WOMAD

Sunday. One in the morning. On a main road opposite a thriving commercial harbour. A lone elderly man stands on the southern edge of Parque de Santa Catalina, grimly holding aloft a handmade cardboard sign: ‘Jesus Siempre’. The only other person on this side of the road is an Englishman initially misreading his message: ‘Jesus Simpers’. Behind the pair of them, in the park, are tens of thousands of people - predominantly in their late teens and early twenties - dancing, drinking, smoking, talking, smiling. If you listen carefully, you might just hear an Irishwoman raucously revving up a tribute to one Mr Lee Hooker, ‘Johnny Got A Boom Boom’. You’ll most certainly hear the massed roars that greet the song’s conclusion and, just possibly, the chuffed-to-pieces Irishwoman shouting over the top of them. “I love it here,” announces Imelda May. “I think I’m gonna move.”

At this moment, the Englishman thinks about engaging the sign bearer in conversation, perhaps confessing to his misreading, and asserting his belief that it was probably a whole lot more sacrilegious than anything likely to occur within the park. Is the well-meaning gent aware, after all, that the event with a seemingly magnetic pull on the city’s youth is WOMAD Las Palmas de Gran Canaria? And might not the Good Lord Himself struggle to find a point of complaint about an event expressly aimed at promoting pan-cultural understanding and harmony? But the questions are never posed. The warm night air carries word that Imelda May has broken out the Elvis covers, and the Englishman is running towards the sound.

If you’re like the Englishman, whose previous WOMAD experience extended to just Charlton Park and Rivermead, you’ll find much here that is familiar. For a start, the WOMAD flags, jagged edged and multicoloured, are present and correct. Then there are the gracious tree-lined surrounds (albeit of the swaying palm variety), Taste The World, and a variety of workshops. And, of course, the globally-sourced feast of music.

The sparkling, virtuosic Spiro, for example, who open the festival’s main stage on Thursday evening and prove that their music is as placeless as it is timeless: just as happened in Wiltshire fields in July, the reception from the crowd is mighty. To take just one example of their musical breadth, the fiddle is wont to switch from free-flowing melody to the kind of scratchy drone favoured by John Cale in The Velvet Underground, or by musicians in Africa many centuries before. Either way, traditional English folksong it is not.

Barcelona’s Manel are up next. As they lead singalongs in the manner of a Spanish Waterboys, your correspondent begins to notice a few lesser-spotted sights in the crowd. In England, WOMAD’s cover charge and location means that musicians are generally playing to people whose ears have already been opened to the joys of unfamiliar rhythms. In Gran Canaria, the festival is free. And as Vieux Farka Toure excites the throng with a master class in African blues, among them stand plenty of curious onlookers, drawn by the siren sound: young parents carrying beaming, shoulder-borne infants, delighted that their pre-bedtime walk has been unexpectedly extended; older women, as immaculately coiffured as the ubiquitous small dogs by their side. The festival has the highest ratio of walking stick:attendee this writer has witnessed.

They’re still around on Sunday evening, albeit more hidden. Behind the main stage, bordered by an endless line of coffee shops, sit table upon table of – let’s say more experienced – Las Palmas residents, playing a score of card games soundtracked by Manao’s gracefully undulating jazz. Picture-perfect serenity. Although, admittedly, you suspect Manowar could strike up and not affect their intense concentration.

Back to the opening night. Everyone loves Eliades Ochoa. The beaming bear of a man stands dressed all in black, his support team – guitar, brass, bass, maracas – all in regulation grey-blue shirts. The formality, clearly, is all used up on the clothing, for their music is one long horn-punching mariachi party. Later, on the second of three main stages, Black Swan Effect ply Pink Floyd-influenced, melodically rocking, anthemic indie. Music to be tearfully, defiantly heartbroken to. By now the older people have largely drifted away, to be replaced many times over by the young. A teenager stands in a possibly mistranslated t-shirt: ‘After sex and drugs comes rock ‘n’ roll’. Not quite the One True Way ethos of your average hardcore music festival fan, but the intent is presumably the same. Excited, laughter-filled chatter from the lawns practically drowns out the music. Your correspondent has never seen so many young people gathered in one place. Anywhere. Ever. Not only are they wide-eyed in surveying each other, but wide-eared in enjoying the unusual sounds.

“I’m very glad you think that,” says the Director of WOMAD Spain Festivals, Dania Dévora Barrera. “At Charlton Park, I found the audience to be very familiar – they pack everything up to treat the weekend as a holiday. Here, from the very beginning on the beach, the audience was always diverse and curious. They want to learn about the artists, be surprised.”

The beach was 15 years ago. After two years, following noise complaints from overlooking hotels, the festival moved to the park. The long sands still have their place, though. Workshops begin in mid-afternoon, the main stages don’t open until 7pm and the headliners come on around 2am, leaving the beach as preferred choice for daytime recovery. On Gran Canaria, less than 100 miles off the west coast of Africa, sunshine is all-but guaranteed.

Thanks to WOMAD’s partnership with Casa Africa, the continent’s influence on the festival is marked. The group promotes understanding between Spain and Africa in everything from economics to foreign policy, but here the emphasis is very much on culture.

On Friday, that means a showing from the 13-piece percussion-heavy African group, Diak Haso, with one main beat augmented by streams of polyrhythms of dazzling, interweaving intricacy. Throughout, their cinema programme and photographic exhibitions promote the continent’s visual arts. And on Sunday they help provide arguably the highlight of the weekend: the parade of Les Grandes Personnes, outsize puppets originating in Burkina Faso, joined for the march by local children and the models they’ve been workshopping. The festival director explains how they came to be here. “A contact in Burkina Faso saw them and emailed to say ‘Dania, you have to see this performance. I looked at their website and thought, although we didn’t have the budget, we should approach Casa Africa to help bring them over.”

The procession confirms the shrewdness of the move. An enormous multi-coloured sailing ship is held aloft by a mass of arms, followed by a line of desert island-tipped umbrellas. Behind them come a tipsily swaying 20ft African couple and their 10ft child, a dancing giraffe, juggling stilt walker, more umbrellas, and the procession’s Zimbabwean beat makers, Siyaya. And behind them, a buzzing swarm of eager followers large enough to make a pied piper blush.

The cavalcade’s size only serves to confirm just what a big deal WOMAD has become out here. You could also point to the morning press conferences in the Melia hotel, with a selection of the day’s acts faced by hordes of uncharacteristically excitable journalists, photographers and TV cameras. Televisión Canaria is out in the park covering every last performance, too.

Lucky locals. It means they get to keep for posterity a vast array of highlights. There’s Depedro, all Tex-Mex twang of guitar and a jazz-sourced rhythm section, while the big, declamatory balladeering voice is most assuredly Spanish. Forro in the Dark showcase free-flowing guitar and fluid percussion reminiscent of Carlos Santana’s ‘Abraxus’-era glory days, mixed with reggae rhythms and Cuban chorusing. It’s a heady mix. Tinariwen headline in front of an excitable crowd on Friday night and becalm them beautifully. Their infinite variety of percussive rhythm and molten desert blues guitar could, of course, hypnotise a stone. Before their puppet work, Siyaya’s performance underscores Africa’s position as the root of so much Western music. Exaggerate the riotous colour, keep the frenetic, constantly member-shifting dancing, and you’ve got a prop-free evocation of the P-Funk Mothership. More pertinently, simply change the words, and you’ve got the joyous silk-smooth harmonies emanating from Baptist churches across the Southern States.

“Maybe I look at the city through WOMAD-tainted spectacles, but I think the young generation lives very naturally with people coming from Africa,” says Dania, before explaining just how you go about obtaining such a rich diversity of music. “First you have to think of the audience, then liaise with the UK team. Each act forms the piece of a puzzle. I was talking with the city’s mayor recently about the young local bands playing. I told him that I thought the 15 years the festival has been here has influenced the music of the city.”

Take in the ad hoc African drumming circles away from the stages, and you can see the wisdom in her words. If you’d only taken in local group, Line, however, you may beg to differ. Here you’ll find a bassist, a club vocalist belting out endlessly repeated platitudes (“Tomorrow’s just another daaaay!”), a guitarist knocking out day-glo buzz saw riffs (think ZZ Top circa ‘Eliminator’) and a DJ whole primary role is to unleash waves of thumping four: four beats the size of Norwich. We’re not in Charlton Park anymore, Toto. They are ludicrous. They are also, unequivocally, utterly brilliant.

“At the beginning I was obsessed with not losing the originality of the festival,” says Dania, explaining how Las Palmas WOMAD’s evolution has come to feature some unusually rock-centric acts. “Though we have critics in the media asking for a specific artist, that’s fine, it’s a free world. But the audience are happy to receive the artists I bring.”

Damn straight. Marcio Local’s rabble-rousing skank is reggae to march en masse down the streets to. Subtlety isn’t given a look in: this is raucous, speechifying vocal and heavy-hitting rhythm all the way; the drummer could’ve eaten pizzas all hour-long and still suffered weight loss. Similarly, Roy Ayers’ sticksman is a complete blur. The bandleader turns to him as if to say “Any more, son?” The returned look says “I’m spent, boss.” Benevolently, Ayers returns to vibes and picks up ‘Everybody Loves The Sunshine’. The set turns on a dime from the smoothest of R ‘n’ B to the free-est of jazz, and all of funk’s many stopping off points in between. Ayers has got Stevie Wonder’s ability to communicate a sublime musical vision and have his band deliver it. Stevie lost that power a good three decades ago; Mr Ayers has still got it.

In similar fashion to those early Peter Gabriel albums, it seems plausible to imagine that every last one of Yone Rodriguez & Timplebanda’s songs is called ‘Summer’s Here!’. Dizzying jazzular conversations between every variety of guitar-based stringed instrument are backed by percussion beats that alternately skip and swing. Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara lock into both Roy Dodds’ drum patterns and a mutually natural groove of Western blues licks and riti-deployed Fula rhythms, and explore all the variants contained therein. Come the encore, the Bo Diddley echo that’s been shyly peeping into practically every track fully reveals itself in a full-throttle improvisation around ‘Mona’.

We’re getting near the end now. As if in sympathy, Melingo sits on the front of the stage, bows his head, and weeps. His voice is as if an extra sheet of sandpaper has been taken to Leonard Cohen’s baritone, his performance the dovetailing of a couple of Jacques: Brel for heart-on-sleeve theatricality, and Tati for clowning. He also does things with a clarinet that Acker Bilk most likely wouldn’t approve of. A true, if smutty, romantic. If you want an idea of the energy level of an Oumou Sangare set, the glitteringly sashaying backing singers are towelling themselves off after just one song. Sangare stands imperious centre-stage, arm raised, her voice – a rare combination, this – as pure as it is voluminous.

Her Malian majesty might be familiar to WOMAD audiences the world over, but not in a setting quite like this. Anyone who suspects that the festival’s travels merely sees the franchise dropped wholesale into another country could not be more wrong. If you’ve never been, a sampling of this grand, distinctly Canarian spectacle is most heartily recommended.

Julian Owen.