Womad music festival closes on a high — review

There are only a couple of places in Britain where a band could perform a single packed with French double-entendres that reached 93 in the charts for two weeks in 1989 and hear the lyrics chanted back to them; one of them is Womad, which returned after a two-year hiatus and marked its final day on Sunday. The band were Les Négresses Vertes.

As they filed onstage with the air of off-duty gilets jaunes, François Cizzko Tousch played the closing accordion arpeggios of “La Valse”. “Il va faire très chaud,” they shouted, launching into “Voilà l’été”, twin trombones pumping, accordion blaring, Stéfane Méllino’s guitar thrashing. For that 1989 single — “Zobi la mouche” — the band teased the crowd with an endless warm-up before playing the infectious chorus, with its hints of rai, over and over again. “J’suis pas tant crédible,” they chanted, “car on me trouve louche.” It was more than 30 years since their amalgam of folk, punk, ska and the Maghreb had been heard at Womad, but it was as if they had never been away.

Gilberto Gil was accompanied on stage by 14 of his family — daughters, sons, grandchildren, some great-grandchildren and a daughter-in-law — for a run through six decades of songbook. Gil is an elder statesman of Brazilian music (literally — he was minister of culture from 2003-2008). From the opening Bo Diddley beat of “Barato Total”, the songs he played gave a tour of the country’s music, from tropicália to samba (the carnival swagger of “Avisa Lá”) to MBP (música popular brasileira) to reggae.

There was a version of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa “Garota de Ipanema”, swooning vocals switching between Portuguese and English. And there was a raucous run through “Get Back” — while Paul McCartney was plucking the song out of the aether in Twickenham, Gil was facing imminent political arrest in Brazil, but soon ended up in exile in London, where he soaked up the psychedelia and reggae he later infused into his own songs. A rocked-up “Babá Alapalá” celebrated Brazil’s African communities. Gil’s daughter Nara sang “Amor Até O Fim”, which he originally wrote for her mother Belina de Aguiar.

Hollie Cook entranced an audience sheltering from a brief shower with pop reggae, taking advantage of the sound system to throw in dancehall sound effects, sending blurts of echo to the circular tent’s imagined corners. Jasdeep Singh Degun played a version of Nitin Sawhney’s “Nadia” — Sawhney had performed the song himself the previous day — recast as Indian classical music.

The Minyo Crusaders married Japanese vernacular folk song, full of flower-selling grandmothers, rich bridegrooms and chimneys so high they smoke up the moon, with reggae and Latin styles. On “Aizu Bandaisan”, the tale of a playboy dissolute and westernised enough that he bathes in the morning, the horns played refrains from Duke Ellington’s “Caravan”; for the boogaloo of the coal-mining anthem “Tanko Bushi”, the Crusaders taught the crowd to dance.

Out in the darkening arboretum, with strange lights over the roof of the stage like a pocket Aurora Borealis, Welsh guitarist Gwenifer Raymond played out the festival with a series of instrumentals that evoked everything from the American civil war to folk horror, with just a hint of early Genesis; an end to (and possibly an ode to) the returning Womad that was the right mixture of settling and unsettling.

womad.co.uk