V.A. Live At Womad 1982

Womad 1982: “It was a simple idea, to create a festival of all the brilliant music and art made all over the world, stuff made outside of the mainstream — music that wasn’t getting on the radio and was even harder to find in record stores.

We also wanted to encourage collaborations between some of the indie artists we had invited and the world music artists that in turn became a great platform for experimentation and later the inspiration for Real World Records. At the beginning most of the music industry professionals told us that we had no chance of making this dream work, we had all the wonderful naïve misguided optimism of the young, and were convinced that we would prove all the cynics wrong.

For its first year it was run out of the rundown farmhouse I was renting as a studio just north of Bath. I remember well the moment we announced the festival to the press who came … for a session with the Burundi drummers whose deep thunderous and hypnotic rhythms pounded … across our sleepy valley … farmers were worried about the impact on the milk yield and of over arousing their bulls.” — Peter Gabriel

Forty years later, the festival has been hosted in more than 30 countries. As well as presenting and celebrating the huge array of art forms the planet has to offer, a central aim of Womad’s many festivals is to promote cross-cultural awareness and tolerance.

This album, announced Wednesday June 8th, celebrating the 40th anniversary of a landmark cultural moment, is a window onto highlights of three days of amazing music from the first festival, Featuring performances by Echo and the Bunnymen, Peter Gabriel, Simple Minds, The Beat, The Drummers of Burundi, The Musicians of the Nile, Salsa de Hoy, and many more.