FRIDAY 24 JULY, by Guy Oddy
Even for a festival whose whole purpose is to platform a rich range of artists from cultures all around the world, WOMAD 2026 is seriously on top of its game for a new start at a new venue deep in the heart of rural Wiltshire. The 2000-acre Neston Park, created in the 1790s, proved a beautiful setting that mirrored the excellent acts and fine weather. It's certainly no Womud and sunscreen is at something of a premium during long summer days.
Similarly, the food on offer is consistently off-the-hook and the alcohol prices far from scandalous. The non-music entertainment is also varied and interesting, taking in everything from laughing yoga to political discussions. Being a festival that attracts crowds drawn from the very young to the long-retired there were, however, plenty of older attendees who insisted on setting up rows and rows of tightly-packed camping chairs close to some of the stages, creating something of an annoyance. However, this is a minor quibble about a weekend that had plenty of Grade A entertainment.
Highlights on the first full day include Turkish psychedelic rock, lively Balkan folk, laidback, socially conscious hip-hop, Afrobeat and spaced-out and soulful trip hop. And that only really scratches the surface of what's on offer. Nevertheless, the undisputed highlight of Friday’s shenanigans is a set by sixty-something reggae and dancehall legend, Barrington Levy (pictured below).
Strutting onto the main World Stage with his four-piece band, to the sound of an air raid siren, Levy immediately grabs his microphone and announces, “They don’t make them like me anymore!” and demands full-on audience participation as he launches into “Tell Dem Already”. Not being a festival that's renowned for attracting shy and retiring wallflowers, WOMAD responds at top volume.
What follows is a plethora of riches, as Levy’s performance takes in tunes such as “Minibus”, “Under Mi Sensi”, “Too Experienced” and “Shine Eye Gal”. He even temporarily stops things to ask in which parish the festival is situated, so that he could incorporate it into his lyrics. With this being the relatively secular UK however, his request is largely met with blank stares, but eventually the Stage Manager tells him (it's Corsham!).
As his set progresses, it also becomes apparent that Barrington Levy can be a hard taskmaster and more than once he stops his band mid-song and demands, “Rewind!” before telling off band members for some infraction or other in real James Brown style. Still, this performance is one that had his extensive crowd enthralled from start to finish. A finish which consists of a wonderful mash-up of “Black Roses” and “Here I Come” and a refusal to leave the stage at the appointed time. Demanding audience support again and again for his band to “Run that track!”, he even gives the Stage Manager a piece of his mind with a “Don’t invite me to your festival and tell me to get off the stage!”, as she tries to usher him off. However, it all comes from a good place and the audience laps up the drama.
Earlier in the day, revolutionary four-piece, “outernational” Anatolian psychedelic folk rockers Derya Yildirim and Grupo Şimşek (pictured above) played a mellow set of resistance tunes in the sweltering afternoon. With a saz, synthesizer, guitar and drums set-up, tunes like “Gurbet” and “Direne Direne” had plenty swinging their hips and bobbing their heads along to the soulful groove. Similarly, the Romanian seven-piece band, Lăutăresele Şaraimanic got plenty of love for only their second ever performance and a set that dug deep into their homeland’s Turkish and Roma heritage. Songs like “Massika” and “Jalem Jalem” had singers Bianca Mihai and Aylin Cadîr spinning and dancing as their three-generation backing band gave an enthusiastic crowd a full-flavoured taste of a multi-cultured Eastern Europe.
Not to be outdone by the visiting artists, the UK also offers up some fine entertainment on Day One and, as afternoon turns to early evening, Birmingham’s chilled out, conscious rapper Kofi Stone takes to the stage (pictured above). Reminding everyone present to “Be free, be yourself. We’re here to live. We’re here to enjoy”, Kofi drew in plenty of audience participation during a set that included bass-heavy and weed-infused tunes like “Colours From my Mind”, “What’s the Plan?” and “Gardener Flow”, before giving out flowers to those who had brave the heat at the front of the stage.
There's also a seriously smoky atmosphere for Greentea Peng’s headline set, as London’s finest neo-soul sister hits the stage with a full band that includes an all-female brass section. Bobbing around in a short, figure-hugging dress and a wide-brimmed hat, Peng (pictured above) chants down Babylon with psychedelically dubbed-up trip hop sounds that have plenty of heads spinning and hips swaying. “Top Steppa”, “Green” and “Earnest” all have the audience fully onside, as does a righteous shout-out to Barrington Levy. Slow and low with the echo dek going into overdrive, Peng reminds her crowd that “This sound is physical. It’s medicine” on “This Sound” and that “I do this shit. I do it honest” on “Tardis”, which conjures up wild applause before finishing with a drum'n'bass-flavoured take on Finley Quaye’s “Sunday Shining”. It's a fine ending to the first full day’s live action before theartsdesk crew went searching for some DJ action to transport us deep into the night.
SATURDAY 25 JULY, by Thomas H Green
One of life’s big mysteries is why people arise at 7.30 AM at festivals. At WOMAD, the musical acts don’t even begin until at least 1.00 PM. Nevertheless, this is what people do. Thus, I arise unwillingly at 9.30ish, when the tea-drinking chatter has reached levels impossible to ignore. Happily, it’s to a feast prepared on three camping stoves of veggie sausages, scrambled eggs, baked beans, the lot.
1.00 PM is the marker to attack our 28-pint box of Sandford Orchards’ Devon Mist cider (4.5%). Suitably revved, we roll onto site through tracks surrounded by picturesque fields of a fat-budded green plant we couldn’t identify, interspersed with masses of gorgeous sunflowers. The World of Words tent has staged Q&As with both Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and Green Party leader Zack Polanski, but we plonk ourselves on slot-together wooden benches to beer-blather in the sun.
Our first act of the day is brass band Mixanteña de Santa Cecilia in the Big Top (pictured below). There are 10 of them, from Mexico City, focusing on boleros and cumbia from the southern states of Guerrero and Oaxaca; four cowboy hats, two trombones, one tuba, one flugelhorn, two trumpets, two saxophones and two drums. The female drummer leads and sometimes sings. Some band members wear traditional embroidered smock tops.
They’re aided by two dancers, one male, one female, the latter with a rose in her mouth, the former initially shirted, then topless in a ram-horned head-dress with huge beard and rabbit-like ears. They jig around in the crowd. “Can you say, ‘Let’s music’?” asks their leader, reading her words from a piece of paper. One sax-player holds an unfeasibly long note to much cheering. There is, eventually, much dancing, especially when they play “El Torro” and a cat-sized papier mâché bull is passed around the crowd. It’s a vibrant kick-off to Saturday.
Today’s weather is the hottest of the three days but never too sweltering. Down at the long, open-sided Sunflower marquee, it’s time for Dallas hip hopper Cure For Paranoia. Some of our party sit this out while others later state, “I’ll be actively pursuing their music after the festival.”
Sometimes a band, today they consist of fast-witted frontman Cameron McCloud (pictured left), in an X baseball cap, backed by a femme-skinhead DJ whose name I didn’t catch. Their set is blighted by issues. A couple of songs in, the sound is turned off and the crowd asked to leave due to a possible structural fault with the marquee. After this the sound is never quite right but, nonetheless, McCloud holds the interest with a focus on music as medicine (he suffers from bipolar and schizophrenia), alongside singalong bangers such as “No Brainer” and his “Origin Story”, in which he raps “I love me too much to be normal.”
The disco stylings of New York band Say She She on the main, outdoor World Stage (pictured above), fronted by three glam-clad, characterful female singers, is a warm sunny afternoon chug but a tad smooth for our posse’s tastes, so we head for the Nakibembe Xylophone Troupe (pictured below) at the Big Top. This lot are six Ugandan dudes, all clad in loose white clothing, who surround a giant mbila wooden xylophone and rip from it a wild polyphonic assault.
They have played Berlin techno mecca Berghain, which gives a clue as to their sonic appeal. It’s a show of battering physicality, as they exchange shout-sung phrases and grinning glances at each other, leaning into wave after wave of muscle-draining percussive rhythms. Frenetically full of spirit, eventually they take turns in jumping up to do groin-thrusting, bum-shaking dances, one leaps onto the mbila, others put their feet on it and play round them. It’s a mesmerically bonkers “I’ve-never-seen-anything-quite-like-this” hour.
Afterwards we grab Indian street foot and drink a box of red wine before heading for tonight’s main headliner, Brazilian superstar Daniela Mercury (pictured below). With musicians pressed to the sides of the stage to make way for her Vegas-style choreographed show, she’s clad in an eye-catching, slit-to-the-hip green dress that looks like a Christmas tree, while her dancers reappear in multiple outfits, including one akin to orange Boobah ninjas.
I hear people, over the weekend, talking about how much they enjoy this glitzy Latin pop extravaganza but it missed me. I’m absolutely one for high-kitsch, on occasion, but it reminded me, in tone, of Janet Jackson’s Glastonbury 2019 performance, which was pop-tastic and machine-slick, but didn’t quite connect.
But, here’s the thing, for various reasons I ended up reviewing Saturday, when most of the music that blew me away was Friday or Sunday, so I’ll sign off with an enormous shout-out to South Korean country band Country GongBang (pictured above), who mustered a Friday night set that was ultra-tight and showbiz yet human and heartfelt, possibly my favourite set of the weekend.
But then there’s Wild Wild Women (pictured above), a gob-smackingly funked-up all-female Mumbai hip hop outfit whose mic skills are matched only by their thrilling, visceral verbal assaults on the intersection of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the Colombian, techno-flavoured dance-a-thon that is Ácido Pantera (pictured below).
And what about octogenarian Western Australian tribal elder Kankawa Nagarra (pictured below) whose soul-earthed desert blues conveyed a whole world to a small tent in Wiltshire.
Not to forget the stunning, mapped, psychedelic tree projections of Bristol’s Limbic cinema, which we saw as we wandered to pin-sharp DJ sets by the likes of Msanzi bass explorer and Hyperdub associate Shannen SP, and the energized DJ-trombone-vocalist trio Aloka & Sherbersky & Barney Goodwin (pictured below).
Overall, in the context of 2026's politics, WOMAD is a communal celebration of difference, making a joyful stand on the right side of history.
But enough of me, here’s Peter Culshaw to take you through his Sunday…
SUNDAY 26 JULY, by Peter Culshaw
The highlights of Sunday were the first and last things on the World Stage - kicking off with the Garifuna Collective from Belize. How they ended up here, like so many groups here, is an epic story. Not to mention how somewhat miraculous it is that WOMAD itself has kept going.
In the case of the Garifuna culture- a shipwreck of a slave ship in the 17th century led to many Africans swimming to Saint Vincent in the Caribbean where they mixed with the locals before being kicked out by the British and ending up in Central America, where the unique cultural mix was generally seen as the lowest of the low. This month's Songlines Magazine cover feature has the context.
Singer and teacher Andy Palacio was as responsible as any for putting the Garifunas on the world stage with his extraordinary Ivan Duran produced 2007 Watina album, which was making really significant waves before tragedy struck. I even wrote a story for the Observer “A New Marley in the Making” (read here) but then Palacio died suddenly aged 48. The next most famous Garifuna singer Aurelio Martinez died in a plane crash.
The fates may have been cruel to the Garifunas (pictured above), but here they are tropically tight, singing songs, including “Watina”, mainly about their culture and religion in an uplifting “mix of chill and warmness” as my companion put it. Lead singer Desiree Diego, a veteran of ceremonial rituals, also a voice on the great Umalali album, projects her soulful voice, full of joy but tinged with grief and the whole thing is so moving it brought a lump to the throat.
The final act on the World Stage is the incomparable Oumou Sangaré from Mali (pictured below), whose band are also as tight as they come. While half the band are Mali-based, such as the scintillating n’goni player Abou Diarra, half are French, which adds original textures, noticeably from keyboardist Alexandre Millet and on-the-nail bass player Elise Blanchard. Oumou hasn’t lost a certain playful sparkle - “Love is better, no war”, she asserts, before teasing women to stay away from playboys on “Kamelemba”. Having met Oumou, she's a no nonsense leader, and a story I heard about band members getting fined for mistakes, á la James Brown, I file under believable / too good to check.
Between these two poles of excellence were an array of diverse treasures, such as the cool Spanish jazzy tunes of Clara Sierra Lopez, with subtle electronics, and the glorious polyphonic singing of Barrut from Southern France, a benevolent wildfire.
The Japanese Seppuku Pistols (pictured below) made an appropriately unholy racket; as their name implies, they are an ex punk band. Leaping about, one band member broke an ankle without realising it. At the Sunflower tent Balochistan Elder, Ustaad Noor Bakhsh played a mesmerising, meditative set with his zither-like benju.
I catch some of Yasmine Hamdan, originally from Lebanon, too cool for school, more influenced by Polly Harvey than Fairuz, before ending up at the fabulous Lizard tent, where DJs playe obscure Guadeloupe 1970s vinyl and get the entire crowd moving.
No time for “laughing yoga” or gong baths at the Wellness Area, but I did drop by the World Of Words tent - run by Byline Times, a publication worth your time - they even have old style investigative journalists.
This year’s WOMAD was more compact - 30,000 rather than 40,000 and no worse for that. The music policy was excellent, maybe the smaller size enabled them not to spend a fortune on big-name artists who used to be good 30 years ago as in previous WOMADs (De La Soul, Toots and the Maytals, for example). The WOMAD brand is strong enough to survive without; people come for the high-quality surprises. The sound quality (and compost loos) were better, though some teething problems remained with internet and water pressure.
If there is something going forward to think of, I would say work out how to incorporate more of the Afrobeats styles sweeping the world (there were a couple of DJs at the NTS tent playing this stuff) - book someone like D’Banj - not a major force but great anyway. And I would have a late night “Sufi” tent for acoustic trance music that could run a couple of hours. Overall, though, a wonderful festival as ever in a fabulous new venue... welcome back WOMAD.
