theartsdesk team arrived at the WOMAD site with a degree of trepidation this year. Coming at the end of one of the wettest Julys in recent memory and the day after a serious deluge, was it going to be another Womud?

Fortunately, Thursday was a day with enough sunshine and wind to dry the ground reasonably well and apart from the odd mud puddle, things weren’t too bad. However, once we’d consumed a welcome beer and started snacking on the fantastic food that was on offer, everything felt even better.

It’s 15 years since Judy Collins last stepped out at the Cambridge Folk Festival. She was a mere 68 then and, in the time since, little has changed except her hair, the famous rock-star mane lopped so that she now resembles the cover of those classic early Sixties’ albums.

Although Dark Horse is Maria Wilman’s first album, it feels as though it’s the latest entry in a string of releases. The songs are fully formed. The delivery is assured. The overall character of what’s heard is cohesive, suggesting the person who recorded these 12 tracks draws from previous experiences with framing what they want to express, and how it should be expressed. But there it is, Dark Horse is a debut.

Restraint wasn’t the watchword. Around March 1965, Heinz was in Joe Meek’s North London recording studio taping “Big Fat Spider,” which became the B-side of his April single version of “Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright.” A run-through which didn’t end up on the record found guitarist Richie Blackmore tossing off blistering lead runs so frenzied, so spikey, so wayward they might – had the track been issued – have caused radio producers to check whether the single had a pressing fault.

It’s probably an unconscious action. Sat on a stage-centre chair, Julie Byrne sings. The two acoustic guitars she plays for about half the set are beside her, on their racks. One hand is above the other, palms down. Each moves side-to-side in a chopping motion. It’s not simultaneous with the song’s rhythm and independent of the meter of the lines. It’s not obvious what's being complemented or ticked off, but it must draw from something concealed by the exterior.

“This wasn’t the day to wear white suede boots,” says Django Django’s singer Vincent Neff, midway through the band’s Friday evening set.

He’s not kidding.

After his death in 1867, it didn’t take long for Charles Baudelaire’s poems to be set to music. Composer Henri Duparc did so in 1870, but Claude Debussy’s late 1880s framing of five of the Symbolist pioneer’s verses confirmed this as more than a one-off fascination for the musical world.

Subsequently, Baudelaire’s words have stimulated myriads of performers: Celtic Frost, The Cure, Serge Gainsbourg, Diamanda Galas and Tyler the Creator amongst them. In France, chanson legend Léo Férre devoted three albums to Baudelaire.

Two producers named Martin worked with Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Martin Hannett was in the studio for Buzzcocks’ debut release, the Spiral Scratch EP, issued in January 1977, and also for the bulk of the tracks spread across their last three United Artists singles in 1980. He also shaped every studio recording Joy Division made for Factory Records.

Mali’s Tinariwen have been a serious powerhouse in non-Western music since the 2001 release of their first major label album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions. Their sound certainly hasn’t stood still in the last twenty years though. Female backing singers have come and gone, and pedal steel, banjo and fiddles have also made appearances on several of their albums, as Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and his crew have explored the shared sounds of West African desert blues and the rural music of the USA.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Pere Ubu Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red)