WOMADelaide 2026
Botanic Park/Tainmuntilla, Tarntanya, SA
March 6th-9th
A few years ago, a video of a local girl at WOMADelaide dancing barefoot through shin-deep mud with joyous abandon achieved relative virality. This is the kind of freewheeling joie de vivre that the festival inspires. It can transform the most straight-laced corporate prude into an advocate for free love and natural deodorant. WOMAD allows even the most bitter cynic to surrender themself to idealism. It is a truly beautiful thing, even if there are far too many patchouli-scented Caucasians with dreadlocks present for my liking.
Friday night at Botanic Park is mild, not beset by the punishing heat that so many Australian festivals suffer from. The scent of Aerogard hangs thick in the air. My weekend of music exploration commences with a plastic pint of beer and La Perla, resplendent on Stage 3.
To try to pigeonhole La Perla into one particular genre would be a disservice to their dynamic nature. The Colombian trio, with their distinct style of percussion and rich vocals, are everything. Their indomitable sense of rhythm, accompanied by much riotous hairflipping, is infectious enough to capture the attention of a venue this sprawling. The countless megabats, shrieking above, seem to approve, as do all the facepaint-flecked children dancing through the trees and jigging in the open grass.
As the sky darkens, one of the best things about WOMAD is readily apparent: the fact that people take chances, and seem to have more willingness to step out of their aural comfort zones and listen to the unfamiliar and new. This is especially exciting to see in Adelaide, whose music scene — which I worship — can come across as admittedly cliquey.
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Later on in the night, Jovanotti, who reminds me of an Italian Elvis, is unavoidable. His stamina is bewildering. He perfectly simulates the experience of being dangerously full of bolognese and drunk on affordable Sangiovese at a family restaurant. The Necks, who grace the stage after him, are far more sobering. The Australian avant-garde jazz trio provide a hypnotic end to the first night of WOMAD.
The marathon continues the next day, for me, with local art-folk outfit Any Young Mechanic (full disclosure: I share blood with the frontman, so I am biased but still correct when I say this band makes phenomenal music) putting on a rousing, triumphant hometown show. The bats, once again, are heavily invested, and distribute feces and urine uniformly throughout the crowd.
Later, iconic collective Yothu Yindi set the Foundation Stage alight, in a haze of scarlet flashes and blinding white strobes. Lead singer M. Yunupingu died of renal failure in 2013, and though his absence is heartrendingly noticeable, Yothu Yindi are in top form. They are at once enraged and merry, their music simultaneously raucous and significant.
Hearing “Treaty” live — the song that first catapulted them to the top of the charts in 1991 — is stellar. With its driving dance beats and kaleidoscopic musical textures, it is truly a song that is a uniting force. But the performance, for all its bright-eyed glory, is not without a sense of bittersweetness, given that we as a nation are no closer when it comes to reparations to First Nations peoples than we were when the song was first released.
On Stage 3 — from what I can glimpse between two sturdy Morton Bay fig trees — BARKAA is on fire. She makes a conscious point of addressing all the children in the audience — “You have the coolest parents in the world because they brought you here” — and this touches on one of WOMAD’s major triumphs: how family-oriented it is.
It feels like there are far too few settings in Australia where children can be so easily and healthily immersed in art (music in particular, socially entwined as it is with intoxicating substances), so it is heartening to see toddlers sporting fairy-wings and clapping along to songs that dissect police brutality and institutionalised racism.
BARKAA is energetic and funny, but she also locks into anger when it is necessary, begging the crowd to wake up to the injustices of the modern world: “Why fucking shouldn’t we be mad? Not just blackfellas, all of you. The world’s run by fucking pedophiles. Free fucking Palestine.”
After BARKAA, the anticipation for the festival’s headliner, Grace Jones, is high. Children and adults alike clamour to the Foundation Stage. The icon finally emerges (fifteen minutes late) on a throne, and, though my view is obscured by sturdy tree branches, she looks like a deity at seventy-seven as she opens the set with her 1981 commercial triumph “Nightclubbing”. Her voice is warbling and strange, but just as arresting as it ever was.
“Adelaide! I need to get laid!” she yells, before confessing that she has helped herself to red wine to lubricate her voice. It is, in fact, hard to tell if she is totally off her face or is just in character. During her many, many incredible but far from seamless costume changes she mumbles things into the mic like, “Spit spit. I spit. Like spit you know when you’re good at sucking cock.” At one point, after much gyrating she becomes stuck upside down in her throne, and has to be detangled by her stage manager Simon, who she also asks to piggy-back her to the lower platform of the stage.
Some audience members appear to be thrown off by her bizarreness — but that, is after all, what she is known for. She has been iconic for decades because she is talented, yes, but also because she has been unconventional and confusing and ahead of her time for so long. For some of the baffled viewers, she is clearly still a little bit too ahead of her time; for others, she is a weird and wonderful headliner — one that didn’t quite make sense, but was the better for it.
Sunday, for me personally, is a lazier day. (WOMAD is truly a marathon, and it is hard to maintain stamina over four days of intensive musical immersion.) I post up at the Academy Stage, which features local acts curated by the arts-focused youth centre Northern Sound System, in the early evening to watch a local act, Jay Eliot Mee, accompanied by his virtuosic band. He is a consummate songwriter — his track “Spanish Time” is one of the most poignant songs of all time, and it was written in Adelaide.
Then comes Baker Boy on the Foundation Stage, whose grinning joy is always infectious, and whose level of breath control is astounding: he flits from playing the Yidaki to rapping with fervour into launching into a dance break with mastery, making it all look effortless (though it surely can’t be). The children in the audience are frothing with appreciation over his skill.
Eventually, Monday — the last day of the festival, the home stretch — rears its dusty head. Obongjayar’s set is rejuvenating, the Nigerian-British singer possessed of blinding charisma. His hold over the audience is akin to that of a megachurch preacher.
Georgia Knight on Stage 7 offers a change of pace. With her auto-harp and her haunting vocals, she is an ethereal presence. She incorporates live radio into her set and sings into a landline; it’s fresh and moody and strange and enchanting. Marlon Williams was nodding along in the crowd, beaming with pride.
Williams is a personal highlight of the festival. He dazzles the stage with his effortless charm and lanky grace. His songs — in both English and te reo Māori — are so timeless, his melodies so classic, that they sound like old standards. Overused adjectives like velvety and silky and honeyed all apply to his voice.
Accompanied onstage by his longtime band The Yarra Benders, Williams is already a transcendent musician to behold, but a little over halfway through the set, everything is elevated by the arrival of a Kapa Haka group called Ngā Mātai Pūrua. They grace the stage with pomp and colour. It is something that must be experienced in person, and was so astonishing that I decided to end the festival on that high and go straight home.
WOMADelaide simulates a utopia, an ideal of how things could be — it is a shame it only lasts a long weekend.
Find out more about WOMADelaide here.