Forward Thinking: Womad's world of difference

Tiki Tane performs at WOMAD 2011 in New Plymouth. Photo / Herald on Sunday

The locals assure us the Taranaki weather is always this good.

But for visitors to the province of oil, milk and mountain, one weekend of golden weather a year will do nicely, provided it's the weekend of Womad.

This year's three-day festival of world music, food and culture was a typically joyous affair.

It attracts a mixed crowd: suburban parents, jive-happy retirees and plenty of teenagers. There are, happily, fewer aged hippies than you might think.

Regular Womaders get used to a set of familiar annual routines: the marathon queue for the excellent Hungarian bread; the local tie-died hippie brushing up on fire poi; the spectacle of a famous TV3 journalist dancing in the lake at the main stage on the final night.

But it's the surprises that make this weekend in New Plymouth's Brooklands Park great.

Of this year's eye-openers, Mongolian rockers Hanggai took the cake. They were visually stunning, decked out in traditional garb, and mixed the traditional hum of throat singing with waves of distorted guitar and a pumping rhthym section. A sort of Mongoltalica, this is the only set of heavy metal throat singing I'm ever likely to see - vintage Womad.

Saturday night's five-star treat was Juan De Marcos' Afro-Cuban All Stars, a 15-piece big band who could have walked straight off the set of a Martin Scorsese movie based in 1960s Havana. American guitar virtuoso Bob Brozman stunned with his breezy genius, all the while throwing out the vaguely lefty, anti-Republican banter the Womad tribe like to hear.

This is far and away the most diverse event of New Zealand's festival season.

(For a reminder of just how rare a cultural treat Womad is, we took a trip to New Plymouth's hellish main drag for a post-festival tipple late on Saturday night. It's fair to say the cultural joys of Womad seem to have slipped under the radar of the teenage crowd spilling out of Breakers Bar.)

Schedule clashes - and gaps - are rife. Mostly they don't matter: One cheerily sozzled member of our group boogeyed through a set of fantastic reggae by Don Letts before revealing that she thought she was at Rhombus.

Many festival-goers were irked to miss Amadou and Mariam, the blind duo from Mali playing exceptional Afro-blues, whose performances bookended the festival. Trouble was, if you drove to the 'Naki on Friday, as many did, and departed on Sunday before the finale, you would have missed them. A great pity.

I've been lucky enough to see Amadou and Mariam a few times now - which is more than they can say - and can report they were excellent on Friday afternoon.

Of course, there are cases of world music hell. Afro-Celt Sound System attracted a big audience to the main stage with their mash of trip hop, West African beats and - Lord preserve us - Celtic tin whistles and fiddles. Each to their own and all that, but I found this hard to bear.

The West African stuff I like, the trip hop I can handle, but I cannot abide anything that draws on elements of the peasants-dancing-in- steerage scene from Titanic.

There were other eyebrow-raisers - take Shell for instance. The awkward irony of the global oil giant sponsoring stages on which artists from Nigeria appear was noted when Seun Kuti performed two years ago. Still, one could gamely argue that Shell has done a great deal for contemporary Nigerian music - after all, there's a lot of protest material there to be written about.

But, all in, a top experience. A fine line-up, and - as ever - the best weather Taranaki had to offer.

-TimeOut