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MUSIC... IT MEANS THE WORLD TO US
EXPLORE A WORLD OF MUSIC: CLICK ON THE DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AND GET READY TO TRAVEL
There is a historic town in southern Estonia, population 17000, that every July transforms into a global cultural hub. For four days, the ruins of its 13th-century Livonian Order Castle fill with tens of thousands of people who have come, some of them from the other side of the world, to listen to music that in some cases nearly ceased to exist. The Viljandi Folk Music Festival has become one of the largest events of its kind in the Baltic […]...
In 1969 a young Zulu musician named Sipho Mchunu heard about a white teenager in Johannesburg who could play Zulu guitar, and went to challenge him to a contest. The teenager was Johnny Clegg. They became friends, then a duo, then Juluka, a band with black and white members who shared a stage when the law said they could not, and the song that took them furthest was “Scatterlings of Africa”, written about the idea that everyone alive traces back […]...
Event Preview: WOMAD 2026 @ Neston Park (Corsham, Wiltshire; Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th July 2026)
After a fallow year and seventeen summers at Charlton Park, WOMAD moves to Neston Park near Corsham in north Wiltshire, running Thursday 23 to Sunday 26 July. Three miles up the road, Peter Gabriel built Real World Studios into an eighteenth-century watermill on the By Brook in 1987, and WOMAD’s own offices have been based there. The festival grew out of what Gabriel was doing at Real World, pulling musicians from across the world into the same building to record […]...
On 22 June 1948 the Empire Windrush tied up at Tilbury in Essex, carrying close to five hundred Caribbean migrants drawn by the offer of work in a Britain short of labour after the war. Among them was the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Kitchener, who came ashore singing “London Is the Place for Me” for the Pathé cameras. The city gave them less than the song promised. Their first nights were spent a hundred and eighty steps underground in the windowless […]...
For one long Bank Holiday Friday, a stretch of east London turned unmistakably verde-ouro. Boa Nova Festival, the capital’s first festival given over entirely to Brazilian music, landed at Leyton Jubilee Park, a sprawling, tree-lined community park, on Friday 22nd May, and even the weather played along: a hot, bright afternoon that felt closer to Recife than to Leyton. Across the site, two stages traded off with a roda de samba, food stalls sent up the smoke of churrasco while […]...
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Interview: From the Lips to the Moon – Four Years of One-Night-Only Worlds (May 2026)
Words by Marco Canepari / Photo by Josh Snaps
