
The 25th anniversary of the Australian incarnation of Peter Gabriel’s Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance) brings together artists from 31 countries, distilling the wide world of sound into three days and four nights of late-summer revelry in Adelaide’s Botanic Park. Skank along to English ska legends the Specials, chill to Brazilian bossa nova singer Bebel Gilberto, or lindy hop to Austrian electro-swing act Parov Stelar.
Beyond music, Father Bob Maguire will be hosting a multifaith panel on religion and environmental responsibility, Archie Roach will be in conversation with Indigenous actor Uncle Jack Charles, Vietnamese band Hanoi Masters are cooking up a traditional chicken salad in the Taste the World tent, and the Philip Glass Ensemble are playing a live accompaniment to a screening of 1982 environmental film Koyaanisqatsi.
To get you in the mood, we’ve prepared a playlist of songs by eight Womadelaide acts that are high on our to-see list.
Ana Tijoux
Accompanying the guts and gore of TV series Breaking Bad was a soundtrack with some killer Latin tunes. One of our favourites was rapper Ana Tijoux’s 1977, both the year of her birth and an autobiographical earworm about growing up in a family of Chilean exiles in France during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. It was in France that Tijoux was introduced to hip-hop via the children of north African immigrants. When her family returned from exile, Tijoux discovered her own voice, rapping in Spanish about women’s rights, Indigenous pride, injustice, inequality, political corruption and colonialism.
Her more recent recordings have incorporated traditional Andean folk instruments – including panflutes and charangos – into her strident sound.
The Hot 8 Brass Band
The Specials’ hit Ghost Town, which captured the social breakdown and urban decay of Thatcher’s Britain, found a new lease of life about three decades on with New Orleans collective Hot 8 Brass Band. The video clip of their cover pays homage to the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on their city. Fittingly, both the Specials and Hot 8 are playing this year’s Womadelaide, and there’s high hopes for a stage invasion during one or the other’s set.
Hot 8 are one of the festival’s opening acts and their raucous blast of hip-hop, funk and R&B make the group the perfect party starters. They’ve been around for two decades and endured their unfair share of tragedy – losing four members to gun violence and illness – but they’ve never lost touch with their marching band street procession roots and effortless ability to get a crowd moving.
Brushy One String
One man. One guitar. One string. Jamaican soulman creates a complete sound with just a low E string and how-low-can-you-go pipes.
When Brushy was a youngster, he was clueless as to how to play the guitar and, strumming too hard, broke five of its strings. He stuck with what was left. His big break came with a cameo in Luciano Blotta’s 2007 reggae documentary Rise Up, propelling Brushy from rural poverty to international musical sensation. As one fan wrote beneath the YouTube video for Brushy’s Life is For Every Man: “Imagine what he could do with two strings.”
Gawurra
It’s not without reason Stanley “Gawurra” Gaykamangu is oft compared with Gurrumul. Both are Yolngu from north-east Arnhem Land; both have voices that seem to travel across time and space; and both sing in language about connections with the land. Gawurra sings in the Gupapuyngu language, creating modern incarnations of the ancient songlines of his homeland. His debut album, Ratja Yaliyali (Vine of Love), had him take home four trophies at last year’s National Indigenous Music Awards. Its title track is sheer aural beauty.
Oumou Sangaré
Malian singer Oumou Sangaré, one of Africa’s biggest stars, has been ruffling feathers since she burst on to the scene at the age of 21 with the 1989 album Moussoulou (Women). A tenacious advocate for women’s empowerment (sparked by her father’s abandonment of her pregnant mother to take a second wife when Sangaré was a toddler), Sangaré sings in her native Bambara and broaches taboo subjects that challenge African society’s rigid conventions.
Her songs often double as morality lectures; take the fast and funky Wele Wele Wintou, an admonishment of child marriage, where Sangaré tells men their daughters shouldn’t marry before they have developed breasts. Or the time she sang a song that included the lyrics “polygamy is the worst of all things” for an audience that included the king of Swaziland and seven of his wives. “People couldn’t believe their ears,” she told the Guardian in 2008.
Sangaré is also an ambassador for the United Nations, owns the 35-room Hotel Wasulu in Bamako, and imports a branded SUV from China – named Oum Sang after her good self. She also likes to dance – and she’ll expect you to as well.
Toni Childs
Since pumping out hits such as I’ve Got to Go Now, Many Rivers to Cross and Stop Your Fussin’ in the 1980s and 90s, American singer Toni Childs has become an adopted Aussie. In a story that’s the stuff of Qantas PR department dreams, Childs perchance sat next to the Australian composer and film-maker Mik Lavage on a 2010 domestic flight. Sparks, er, flew, and by 2012 she had relocated to the Byron Bay hinterland. Naturally, Childs is now also a yoga teacher, and will be taking a Sunday morning class at Womadelaide following on from her Saturday afternoon hit-churning performance.
Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro
Tango music is known for arousing passion, although rarely the kind that sparks spontaneous street protests and confrontations with police. Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro began life in the early noughties performing on the streets of Buenos Aires, where authorities’ attempts to move them on were met with fierce resistance from neighbourhood tango fans.
The dozen-strong collective of bandoneons, strings, voice and piano shatter the traditional Argentinian sound. The headbanging, the dreadlocks, the punk-rock aesthetic and reinvention of tango for a new generation, is as gritty and captivating as their home city, where the band now have the luxury of their very own music venue – the Club Atlético Fernández Fierro – a grungy warehouse-like space where, when they’re not touring, they play twice a week.
Dope Lemon
The latest project from Angus Stone owes as much to the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, the Doors and the Jesus and Mary Chain as it does his main gig with his sister, Julia. If last year’s fuzzed-up, psychedelic debut LP, Honey Bones, is anything to go by, Stone’s Womadelaide performance will be best enjoyed horizontal, on a manicured patch of Botanic Garden grass, where you can maybe catch a whiff of the kind of Byron Bay flora that went into making the album.
• The Womadelaide festival, for which the Guardian is a media partner, is on at Botanic Park, Adelaide, from 10–13 March 2017
