1996

Womadelaide

Murray Bramwell talks with Womadelaide organisers Rob Brookman and Thomas

Brooman about the World Music festival’s continuing success.

Adelaide’s Botanic Park is a green haven right in the centre of town. With

its majestic Moreton Bay figs and well-watered meadow, it is bounded by the

zoo on one side and the botanical gardens on the other. Not surprisingly, it

is a favourite spot for a scattered population of picnickers, joggers,

strollers, sketchers, spin bowlers and anybody else fancying a bit of

leisure sur l’herbe. However, next weekend, this quiet domain of nineteenth

century arcadian empire will be inundated with as many as fifteen thousand

fans, all ready for Womad’s three days of cultural surprise and musical

delight.

Womadelaide began as part of the 1992 Adelaide Festival, but for artistic

director Rob Brookman it goes back to 1989 when he first visited the small

Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe Bay. There he first saw the Sufi

qawwali singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan perform, and there he met his future

associate, Womad UK organiser, Thomas Brooman. As it turned out, the two had

more in common than very similar surnames. For some time Brookman had been

looking around for just this sort of music event.

“It goes back to my work with the Adelaide Festival over many years,” he

recalls. “And it came to a head with Lord Harewood’s program in 1988 with

its mini-festival of Indian music and dance, and Clifford Hocking’s 1990

festival which included Ali Akbar Khan and Mercedes Sosa. I really wanted to

pick up strengths already there.”

When Brookman got the nod to direct the 1992 Adelaide Festival he started to

look about. But he didn’t want just to add sixteen separate concerts within

the Festival program-“you’d create internal competition and it simply

wouldn’t work. I thought of having an outdoor festival but I had arrived at

what I wanted before I arrived at Womad. Then I came across this stuff about

Womad in the UK and I thought, ‘Here is exactly what I’ve been thinking

about and someone else is doing it. Great ! ‘”

This Womad, Brookman had read about, was an acronym for World of Music, Arts

and Dance and began in 1980 as an idea shared by Thomas Brooman, Bob Hooton

and leading edge singer Peter Gabriel, who, as patron and financial angel,

has supported this project, for international understanding through music,

since its initial festival at Shepton Mallett in 1982. Vital to the

operation, Gabriel’s record label Real World, based near Wiltshire in South

West England, provides an important promotion and sales adjunct to the live

performances.

Womad has had some bumpy times with heavy festival losses in the UK and

Europe and an unsuccessful Lollapalooza-style tour in the US. But since a

1993 bailout from Gabriel and restructuring which brought closer links

between Real World and the Womad festival operations, things are on the

rise. Virgin Records has signed another three year deal with Real World and

Womad concerts are scheduled this year in Spain and Austria as well as

Reading, Morecambe and London’s Barbican Centre.

But it was an earlier Morecambe Bay that provided the idea for Rob Brookman.

Although, he thought it could be improved on. As he recalls it, “the town

itself was pretty tawdry, there were no beautiful parks so the best that

could be done was a big circus tent on a parking lot behind a row of shops.

It was populated with ferals and vegans in VW vans, some three or four

thousand people jammed into this very urban event.”

Thomas Brooman is the first to describe Morecambe as “eccentric” – but the

Womad concept itself was to get a considerable leg up when the UK organiser

flew to Adelaide for talks about a fixture in 1992. Looking about for venues

Brooman could see, as he rather ornately puts it, that “the culture of the

outdoor festival which had grown up in Europe, combined with the Adelaide

environment and climate, makes for a complete marriage of cultural

opportunity and setting.”

The original plan was to use the Long Gully ovals in the Belair National

Park as the Womadelaide venue. It was even announced in the brochures. Then

the Country Fire Service and the police stepped in, concerned that a late

summer bushfire in the national park would be quite bad enough without

having ten thousand extra people camped on the Long Gully ovals. It was then

that Brookman moved to Plan B – and what has now proven a prophetically good

idea – and approached the Botanic Gardens administrators and the City

Council for permission to locate at Botanic Park.

The rest is almost history. Under the aegis of the 1992 Adelaide Festival,

Brookman presented the first Womadelaide with a program including Nusrat

Fateh Ali Khan, Remmy Ongala, Youssou N’Dour, Trio Bulgarka, Sheila Chandra,

Crowded House and scores of others.

It proved an important turning point for the Festival, in fact it was a coup

of a very quiet kind, in simultaneously providing an increased multicultural

program with an openly popular one. It has always been a Womad tactic to mix

sufi chanting with Siouxie and the Banshees, the Indian classical violin of

Subramaniam with the reggae soul rhythms of Remmy Ongala or Jah Wobble’s

Invaders of the Heart. And, as well as budgeting a generous subsidy to this

fledgling event, Brookman used the considerable resources of the Adelaide

Festival’s technical and organisational expertise to ensure the best

possible production values.

To consolidate as a biennial, not-the Festival-year event, Brookman followed

in 1993 with an even more successful venture. Numbers were up – from 34,000

attendances in 1992 to 42,000 the following year. The formula was starting

to become established, audiences were now familiar with the format and the

venue. The sound stages were relocated- after causing some grief to sections

of the zoo population the previous year, the catering ran more smoothly and

at the same high standard, and the headliners were as engaging as ever.

Salif Keita visited, Peter Gabriel himself participated. Word on Womad was

very good.

This year sponsorship is solid and in the Kennett-style rush to claim major

events there has been boisterous political support. Premier John Olsen

launched the program and Arts minister Di Laidlaw gingerly passed around

amber coloured multicultural solidarity ribbons. But that is all fine by Rob

Brookman – and his associates in what is now the private production company,

APA – if it secures what is still a risky venture.

“It still takes a big leap of faith in saying – ‘Yes. we can do an event

which includes a whole lot of artists that nobody’s ever heard of, and who

don’t get airplay on radio stations, and who aren’t heard on television, and

who are probably only in absolute diehards’ record collections.’ If we had

gone to AME (Australian Major Events) in 1992 they would have been very hard

to convince. So when the Premier trumpets the event in the same breath as

the Adelaide Festival and the minister for the Arts gets up and espouses the

cause of world music and racial tolerance, I couldn’t hope for anything

better.”

But while no-one is likely to clone Womad the way the Big Day Out has

spawned imitators, the fourth time round is also less formidable than the

first. As Thomas Brooman notes, international communication has made life

both more local and more global and the fifteen years of Womad have been

paralleled by a general increase in cultural diversity. In all forms of

popular music hybridisation is taking place – like 1997 Womad act, the

Afro-Celt Sound System, with its blend of Irish, African and rave rhythms.

“They have sold more than 100.000 albums for Real World,” Brooman reports,

“which is very big for us. With this changing audience for music and all the

sampling and technology that is going on, musicians are going to be looking

around the world more and more. ”

“Twenty years ago Womad would be unimaginable,” Brookman observes.”Other

cultures were seen as too alien and the number interested in the exotic was

limited or reduced to some commercial common denominator like Georgian or

Caribbean music. Until the seventies, cultures other than western cultures

were put in a basket of simple flamboyant exoticism, whereas now, people’s

ears are tuning up in a different way. Fine music has been shaken also –

with early music, Gregorian chant and recent composers like Gorecki and

Gavin Bryars. The Kronos Quartet has never played Womad but they surely

would fit in.”

But while commercial broadcasters avoid the diversity of world music, ABC

programs such as The Planet under the stewardship of Lucky Oceans and Robyn

Johnstone continue to chart the Womad universe, as does Triple J and SBS

radio and television. Another interesting feature of Womadelaide is its

audience range. Brookman describes the demographic as “huge” – from the

tribes of Triple J to Baby Boomers and their families, to the septugenarian

subscribers of the Adelaide Festival. The high level of passenger comfort

also contributes to this. Compared to the rigours of Big day Out, for

instance, Womad in Botanic Park is considerably more gentrified.

And for the estimated 65,000 attendances this year, there is all that music.

More than two hundred artists from more than twenty countries. Loudon

Wainwright and Richard Thompson for the middle-angst; Shooglenifty,

Afro-Celt Sound System and Fun-da-mental for the house ravers; Midnight Oil

and Paul Kelly for the Aussie rockers; the Guo Brothers and Joji Hirota for

the ethereal; Kev Carmody, Telek and Christine Anu for the regional; and

Salif Keita, Tenores di Bitti, Radio Tarifa and Misia for the distinctively

vocal. As Brookman notes, “Womadelaide is one of the places where fifteen

year olds willingly accompany their families and when parents can get to be

mildly cool.”

Brookman and Brooman are justly proud of the event. “We’ve got the

reputation, location, atmosphere and great word of mouth,” says Rob. “It’s a

real pleasure to bring artists to this venue,” echoes Thomas. “In all the

sites in all the world – that I get to see – it is very rare that it’s as

nice an opportunity as Botanic Park.”

And the future? Retaining Adelaide as the main event, says Brookman, and

getting it closer to stand-alone commercial status. Meanwhile, there is an

Auckland Womad to follow in March and Adelaide involvement in events in

Singapore and in Ubud, in Bali, in 1998. It looks as though this Womad could

be a world thing after all.

The Australian, February 1996

© Copyright Murray Bramwell 1996