995
Botanic Park
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Friday night. Six o’clock. Entering Botanic Park from Frome Road. There is a steady procession of people -in groups, comfortably solo, wheeling bicycles, ferrying their kids, carrying various clobber for the first phase of a three day picnic. The queues run smoothly, tickets are checked , everyone is easy. Pick up your free program and you’re in.
Now in Adelaide for a third time, Womadelaide has an established script. We know what to expect and that’s what we get. The old firm, led by Rob Brookman, Colin Koch, UK Womad’s Thomas Brooman and many more, have created a sense of the effortless which belies the attention to detail (and sheer slog) behind the event. The layout is familiar – two mainstage areas and the tent (the favourite for many) for workshops and other musical bijoux. The food and drink stalls serving the multitude include the best known names in Adelaide’s Asian, Middle-Eastern, European,vegan and ocker gourmet victuals. The displays and craft vendors represent the postmodern caravanserai of our late century. At Womadelaide, time is not linear, it is multidimensional. Unreconstructed hippies mingle with goths, neo-punks, hip hopsters, yuppies, folkies, green workerists, rayban capitalists, management samurai and a large crowd just trying to stay cool and have a good time. Rarely is our social variety arrayed as visibly, or as amiably.
And the word has got around. Twice the number of interstate registrations this time. Ticket sale targets were reached five hours before opening and an estimated fifteen thousand came through the gates on Friday alone. A matter for some cultural jubilation. And a further vindication of those Rob Brookman hunches, back in the 1992 Festival, that musical eclecticism had reached epidemic proportions and a festival such as Womad would be just the ticket.
It is entirely appropriate that Adelaide should secure this event – and that the country should look to us to host it- because, smaller centre though we are, there is considerable musical nous here, sustained by dedicated record shops, a vigorous live music scene and a supportive music press, both mainstream and on the street. It has been said before, but Adelaide has produced some of the country’s best. If we pay some systematic attention to these things we could become a postindustrial Weimar like Seattle.
The Womadelaide program is denser this year, with fewer repeat performances. This time the emphasis is more on the M than the D in the acronym- World of Music and Dance. There is an evenness in the program – fewer standout acts but plenty to like. And, arriving into the green expanses of Botanic Park, monument to nineteenth century public benevolence, who better to be hearing than the splendid vocals of Vika and Linda . Paul Kelly’s Hard Love . Followed by others from the Bull Sisters’ increasingly widely-known debut album – I Know Where to Go, These Hands (dedicated to their Mum) and We Started a Fire. A highlight is the Etta James standard, Something’s Got a Hold of Me, their alternating blues solos enough to make your skin shiver. Thank you for clapping, they pucker, and the band- a trio including Black Sorrows guitarist, Wayne Burt – roars into their new gospel release, Up Above My Head I Hear Music in the Air.
With more than fifty performances over three days the ticket price at Womadelaide represents less than two dollars a set. On that calculation the Leningrad Cowboys are certainly worth a dollar twelve. Eight strong, and thumping everything from an accordion to a military drum the Cowboys are a triumph of hairdressing,with arcing quiffs rhyming with scimitar winklepickers and , for the two go-go lady persons, B.52’s with a grecian urn motif. The playlist is psychotic in its diversity- Lets Stick Together, No-one Like My Tooka (?) The Sabre Dance, LA Woman and their tour de force, the old Ryan twins hit – Eloise. Thank you very many, they gurgle in mock Boris accents while the crowd sways like corn. We love you because you are so rich and healthy looking.
Geoffrey Oryema is one of the happy returns from previous festivals and this time he has a three piece band , once more led by guitar incendiarist Jean-Pierre Alarcen. Oryema again manages to be magnificent – winning the crowd with his regal presence and an astute blend of indigenous African and richly produced pop. He plays songs from Exile and from his recent album Beat the Border. Among others, he meanders through The River – Paint me a picture, and let it flow. It flows- and so does Alarcen’s superbly sinuous guitar.
The drawcard rock act for Womadelaide is The Cruel Sea who launch into a seventy five minute set with great commitment but not much real impact. They aren’t helped by Stage One’s harsh trebly mix – excruciating also for Sierra Maestra earlier in the night. Jim Rumour’s virtuosic guitar lines- slides, fuzz, all the pedals- are often mangled although the rest of the band fare better. Lead singer Tex Perkins can’t seem to settle into his task, unable to capitalise either on the size of the arena or the nature of the occasion. He toils through the familiar canon – It’s All Right Because She Loves Me, and from the recent honeymoon- Naked Flame, Blame it on the Moon, Delivery Man and others. The band have a hard energy reminiscent of Sticky Fingers vintage Stones but Tex, for all his antics, can’t get in close. Maybe he’s meant to be a pub grokker. The faithful love him and the band play their spirited insrumentals. But out on the perimeter, the sound shredding our ears, Tex looks like a bird trapped in a window.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan closes the evening, under perfect stars, with a golden hour of his qawwali singing. Surrounded by a dozen singers and percussionists, Nusrat leads his consort through a maze of melodies, litanies and repetitions. It is like a sort of divine scat singing but so rich and satisfying to listen to that it can draw a whole paddockful of people into a peace that passeth, not only understanding ,but the midnight hour at Womad.
Saturday. It is hot to cook. Rafts of people follow the configurations of the shade, while the less inflammable gambol to the sounds of Tiddas, the Sunrize Band, Papa Wemba making a first stunning appearance, Justin Vali, Mouth Music, Christine Anu and Archie and Ruby.Performing only on the Saturday the Borderers play a popular set as does the American rap pioneer Gil Scott- Heron. His Amnesia Express begin half an hour late- the first and only time the trains don’t run on time. With a gravelly drawl, Gil coos to the crowd. This Ain’t Really Your Life (It’s a Movie) -over and over to the groovy slap bass and Hendrix riffs of the band. The long ,hypnotic extemporisings put the pause button on the crowd as Gil skips to Winter in America and, his final funk frolic, Celebrate.
Deprived of a crowd becaue of the time mix-up, the Mutton Birds play to a select but very admiring few. Singer Don McGlashan sings songs reminiscent of Tom Rapp’s Pearls Before Swine. A Thing Well Made satirises the gun trade, other, sweeter sentiments are heard with In My Room, Let Me In and in the lilting melodies of the final song, Anchor Me. The large turn-out for ALT is all the more ironic because the trio – made up of Hothouse Flowers, Whites and Finns- turns out some very lovely harmonies for some very fatuous songs. The new age flubbiness of Mandala for example- and others too insipid to think about.
It was Jah Wobble’s band who invaded the heart of Saturday night with a startling hour of Algerian, Asian and Carribean sound. Combining esoteric forms -including chanting, percussion and an undulating belly dancer- with a resonant, well balanced rock sound, the Invaders of the Heart are excitement itself. Building from a ten minute drum trio the band flowers into an extended version of Becoming More Like God which draws layers of synth, percussion and Justin Evans’s magnificent guitar work, into a musical ragout which stuns the crowd. We’d love to play for yer for another five ars, roars bassist Jah, former alumnus of John Lydon’s PiL, but there y’ar. Instead he blows a kiss into the mixing panel’s echo loop. As Jah says, it’s a big sincere show business kiss- from the bottom of me ‘eart.
For their final appearance Nusrat and the boys take to Stage One for the last two hours of Saturday night- as the huge crowd sprawls on the cool grass, weary from the day’s heat and the stimulation generated from more than two hundred musicians. This is the life. And certainly someone’s god’s plenty.
Sunday. Zap Mama, favourite for many, open the program followed by Kashtan and Bangarra Dance. In the milder conditions festival favouries Jah Wobble and the Invaders of the Heart return with an excellent facsimile of their previous set. Christine Anu is joined by various guests including, on her performance of My Island Home, David Bridie. A warmly received set. As is the second round by Mouth Music. Led by vocalist Jackie Joyce the band uses splashy dance rhythms to underlay the dreamy, elemental lyrics. Move On, Tomorrow, Forever to Travel and Colour of My Love – all from the Shorelife album- have the crowd gliding nicely to Stage One for shorter segments (too short) by Tanzanian Hukwe Zawose and Stella Chiweshe whose spare traditional musicmaking reminds us of the preponderance of electric sound in the festival. Adel Salameh and Krishnamurti Sridhar, on oud and sarod respectively, also perform superbly making us wish that they hadn’t been programmed against Nusrat on Saturday night.
Archie and Ruby assemble fellow Nunga performers- the Sunrize Band, Rough Image, Bangarra and Christine Anu – for a statement of land rights solidarity before settling into performances of their best-known work – And the Children Came Back, Changes and others. Kate Ceberano, the grown-ups’ Cruel Sea, brings in a snappy band and special guest Jean Paul Wabotai, for a popular but oddly discrepant show. Particularly strong is her version of the Rene Geyer song, Things Gonna Be Alright. Less so is Voice of Reason, a song quixotically bemoaning her undeniably MOR status. The lady surely doth protest too much.
After a second helping from Geoffrey Oryema the big blast finale goes to Papa Wemba. Leading his brilliantly tight six piece band and flanked by two women singers, the Zairean singer delights the crowd with vibrant, beaty African pop. Culled from his two Real World albums, Voyager and Emotion, Wemba’s playlist, with the exception of a soulful solo, is geared to peak energy. The band works like a train and its almost Salif and Remmy again. Show Me the Way, Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa and more. Merci beaucoup, exults Papa Wemba in his semiotically unsound Union Jack-et. Merci indeed.
There are bound to be some gripes about Womadelaide- not enough telephones, long queues, still some sound glitches. And the printed program. Great that it’s free. Not great that Rhythms magazine published only breezy advertising copy as notes on the acts. Womad isn’t meant to be a musicological seminar but the point of the exercise is to improve our cubits of knowledge about the many unfamiliar sounds we are being introduced to. More prefatory explanations, translations and song lists would be welcome.
That said, Womadelaide is an event of such calibre that each time it raises its own stakes almost impossibly. Leaving Botanic Park to the bell-like voice of Tibetan musician Yunchen Lamo we experience a kind of benediction. It is skilfully orchestrated, of course. But not even the most cynical can resist the feeling that for two days and three nights we have stepped out of the mousewheel.
The Adelaide Review, March, 1995.