Friday 07/03/08 WOMADelaide 2008 @ Botanic Park, Adelaide

The figures in question – 39, 39, 39 – don’t represent the vital statistics of a particularly square musician, but the weather forecast for the three days of WOMADelaide. One of the most civilised music festivals you can imagine, held in a beautiful park in the heart of a rather graceful city, will have to contend with a truly brutal weekend.

First stop: Farafina. Though they’ve used keyboard and guitar in the past – and recorded with the Rolling Stones – they currently work only with instruments traditionally used in their West African homeland of Burkina Faso. Singing in French, their opening number is largely acappella and has minimal percussion. But it’s hardly representative, and the driving rhythms of their djembes and dunduns soon combine with melodic lines from twin balaphons. Even so, it’s a gentler set than might have been expected, and proves interesting rather than exciting.

The Black Arm Band In Murundak is perhaps the most ambitious performance ever to take to the WOMADelaide stage: the aim is nothing less than telling the history of Australia’s aborigines in song, with a strong and perfectly understandable focus on the last 200 years. Doing justice to the show within a paragraph or two – or even to just a few of the singers and the huge band, which draws on something like thirty musicians – is simply impossible. The highlight is probably Kutcha Edwards, who uses a beautiful voice to ask a very uncomfortable question with his song 'Is This What We Deserve?'

Mavis Staples starts her set with a rather funky – and entirely glorious – rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s classic 'For What It’s Worth'. It’s the perfect summary of what Staples is about: articulate, passionate protest, delivered via one of the finest voices you’ll ever hear. But it’s not just the voice that makes her great – there’s the small matter of her perfect phrasing and the scarcely credible depth of emotion she manages to express.
Her three backing vocalists include an older sister; the band itself is kept simple, with just guitar, bass and drums. Though all six are excellent musicians, Rick Holstrom deserves special mention. After that funky start, we get, in various measures and combinations, gospel, soul, blues and rock, and Holstrom, the guitarist, is the one who makes all of these settings so convincing. There’s a point later on when Mavis takes a well-earned breather, heading to the side of the stage to wrap herself in a few towels and dry off. Normally, given a vocalist of Staples’ calibre, you might expect to feel her absence and tolerate it only because she’ll come back refreshed. But Holstrom takes the emotion up to another level, turning in an absolutely brilliant solo. It’s not particularly flashy, but it is perfectly judged. Obviously he can’t tell Staples’ stories for her, but through what and how he plays he proves that he understands exactly where she’s coming from and what she wants to say.

'March On Freedom’s Highway' gets perhaps the best reception yet; it’s followed by 'Respect Yourself', and there’s a gracious nod to Aretha Franklin being the real queen of soul. While Staples deals almost exclusively with injustice and oppression, her show, taken as a whole, is entirely uplifting. You can’t listen to something like this and then walk away unaffected.

Last stop for the night is to see Kora, one of the many New Zealand bands with a penchant for dub reggae. First impression is that they’re rather good, but, unusually in my experience of NZ dub, the levels of paranoia in their music aren’t too far away from those to be found on some of Tricky’s albums. That would normally count in their favour, but after the deep soul-cleansing service that Mavis Staples has performed, the change is simply too much. Once I’ve made a mental note to investigate them again later in the weekend, it’s time to wander off into the hot, hot night. Unfortunately, though the timetable I’m looking at doesn’t say so, it proves to be their only show. Maybe they were right to be paranoid.