THROUGH THE LENS: Music from Around the World at Australia’s WOMADelaide and Flogging Molly’s Shamrock Rebellion

This week’s column focuses on two festivals featuring world music of different sorts. First, WOMADelaide, March 8-11 in Australia, offered roots music from a variety of countries, including Ukraine, Brazil, Nigeria, and Tunisia. Second, Flogging Molly’s two-day Shamrock Rebellion, March 16 in California and on St. Patrick’s Day in Las Vegas, offered primarily Irish music.

Steve Ford, ND’s Australian correspondent, caught WOMADelaide. Liza Orozco visited the Shamrock Rebellion’s California stop, where she also got to chat with Amigo the Devil. Here are their reports and photos.

WOMADelaide 2024 by Steve Ford 

Following a sold-out, star-studded 2023 festival that tested the limits of the event’s infrastructure, this year’s WOMADelaide, Australia’s annual festival of music, arts and dance, was back-to-basics. Despite the brutally hot weather — temperatures over 100°F well into the evening — the excellent performances to a rapt total audience of 98,000 in Botanic Park, on the edge of Adelaide’s city center, made it all worthwhile. 

My festival began Friday evening with DakhaBrakha, a four-piece group from Kiev, whose music is based on ethnic traditions from Ukraine and beyond, featuring haunting vocals over accordion, percussion, and keys and anchored by Nina Garenetska’s jazzy bass lines. Scenes and slogans from the war were projected behind the band, setting a tone for the weekend, with many performers invoking the struggles in Ukraine and the Palestinian territories.

Tunisian Emel Mathlouthi was, for many, the voice of the Arab Spring through her protest anthem “Kelmti Horra (My Word Is Free).” Her Friday evening show was a highlight.

Senegal’s Baaba Maal headed my “must-see” list and exceeded expectations. I’d been a fan since the 1989 album Djam Leelii that he did with Mansour Seck. Maal and his seven-piece band delivered a master class in West African music. It may have lacked the subtlety of Maal’s early acoustic work, but made up for it with virtuosity, stagecraft, and rhythmic complexity. 

I didn’t know what to expect of Gilberto Gil, now 81, but his Brazilian fans did. They turned out in droves to create a joyous sing-along dance party, with Gil speaking as much Portuguese as English. Jailed then exiled by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1968, Gil became his country’s minister for culture in 2003. On this, his farewell tour, he was a man at ease, with several family members in the band, including 15-year-old granddaughter Flor on keyboards.

Seun Kuti is the youngest son of Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. Seun took over Egypt 80, his late father’s band, while in his teens. Now 41, he heads an international band, still paying homage to his father while expanding his own musical vocabulary. 

The Monday afternoon show by Angelique Kidjo, a late festival inclusion, was superb. Normally intense, Kidjo was relaxed, clearly enjoying herself, and her performance was the better for it. 

There are few better bands on the festival circuit than UK trip-hop veterans Morcheeba. Following Kidjo on the main stage Monday, they mixed ’90s album favorites with more up-tempo songs, including a delightfully funky version of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”

Sweden’s José González played a heroic set, just him and his acoustic guitar, facing into the fierce afternoon sun. He drew a devoted audience that hung on every word as he played the whole of Veneer, his debut album. (Nobody missed the irony of him singing “Stay in the Shade.”) UK jazz drummer Yussef Dayes faced the same challenge and won over a sizable daytime audience. Billed as a virtuoso drummer, Dayes plays like a bandleader, not a wunderkind.

Other performers who impressed me: the Balkan ska band Dubioza Kolektiv; London’s Ibibio Sound Machine (recalling Stop Making Sense-era Talking Heads); a pair of Irish folkies, Lisa O’Neill and concertina master Cormac Begley; Portuguese fado guitarist Marta Pereira da Costa; the reinvigorated Zambian rock band WITCH, fronted by original singer Jagari Chanda; and Angolan-Portuguese Pongo, the Queen of Kuduro. As a whole they illustrated the boundless variety of African popular music.

Flogging Molly’s Shamrock Rebellion by Liza Orozco

I caught the first day of Flogging Molly’s Rebellion, sub-billed as a “St. Patrick’s Day Weekend Beer & Music Festival,” at Oak Canyon Ranch in the green mountains of Santa Ana in Orange County, California.

With performers such as Amigo the Devil and Frank Turner, the fest’s lineup featured a combination of punk rock vibes with folky overtones. And in keeping with the spirit of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, there was craft-beer tasting from a wide variety of local breweries and free samples of Irish whiskey.

While there was music and drinking galore, my highlight was spending some time with Amigo the Devil (aka Danny Kiranos). We had a chat in his trailer about his new record Yours Until the War Is Over (ND review). After listening to his album on repeat for a week, my question was, “Why the melancholy and darkness?” 

During our chat he told me that with every record, specifically this one, there is a coming-to-terms moment that happens. On this occasion he kept wondering why was he attached to dark, shocking, and aggressive stuff while growing up. Once he started experiencing a lot of that loss and darkness in his own life, he came to appreciate the endurance that people have to survive and outlive these situations.

He further told me that he came to respect his attachment to those hard times and began to explore the why. “How do I explain this, rather than get stuck in it?” became the focus that enabled him to put a name to these experiences rather than letting them swallow him up. Despite the darkness in his life and music, he concluded with, “I’m a sunny dark guy, I’m not a grim person. I like jokes and joy!”  

Click on any photo below to view the gallery as a full-size slideshow.