Back in 1982 Peter Gabriel was one of the initiators of the Womad Festival, an event that brought together music, visual art and dance from artists all over the world. Back then Peter Gabriel was a commonly known British popstar, but he wasn’t the average business man and due to a lack of ticket sales among other problems, the festival became a financial nightmare. Peter Gabriel and Womad had to be saved, and who would be better for the job than Gabriel’s old stable mates from Genesis? The Six Of The Best Concert at Milton Keynes was a fact, and it was a huge success.
The Womad disaster in ’82 did not discourage Peter Gabriel from persevering his goals. Many years later Womad is still alive and the festival is held on different continents all over the world. In 1994 the organisation was to bring Womad to Holland for the first time, to The Hague to be precise. Mojo Concerts were responsible for setting up the festival and promoting it but due to various reasons they cancelled the first Dutch Womad in early June. The logistics were just too complex.
Womad didn’t happen but instead Peter Gabriel came back to Holland to perform a sequel to his Secret World Tour. The year before that he’d played two nights at the Ahoy in Rotterdam. I recently found an original concert poster for the gig in The Hague on July 6th 1994. In the gallery above there’s more information (in Dutch) about PG’s performance and about Womad going wrong. History repeated itself, only this time without the financial ruin.