1985 07 27 WOMAD NME

Page 6—New Musical Express 27th July, 1985

IT'S A WOMAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

GAVIN MARTIN and ADRIAN THRILLS return from ‘The Mexican Embassy’ and other vantage points at last weekend’s WOMAD Festival in Essex to declare — hey, some of these events are good! First, second, and third world pictures by FOUR EYES .

IT STARTED late, of course, and stayed that way the whole time I was there. The crowd didn’t seem to mind, they arrived gradually in painted charabancs and buses —weekend campers, the festival freaks, alternative entrepeneurs, purveyors of mind-altering stimulants, women carrying their children in kangaroo pouches, squaddies from the nearby army camp, kids with outrageously painted faces.

They set up home in a cross between a Saxon village and a Morrocan street bazaar. The easygoing frugality extended to the backstage area where the changing rooms were a collection ofsmall marquees (no limo entrances and hasty Glastonbury style exits here). Flanked on one side by beautiful countryside and on the other by a choppy sea, Mersea Island provided a suitably elemental setting for new ethnicentrics, the rootless drifters of Thatcher’s reign and hangovers from the hippie generation.

LIKE LIVE Aid, Womad is a registered charity but where the former’s brief was to raise as much money as possible, Womad’s objective is to present an array of music from all over the globe. The pulling power of the Bagamoyo Group from Tanzania or Indian dancer Alpana Sengupta when set beside The Pogues, New Order and The Fall is debateable. But the idea is that these foreign delicacies are being made available to people who’d otherwise not be able to sample them. Who knows what delights await the hapless wayfarer on their forays around the site and its three stages (or, conversely, who knows what they’re going to miss trying to adjust to Womad time or joining the agonising queue for the bog).

Mediocre African acts Somo Somo and Samko got things rolling on the main stage but it was over on stage two where the first delight of the festival came.

The Guo Twins are from China - we give them Wham! and they give us a flute player and a zeng master. The zeng has a mouthpiece akin to the tubing on a massive waterpipe and ends in a row of bamboo cane organ pipes which create captivating and evocative soundscapes. The tunes arc mostly their own - serenades for horse ranchers, workers gathered after a day’s labour, one called ’Bring My Tea Leaves To Peking’. Inspired by similiar terrains the melodies were redolent of cowboy ballads but with infinite layers and shifts as they drifted into the sunset.

It was getting dark and a cold breeze blew up off the sea. In a tent in the middle of Womad Village a man with only a piano and drums for accompaniment was howling out years of angst and trauma. John Peel’s patronage has obviously paid off for Peter Hammill, his set was packed to overflow. The last time I saw someone play with just drums and piano was Nina Simone, three years back. There was enough fear, back-biting and true obsession in her performance to carry it off, but Hammill sounds forced and self-pitying by comparison. He wasn’t totally at odds with the Womad spirit (those rants and yells sounded positively tribal ) but his is a brand of English miserabilism. Hammill is a picture of Morrissey grown up. (If Morrissey ever did grow up! Maybe he saw Peter Hammill and decided it would be better not to.)

"WE'RE THE Fall and we’re from the first world,” sneered village shaman Mark E Smith, following a dire identikit reggae set (one song about da youth, one song about Babylon, one song about pollution and one song about scoring weed) by Bristol’s Black Roots. It was cold now but the field had filled out with people here to see the witch trials. The Fall have kept that anger and tension between the audience, the (pop) world at large and even themselves (“Have we got a drummer tonight or what,” glared Smith responding to one of several miscues in their set). They’ve fallen in and out of favour with this scribe but tonight they sounded great again, not least because there seemed to be some element of opposition, of sheer perversity in pitching them as spikey Lucifers after an evening of grinning Womadic “we can pull together” worthiness. ‘Couldn’t Get Ahead’, ‘What You Need’ and ‘Stick In The Mud’ were splendid whiplash reminders of their maverick brilliance. They have perfected a rock esperanto that steamrollers all else in its path. It’s Smith’s scowling rage that anchors them, sometimes to their detriment, he’ll never let them progress pass a certain proficiency — after a while they bore holes in your head and drive stakes through your feet.

But he’s got a great yelp - the sound of a mad dog getting caught in the cogs of the music machine — and a fine line in rabid rants. “ Suburbia holds more than you care for ” was particularly apt tonight. They played until past 2am, the villagers could sleep soundly now knowing that Britain’s Last Poet had left few demons unscathed.

The sky provided much of the entertainment on Saturday. The rain fell remorselessly all morning, and throughout the afternoon great heaving cloud formations gathered as we awaited an almighty tumult which thankfully never came. “Oh look at the rainbow, it’s a beautiful rainbow,” shouted Zeke Manyika when the sun burst through the clouds “Well it is a festival,” he said making the peace sign. Zeke’s set - ebullient rainbow pop - fired the crowd with warmth, joyous riffs and his own happy-go-lucky character.

Next up, The Pogues. Nonchalantly shambling onstage, Shane raised his pint and a double ‘V’ sign. “Peace in our time,” he grinned. Their set, which I expected to galvanise the crowd, was hampered by bad sound, they didn’t carry the charge and reckless abandon to the back of the field. This was unfortunate as, by default rather than design, The Pogues’ songs are veritable anthems for a generation - the squat culture kids who converge on London and the involuntary nomads of the new Tory' Poor Law. ‘Transmetropolitan’ is as much a raging rampage for the audience as it is a statement of The Pogues’ anarchic cultural asault. Because they’ve never really left the lowlife world and they’ve been so closely shaped by their audience, in live action the new Pogues songs go deeper into abject sleaze - one song crawls on its belly through the shit, vomit, blood and human vermin of Leicester Square. They don’t offer solutions or moral jugements, just the full picture. And it’s etched skillfully too, these new songs have rich lyrical and melodic craft, helped by the extra musical responsibility of new Pogue Phil Chevron.

There’s still something amiss about the group, but it’s probably what makes them the most “relevant” group for so many. If you accept The Pogues at all you have to accept their wild disaffection and propensity to stumble and fall -it’s all part of their appeal. Shane blew his nose and tried unsuccessfully to wipe a big clinger away from around his chin. “I’ll never be George Michael at this rate,” he grumbled. True, but then George Michael will never be a Pogues frontman, will never mean anything to a large number of people. That number is getting larger all the time.

Thomas Mapfumo’s folk chants bolstered and blasted by flaring horns, diamond cluster guitar chords and limbo contorting rhythms came across with full rounded power. It’s perfect outdoor sunshine music (he was the star of the recent GLC Battersea Festival) but he was in the wrong time slot here, playing far too long into the cold dark night.

ON THE other hand, New Order, stubborn uncompromising bastards that they are (keeping the crowd waiting until 1.30 am before going on), sounded magnificent under a star-studded sky. There’s a deal more light and shade about them now than when I last heard them play (a doomy, gloomy dirge at Glastonbury three years ago). Their sparse throbbing celestial rhythms and silvery melodies fitted well into the grand design. People watched wrapped in blankets and gathered round large torches for heat, backstage a guy had rigged up an elaborate optical illusion of streamers on a kite string which soared towards the sky and — swear to God - seemed not to stop in any earthly place. We gazed in amazement - was this truly a sign from the heavens? I for one was very glad I’d eschewed the mushroom tea on offer from “The Mexican Embassy” or I’d doubtless have become a galactic Jack in a beanstalk.

Earlier in the evening we’d watched as Mark Stewart’s idiotic exhortations to “rock the house” left most of the stage three onlookers seated and nonplussed. Maybe there had been a laxity of energy and enthusiasm at Womad but it doesn’t necessarily mean apathetic acquiescence. Those are rather idealistic rock journalist concepts, could be folks were just soaking up all the weirdness, watching the freaks, enjoying being flies on the wall at a temporary international music village. The only ‘offensive’ thing about hippy festivals was that a lot of people really thought they were changing the world, only a few loons were kidding themselves at Womad.

While the gruelling supermarket consumption of music has its drawbacks the financial expediency of being able to see three of the great iconclastic remoulds to come out of punk - The Pogues, The Fall and New Order - on the cheap can’t be so easily discounted. These groups are an alternative to the bland bleachout of the pop’s pastel playpen, music that relies on video for its mass audience. The top attractions at Womad don’t have easily marketable charisma and image, nor goofy statesmanship (you'd have to be born in the USA to pull that one off), so they don’t fit into the convential video scheme. But to see them in these surrounds is to see them in a setting beyond the wildest dreams of any two-bit talentless promo director. Not so much the medium is the message, more the village is the video.

 

GM

THERE WAS a wry glint in Dave Wakeling’s eyes when he described it as “a weekend of mud and dysentry”, but the third and final day of WOMAD ’85 was in many ways the blitzed-out calm after Saturday’s storm.

The music certainly had its moments but, with some of the flaking revellers battered into lethargy by sheer band-fatigue and others strung out on substances a mite stronger, there were times when the three canvas covered stages seemed almost identical.

Not all the (in)action at a festival revolves around the groups. With flaxen-haired earth maidens touting trays of “genuine Moroccan hash cakes” and “Mexican Blue mushrooms” against a distant backdrop of oil tankers gliding slowly down the Thames Estuary (Thrills must have brilliant eyesight - as the crow flies the Thames Estuary is 20 miles from Mersea, which sits in the River Blackwater), there were parts of this scenic Mersea site that simply did not belong to the real world.

It was just a five minute stroll from 1985 back to somewhere around 1969, to a hippie-punk netherworld in which men, women, children and dogs were living a strange, frugal existence. These must have been the kind of people my parents always warned me about.

Were they really there just to see the Boothill Foot-Tappers? Were they there for the music at all? The truth is probably that these were the full-time festival-goers who went just to be there. Last month it was Glastonbury, this week WOMAD, next it is probably the Elephant Fayre.

It beats me why people should go in their thousands to a far-flung corner of Essex simply to be among the last upholders of an outmoded counter culture, albeit one that refuses to die. There again, I can think of few less satisfactory ways of listening to music than sitting in a crowded field.

WOMAD, however, can be different. This year’s line-up was arguably weaker than previous billings but reflected international music characteristics far better than last week’s Live Aid benefit.

WITH SO much to take in, however, it was impossible to be exhuastive. The best policy was to flit from table to table, snapping up the pickings from the unique global buffet en route.

The WOMAD brief is to present music and dance from five different continents, although this year’s bill did place a particular emphasis on Africa. Organisers also showcased plenty of British-based African music to illustrate the cross-cultural interplay that now exists, a worthy enough aim but one that hampered the festival's ratings on the exotica scale, many of the featured acts already being familiar to the rock audience.

Of the home-based acts the most startling was Cameroun-born guitarist Charlie Assah Papa. His band play a stormy mixture of melodic African guitar music and fast funk, highlighted by some superb wood-marimba work. Witnessing their breathtaking set on stage three—the smallest marquee on the site— Zeke Manyika was moved to admit embarrassment at having played on the supposedly more prestigious main stage.

Elsewhere, Ghanaian drummer Ben Badoo — whose modernised highlife strain goes under the ‘alaha’ moniker — and his former colleague Isaac Tagoe’s Orchestre Jazira also fanned the homegrown flame. The real Afro stars of Sunday, though, were Zairean ‘soukous’ squad Tabu Ley Le Rochereau And Afrisa International. Serious men in sombre suits, they cooked up a warm and soulful sway, punctuated by wild horns and a thunderous bass.

Taking their inspiration from the other side of the Atlantic, the London School Of Samba - a ‘school’ being the Brazilian term for a professional party of drums and dancers - work their way right through the festival site as the day wears on. Even the absurd people in the netherworld on the edges of the camp fail to escape their metal-bashing. Forty-odd percussionists decked out in green and white, their raw cacophony is more suited to a street carnival or an Oval Test Mach than a picturesque stretch of Essex countryside, but their mark was noisily made.

THE DAY’S Blue Riband Rock Performance came from General Public. Resplendent in classic black and white - “nothing too fancy, just enough to set us apart a bit" - Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger were at their best, a welcome return to form from the lumpy, lacklustre sets they were playing this time last year.

Success in the States, where their ‘All The Rage’ LP reached the Top 30, has given them new assurance and their frontal attack, a rhythmic roller coaster that dips and soars with renewed vigour, has been trimmed to far more pointed effect over the past year.

Veering from heavy dub-orientated skank to a swelling Northern Soul streak - the latter no doubt due to the ex-Dexys sidemen in their number - they were in a vibrant mood. Ranking Roger’s slow-style talkovers might sound old-fashioned beside the current crop of quickfire metropolitan toasters, but his effusive, ebullient style gives him more stage impact than a dozen assorted Smileys.

And if the GP sound still lacks a little variety, there is always the veteran Saxa whose deep brown, delightfully flighty sax solos were a joy. When he returned alone for an extra encore, his woozy, rippling notes seemed capable of snatching the nearest breeze and simply fluttering off into the North Sea with tankers.

Back on stage two, James completed the three-pronged Factory Records presence at this year’s WOMAD. But where New Order and ACR had both played thrillingly hard-edged but slyly humorous sets, these Trumpton teeny-poppers take a far more spidery, even torturous course in their songs.

Singer Tim, an elfin-footed Morrisseyman boy-child, dressed all in white, had spent the minutes before going onstage crouched on the ground outside his tent dressing room, his eyes closed, his lips emitting a long, low hum. Strange behaviour for sure, although it seemed good relaxation for a cleverly controlled, occasionally quite bewitching set.

James are deceptively fragile, the gossamer frailty of their early songs - particularly the strummed opener ‘Yahoo’, played as a duo - gave way to late flurries that were more forceful if just as gangly and awkward.

Following them, The Go-Betweens were not pedestrian, straining hard to transcend the rambling Postcard-Velvets veneer that often clouds over the testier inner soul of their songs. At WOMAD, their worth remained enigmatically hidden.

It was left to the Boothill Foot-Tappers to inject the final spices into a weekend that was beginning to lose some of its early flavour as the crowds drifted off and an easterly chill set in. Without the hefty Slim but with the supposedly-departed bassman Lloyd back on board, Wendy and Merryl traded vocal licks and physical jerks to lead the motley troupe through a set of songs that are growing more polished and less ramshackle by the week.

Though banjo-bashing is the band’s trademark, it is really no more than the icing on a home-baked countrybilly cake that is now imbued with an even more direct political thrust than before.

“See you at Dingwalls,” they shouted as they disappeared off into a murky sunset behind their tent. They leave only the diehards, the truly committed feet-fanciers, to make their way over to the rain-lashed main stage to watch Toots And The Maytals bring the curtain down on another year’s WOMAD.

 

AT