This year should have been an unmitigated high for Womadelaide: riding into 2024 on the crest of last year’s unprecedented crowds, a record number of four-day passes sold this year, and a lineup stacked with heavy hitters including José González, Corinne Bailey Rae, Ziggy Marley, Morcheeba, Baaba Maal, Seun Kuti and Nitin Sawhney.
But as the festival approached, Womadelaide was making noise for all the wrong reasons. First, a campaign from the Australian Friends of Palestine against Marley’s inclusion, citing his attendance at a 2018 fundraiser for the Israel Defense Forces.
Then there was the heatwave that unfortunately coincided with the festival. The temperature reached nearly 40C on Saturday – a blistering 39.9C, according to the Advertiser.
And then there were the bats. In the week leading up to the festival, concern mounted about the double-whammy effect of heat and noise on the colony of 10,000 or so grey-headed flying foxes that lives in Tainmuntilla (AKA Adelaide Botanic Park), where Womadelaide takes place. Reports about “bat bins” being installed to catch their corpses didn’t help.
Then, days before the festival opened, Palestinian band 47Soul announced that their invitation to perform had been rescinded back in November due to the festival’s concerns about providing “a suitably safe environment” in the context of tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza. Their post went viral, spurring calls for punters to boycott Womadelaide altogether. On Sunday, the festival released a statement apologising for the decision but stopping just short of calling it a mistake.
In the end, just one act pulled out due to the boycott: the British Lebanese producer and DJ Saliah. But as the festival opened on the 37C Friday night, with criticism mounting on social media and pro-Palestine rallies at its main entrance, everyone was feeling the heat and some were wondering if all this noise would drown out the music.
Because above all, Womadelaide is about music; people don’t come to be seen, or for the daytime drinking, or drugs on the dancefloor – they come for music. It’s not necessarily the specific music, either: though many buy tickets for particular headliners, it’s a distinctive facet of Womadelaide that people will set up in one spot, often with kids and coolers and camping chairs, and chance their day or long weekend on what happens around them. It’s one of the few festivals that has a “lifer” audience of people who return year after year, regardless of who is playing.
And in these two key respects, Womadelaide remained undaunted this year: the audience was characteristically good-natured and the music was fantastic, with both conditions coalescing in large, enthusiastic crowds at the festival’s main stage for 81-year-old Brazilian Tropicália pioneer Gilberto Gil, Beninese icon and festival veteran Angélique Kidjo (a last-minute replacement for Nitin Sawhney, who dropped out due to a health emergency), British trip-hop trio Morcheeba, British singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae, Senegalese doyen Baaba Maal and Seun Kuti & Egypt 80. And despite the calls to boycott or protest his set, and reports of a protest circle at his stage, Marley closed the festival on Monday night to a pounding dancefloor that belied his laid-back, reggae-infused set.
In this lineup of luminaries, Afrofunk eight-piece Ibibio Sound Machine stood out. A combination of dancefloor bangers, a tight three-person brass section and frontwoman Eno Williams’ ebullient stage presence was met by a crowd response that had Williams in tears halfway through.
As with any festival, many of the biggest treats were found on the smaller stages – though at Womadelaide in particular, with its ethos of discovery, it pays to perambulate. There was a special kind of magic in cannoning from Ibibio’s main stage to the other side of the gardens just in time to see self-described “punky voodoo queen” Moonlight Benjamin casting an electrifying spell; or gravitating, ears first, from a food truck queue to a side stage to watch rediscovered British 70s funk gurus Cymande weave their joy.
Standouts across the smaller stages included South Korean pansori pop six-piece Leenalchi, Réunionese singer and queer shaman Aurus, New York-based Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab, and western Sydney soul singer and rapper A.Girl.
A festival should always be bigger than the sum of its parts, and I was struck by the myriad ways and moments in which different acts spoke to one another, tracing a lineage of genres and their influence – from pioneers of Afrobeat, Ethio-jazz, Tropicália and Zamrock to younger generations of artists, and across multitude permutations of soul, funk, R&B and rock.
Sometimes the conversation was more literal: Zambia’s Sampa the Great popped up on stage with Kidjo and with Zamrock frontrunners Witch; soul singer Bumpy guested with fellow Naarm artist Mo’Ju; and Jen Cloher performed with Naarm-based Māori culture troupe T’honi, whose influence Cloher described as transformative.
But while the festival was overwhelmingly joyful, the dismal state of the world was never far from mind. It was felt in the on-stage calls by artists for Treaty, for a ceasefire in Gaza, for an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody; it was heard in First Nations artists Rob Edwards and Bumpy’s respective reflections on the impact of the stolen generations on their own senses of cultural identity; it was seen in the keffiyehs and Palestinian flags that turned up on stage and in the crowd. There were abundant reminders of the manifold traumas unfolding elsewhere as artists talked about wars past and present, fraught elections, and gender and class relations in their home countries.
Across the festival, every artist had the same message: love. It turned up in songs, in mid-show proclamations and in moments of unscripted, raw reflection. Cumulatively, it felt like an incantation – generously offered, gratefully received – against the Very Bad Times we live in.
And what of the flying foxes? Happily, rumours of a “bat massacre” proved to be an exaggeration and the festival wisely decided to scupper the daytime lineup for the stage directly under the tree roosts so they could keep the sprinklers on during the hottest part of the day. There were misters for the rest of us too, set up at strategic spots across the park and in constant operation – both Band-Aid solutions for a climate-related threat to music festivals that isn’t going anywhere.
