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WOMAD 2026: Fresh Eyes at the World's Most Eclectic Festival
WOMAD 2026: Fresh Eyes at the World's Most Eclectic Festival
WOMAD returns to a new home after a year away from the fields. With 10,000 fewer tickets, it was a weekend that proved the break was worth it.
Co-founded by Peter Gabriel in 1982, WOMAD has spent four decades platforming music from cultures that rarely share a stage, let alone a field in Wiltshire. It has outlasted trends and survived financial crises, continuing to build a loyal community of attendees who return year after year for new and exciting discoveries of every kind.
After a year's hiatus and a move away from Charlton Park, its home since 2007, the festival returned in 2026 at Neston Park Estate near Corsham. Smaller than before, it remains proudly independent - shaped in part by feedback from its own audience.
This was our first WOMAD. We were delighted to be working with the festival for the first time this year, facilitating a number of roles for up and coming creatives from our community, as well as heading out ourselves to cover the weekend across interviews, editorial, and social content.
Friends who have been going for years, affectionately known as 'Womad babies', said it felt slightly different this year. With a new site after a year's hiatus, and scaled-down crowd moving from 40,000 to 30,000, this is understandable.
WOMAD moved from Charlton Park, its home since 2007, to the 2,000-acre Neston Park Estate near Corsham, returning as a truly independent operation after a year away. Sunflowers lined the tracks and fields rolled out behind the stages, making the compact layout feel more like a village. You could get between stages quickly, run into the same people multiple times, and move through the site at a pace that suited the music.
With the UK heatwave in full swing, the temperature was relentless, pushing thirty degrees for most of the weekend, which did, however, make the one layout issue more noticeable. The centre of the arena was taken up almost entirely by shops, meaning you had to navigate through stalls to get between stages. We eventually worked out it was faster to go round the outside. But in that heat, and as a first timer at WOMAD (and indeed for all punters on the new site) it adds up.
WOMAD stands for World of Music, Arts and Dance, and unlike a lot of festivals that gesture vaguely towards eclecticism, this one really means it. Over the course of the weekend we watched a six-piece Ugandan xylophone troupe who have apparently played Berghain, a Japanese drum and flute punk band whose set involved a member breaking his ankle without noticing, and an octogenarian Western Australian tribal elder playing meditative desert blues to a tent in Wiltshire.
As Zack Polanski put it when we sat down with him in the World of Words tent, there is something genuinely radical about a space that treats music from every corner of the world with equal weight, and asks you to be curious and open rather than comfortable and closed.
Barrington Levy on Friday was something else entirely and a major highlight for most. Strutting onto the World Stage to the sound of an air raid siren, announcing immediately that they don't make them like him anymore, stopping his band mid-song in James Brown fashion to demand a wheel up, and point blank refusing to leave when his time was up. A real entertainer, the crowd absolutely lapped it up.
His signature scatting, that infectious 'shadilydidilywooo', became the unofficial sound of the weekend. You'd hear it from strangers walking past, 'Here I come' hummed under breath and muttered between friends throughout the weekend. We sat down with him backstage and talked about his voice being sampled across decades without him always knowing, what Jamaica is losing as its natural land gets privatised, and what he would tell young musicians coming up now. We did try to convince him to attempt a world record for the longest shadilydidilywooo, but unfortunately he wasn't having it.
The NTS partnership transformed the late night Rhythm and Rhyme stage into something that felt genuinely connected to where underground music is moving right now. Livwutang on Thursday night, whose deep and dubby selections drew from sound system culture, was a real discovery - which we also heard from her firsthand in an inetrview. DJ Travella closing the NTS stage brought the breakneck singeli of Dar es Salaam, pushing past 200 bpm. The Bristol takeovers from Twende and the Jam Jar on Friday and Saturday also featured hybrid sets from DJs, selectors, singers, drummers and trombonists all sharing the space.
Across the weekend we also sat down with Jupiter and Okwess, Hempress Sativa, Cami Layé Okún, and Zack Polanski.
Jupiter Bokondji, nicknamed the Rebel General, grew up as the son of a Congolese diplomat, crossing the Berlin Wall daily to attend school as a child, before returning to Kinshasa and staying there during the First Congo War while his bandmates fled to Europe.
His fourth album Ekoya, conceived during a tour of South America and recorded in Mexico, features lyrics across eight languages and collaborations with artists from Brazil, Mexico, and the DRC. Jupiter conducts all his interviews in French, making this our first ever translated interview, and one we found genuinely exciting, albeit challenging, for that reason.
Hempress Sativa spoke of the tension between the patriarchal structures within Rastafari and the critique at the heart of her new album Woman, and why her mother Doris-Ray's voice appears on the record where her father Albert's sound system shaped everything that came before it.
Cami Layé Okún talked us through records that found their way to Cuba via soldiers who fought in the independence struggles of Angola and Mozambique, and what it means to be the only person running 100% vinyl events in Havana - a city where access to records from outside the country has historically been almost impossible.
Finally, Zack Polanski delved into why accepting people into this country shouldn't be conditional on what they can offer economically or culturally. Not because they can cook a dish or play an instrument, but because kindness doesn't require a justification or quid pro quo.
He also spoke about MCing Green Party raves at The Cause in Tottenham, and whether politics belongs at festivals. As he put it, you're not going to solve the world's problems at a festival alone, but you might just be more receptive to new ones.
For our first year working with WOMAD, we could not have asked for a better introduction to this incredible festival. Keep an eye out for the release of our WOMAD conversations coming soon over the next few weeks!
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