Womad Festival

At lunchtime on Friday, the Womad site experienced an almost unprecedented event. Rain lashed down on the marquees and village of ethnic gift shops. This looked like a Womad to cover from the bar of the Reading Holiday Inn. By the time Sevara Nazarkhan took the stage there was a brisk wind, blowing Nazarkhan's green silk dress and jangling her jewellery. Backed by a rock band embellished with a doutar, a Central Asian lute, Nazarkhan offered glamour and a partially successful mix of European pop rock and local tradition.

Eliza Carthy, the great young hope of the English folk scene, followed with sprightly reels and lovely ballads, punctuated by shafts of sun rapidly coalescing into - unbelievable, they've done it again - another Womad fine evening. The forest of silk flags rippled like a huge Dulux colour chart - here a section of earthy reds and browns, there a patch of cool greens and turquoises. The merchandise stalls began to buzz. Krank-it. com, offering a canny selection of "legal hallucinogens" and raincoats, cranked up its sound system, while the sales team donned feather boas. Gastronomically, the usual falafels and West Indian stews were joined by newcomers - from Lulu's Café, the operation that claims to have introduced chicken satay to the UK festival menu, cassoulet, no less. Almost enough to lure you out of the Holiday Inn.

Doubly worth it, to catch Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, the 1960s San Francisco country-rock-blues novelty outfit. An avuncular faux redneck with a pleasing drawl, a neat guitar technique and some excellent songs, Hicks fronts a tight little band of fiddle, mandolin, guitar and two chorines, the Fabulous Lickettes, whose pencil skirts and blonde perms seemed straight from some 1950s luncheonette.

The open-air stage terminated proceedings with a set by the impish north-east Brazilian Chico César - guitars, percussion, melodies, a great girl clarinettist, wacky dance steps, and the expenditure of huge energy at the old festival game of getting the audience to wave their arms in the air.

Après Chico, le déluge. By lunchtime on Saturday the heavens had dumped on Womad. But the public didn't bow: Krank-it.com was still selling more legal hallucinogens than raincoats. The half-dozen stages vibrated, and even the dispiritingly municipal River Mead sports complex began to look inviting, with its DJs and workshops. The world this year included: the Indian sub-continent, classical (the Kaboul Ensemble), rootsical (the massed Punjabi drums of the Dhol Foundation), the sophisticated (Nitin Sawhney's polished settings for suave vocals), and the Mediterranean (the rai star Khaled, direct from Algeria, and an excitable young Barcelona outfit named Ojos de Brujo, with a touch of flamenco and a bit of anything else to hand, adored by the crowd).

The biggest contingent this year, with a dozen acts, was African. Sunday dawned bright and warm. The only stray water on view was splashing out of the white plastic tub holding the floating percussive gourd of a water drummer with the group of Manecas Costa of Guinea Bissau, the tiny West African nation. Playing jaunty minor-key dance tunes, including the distinctive goumbe rhythm, Costa was enjoyable, though the heavy-bassed amplification stifled the subtlety of his music.

A major attraction was the appearance of the Guinean band Bembeya Jazz, the great African authenticity forerunners of the Sixties, and their equally legendary 1970s neighbours from Mali, the Super Rail Band, fronted respectively by guitar stars Sekou "Diamond Fingers" Diabate and Djelimady Tounkara. Bembeya's brass section boosted the tight mesh of their four guitarists, until their old female-circumcision ceremony song, "Lefa", had all Rivermead moving. Meanwhile, Tounkara's silvery riffing on his Gibson enraptured the open-air stage.

As for the Latins, festival favourites Cuba offered two acts. And then there were the other Brazilians - such as Totonho y os Cabra, an antidote to the soigné newbossa nova acts currently wowing fashionable metropolitan Europe.

The presence of the word "goat" in a band's name is invariably a promising sign, and Tony's Goats bore out this dictum. Fronted by an aged ruffian with grizzled beard and manically baleful stage demeanour, Totonho initially scared off some listeners with a blast of vicious heavy metal. Thereafter the mix of surrealist tropical guitar mayhem fascinated. At one point, Totonho almost slipped into festival-cliché mode, ordering the audience peremptorily to sing "yin, yang", and then instantly dropping the idea when no one responded. Give that goat a medal.