Fact #165704
When:
Short story:
The first ever W.O.M.A.D Festival begins in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England, UK. Over the three days of the event, artists appearing include The Drummers of Burundi, Echo And The Bunnymen, Musicians of the Nile, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, The Beat, Peter Gabriel, Simple Minds and Prince Nico Mbarga.
Attendance : 16,000
Full article:
Peter Gabriel : Pure enthusiasm for world music led us to create WOMAD. Despite a considerable lack of interest from most of the music business, I tried to gather together a group of people who could create an event that would present music and dance from all over the world, together with rock, jazz and folk music from the West.
Richard Williams (The Times) : Arabian horns, West African drums, Indonesian xylophones, American synthesisers and British electric guitars, all half-immersed in the collective babble of children at play, vendors of wholewheat doughnuts and astrological trinkets, and prophets of nuclear doom and spiritual nirvana.
John Ryle (Sunday Times) : More than fifty acts performed on five stages, under geodesic carapaces, in pavilions, mangers and marquees. Stars of the occasions were undoubtedly the lovely and thunderous Drummers of Burundi whose acrobatic performances left audiences agasp.
Peter Duncan (fan) : I remember a football match - the Burundi Drummers against a Rest of the World team including members of The Beat, a couple of Bunnymen and some of the Musicians of the Nile. The Drummers won, two-nil.
Thomas Brooman (artistic director, W.O.M.A.D.) : That first Womad was a cataclysmic financial disaster. We just didn’t know what we were doing.
Peter Gabriel : We didn’t make a profit but we showed that there were people who wanted to hear other musics apart from rock.
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Peter Brooman (co-founder, WOMAD) : Peter Gabriel was the inspiration and the catalyst for WOMAD, and he, myself and our planning committee were very involved in this together at every level throughout 1981-2. None of the rest of us had any music business experience but I fell into the role of festival director, probably because I was articulate and enthusiastic.
Ten weeks out from the event, there were feelings of deep anxiety and bewilderment because we knew that it wasn’t going well financially but not how badly.
We didn’t have the Internet or Excel spreadsheets, and all the organisation was based on written notes - plus we were complete novices at putting on festivals! But we knew we had to make something happen and on the day either people would come or they wouldn’t. We’d sold 9,000 tickets before we opened but we needed 27,000 to have any hope of breaking even [the eventual figure was 18,000].
Now, in 2007, we know exactly how many people are coming because all the tickets have just about been sold in advance but for the first six years or so, at least 40% would turn up on the day.
It was a very physical, hand-held experience and, in 1982, it was some achievement to pull all this off.
During the festival, it was clear that not enough people were coming and we had three-hourly emergency meetings to see how we would survive the next three hours, which we somehow did.
There was tremendous guilt - having got all these people to come and perform, we realised by the Sunday that we didn’t have enough money to pay some of them. Come the Monday after the event, we were in a queue outside our bank in Bristol trying to cash cheques with no money in the bank. And yet there was still this feeling of achievement, because the festival really moved people in a profound way.
Observing how some of these unusual artists went down so positively with the audience was truly heartwarming. I’d seen the drummers of Burundi when I was in France the previous year but they’d never visited Britain before and it was kind of hard to predict how they’d be received, unlike homegrown acts like Echo & The Bunnymen and Rip Rig And Panic, but they were astonishing.
We were all pretty much washing our hands of it. It was a scathing experience and Peter was under enormous pressure afterwards with people blaming him for it not being commercially successful when it wasn’t his fault at all.
(Source : Total Production International magazine, September 2007)
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Richard Williams (The Times) : Arabian horns, West African drums, Indonesian xylophones, American synthesisers and British electric guitars, all half-immersed in the collective babble of children at play, vendors of wholewheat doughnuts and astrological trinkets, and prophets of nuclear doom and spiritual nirvana.
John Ryle (Sunday Times) : More than fifty acts performed on five stages, under geodesic carapaces, in pavilions, mangers and marquees. Stars of the occasions were undoubtedly the lovely and thunderous Drummers of Burundi whose acrobatic performances left audiences agasp.
Peter Duncan (fan) : I remember a football match - the Burundi Drummers against a Rest of the World team including members of The Beat, a couple of Bunnymen and some of the Musicians of the Nile. The Drummers won, two-nil.
Thomas Brooman (artistic director, W.O.M.A.D.) : That first Womad was a cataclysmic financial disaster. We just didn’t know what we were doing.
Peter Gabriel : We didn’t make a profit but we showed that there were people who wanted to hear other musics apart from rock.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Brooman (co-founder, WOMAD) : Peter Gabriel was the inspiration and the catalyst for WOMAD, and he, myself and our planning committee were very involved in this together at every level throughout 1981-2. None of the rest of us had any music business experience but I fell into the role of festival director, probably because I was articulate and enthusiastic.
Ten weeks out from the event, there were feelings of deep anxiety and bewilderment because we knew that it wasn’t going well financially but not how badly.
We didn’t have the Internet or Excel spreadsheets, and all the organisation was based on written notes - plus we were complete novices at putting on festivals! But we knew we had to make something happen and on the day either people would come or they wouldn’t. We’d sold 9,000 tickets before we opened but we needed 27,000 to have any hope of breaking even [the eventual figure was 18,000].
Now, in 2007, we know exactly how many people are coming because all the tickets have just about been sold in advance but for the first six years or so, at least 40% would turn up on the day.
It was a very physical, hand-held experience and, in 1982, it was some achievement to pull all this off.
During the festival, it was clear that not enough people were coming and we had three-hourly emergency meetings to see how we would survive the next three hours, which we somehow did.
There was tremendous guilt - having got all these people to come and perform, we realised by the Sunday that we didn’t have enough money to pay some of them. Come the Monday after the event, we were in a queue outside our bank in Bristol trying to cash cheques with no money in the bank. And yet there was still this feeling of achievement, because the festival really moved people in a profound way.
Observing how some of these unusual artists went down so positively with the audience was truly heartwarming. I’d seen the drummers of Burundi when I was in France the previous year but they’d never visited Britain before and it was kind of hard to predict how they’d be received, unlike homegrown acts like Echo & The Bunnymen and Rip Rig And Panic, but they were astonishing.
We were all pretty much washing our hands of it. It was a scathing experience and Peter was under enormous pressure afterwards with people blaming him for it not being commercially successful when it wasn’t his fault at all.
(Source : Total Production International magazine, September 2007)