WOMAD

Peter Gabriel

From United Kingdom

Without Peter Gabriel, there would simply be no WOMAD. Together with Thomas Brooman and several like-minded souls, he started the festival back in 1982 - before having to reform Genesis to pay off the debts from that first pioneering event. Since then, of course, WOMAD has gone from strength to strength - as has Real World, the record label he started in 1989 to give exposure to such great world music artists (and, of course, such WOMAD favourites over the years) as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Hukwe Zawose and Papa Wemba. At the same time, as you may have noticed, he's also enjoyed a rather successful career of his own which now runs to 11 solo albums, the most recent of which was 2002's Up. Yet he's seldom taken the stage at the festival he started, always arguing that the purpose of WOMAD was to give a platform to other artists whom we might not get the chance to see anywhere else.