Saturday 08/03/08 WOMADelaide 2008 @ Botanic Park, Adelaide

There’s a plan, of course – you can hardly cope with WOMADelaide’s six stages without one – but mine’s in danger right from the start. Tecoma are tucked away on the Moreton Bay stage, just near the entrance, playing some fairly gentle country-influenced folk. The laid back rhythms are perfect for a heatwave afternoon, since laziness isn’t so much an option as a necessity. Amira Pyliotis, their lead singer, has an interesting voice and some good material, and nothing would be easier than lying back in the shade of a giant fig tree and listening to her band for the next hour or so. Trouble is, that would mean missing out on the taiko drummers. So there’s nothing for it but to check the water supplies, notify the appropriate authorities (that would be my feet) and begin the long and arduous trek across the sun-ravaged patch of scrub that lies between here and stage three.

As taiko drumming ensembles go, the Joji Hirota Trio are small both in numbers and in the size of their drums, the largest of which is comparable to a beer keg. (See what the weather’s doing? I’ve got fluid on the brain.) But they’re no less thunderous for that. Unless they want to be gentle, of course. From my uneducated viewpoint, taiko has always seemed to be a music of extremes, bringing together pounding violence and exquisite delicacy in such a way that you have to see the world a little differently. You get used to one, and then you get the other, and somehow the two are intertwined. After demonstrating similar prowess on shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, Hirota helpfully teaches us a few lines from an old Japanese folk song, suggesting that we use them to speed our passage through customs the next time we visit his country.

Come four o’clock, the sell-out crowd is still missing in action. The punters gathered in front of stage one for the Terem Quartet go no further back than the shade from the canopy, though plenty more are huddled together under the trees behind the mixing desk. The four musicians are wearing traditional embroidered Russian costumes, and you can only hope they’ve got ice jackets underneath. Imagine the Giza pyramid crossed with a double bass and you’re somewhere close to a mental image of the contrabass balalaika, perhaps the largest instrument at WOMADelaide apart from the occasional grand piano. It’s joined by two standard balalaikas and an accordion. Much of the Terem Quartet’s set today is classical in nature, presenting or referring to works by Bach and Tchaikovsky, among others. But the most entertaining number is Summer Holidays, which comes complete with sound effects. Waves on the shore are created blowing into the balalaikas; foghorns – these are Russian summer holidays, presumably – by the accordion.

Qualifying either as a mad dog or an Englishman, perhaps both, I decide to head off for a wander. The lesson learnt is really quite simple: it’s scorching. But at least the wander leads to Clube Do Balanço. Being Brazilian, and playing something described as samba rock, they clearly know a thing or two about rhythms for hot weather. I’m confronted by the sight of a bloke in his fifties wearing some truly horrendous yellow shorts and a Vietnamese hat. He’s dancing in double time – anywhere else but Womad I’d assume he was a drug dealer advertising the quality of his stimulants. Clube Do Balanço play instrumentally for three or four songs, and then add a singer. Ideally you’d want this lot on much later at night – they’re easily good enough for that – but their crowd is the largest so far and deservedly so. The end of their excellent set is percussion heavy and adds a number of dancers, who only add to celebratory feel of their music.

The John Butler Trio has drawn the most excitable audience of the day, and for the second in a row. Though it’s an all-ages crowd, most of the buzz is coming from young women and teenage girls, large numbers of whom clearly adore JB. Yesterday the talking point in the crowd had been the rumoured demise of Butler’s dreads (they’re certainly very much shorter); today it’s how good he was yesterday. There’s a view of Butler that sees his lyrics as overly simplistic hippy dippy bullshit and his music as banal, but expressed that starkly it’s just a tad on the excessive side. His two Womad sets certainly prove one thing: he’s a consummate musician. The most obvious proof of this comes on Ocean, an extended solo instrumental, even if Saturday’s version has some technical flaws. It also features the rather unusual sight of Lucky Oceans, the stage two MC for the weekend and a nationally known DJ, tucked away at the back and playing along on lap steel without making a sound. As it turns out he’s not just doing it purely for his own enjoyment, but warming up for a guest slot on the next song.