Even seasoned veterans can suffer from programme amnesia over the four days and nights of rock, pop, dance and traditional music from around the world to be found at WOMAD, such is the array of choices across its 10 stages, ranging from the main arena through to the Ecotricity stage in Charlton Park’s leafy Arboretum – also home to the World of Words and Taste the World tents, the gong bathers and tarot readers in the World of Wellness.
Most of us clearly knew where and when we were when Leftfield headlined on Friday night, reproducing their 1995 classic 
Leftism live and drawing one of the biggest main-stage crowds Womad has seen, the band delivering a pounding, visually arresting two hours of classic 1990s music and dance. And if you weren’t there, you were probably catching Goldie’s DJ set (right) at the very same time in the big Red Tent. Or perhaps, like Estonian singer Mari Kalkun, you were doing a live session under an awning behind the BBC Radio 3 stage, about 100 metres from Leftfield’s gargantuan beats and basslines, singing a very quiet song from Estonia’s forests into a mic that managed to eliminate any sound more than a few feet away. Her Ecotricity stage earlier that afternoon, sheltering from a still-broiling sun under some useful foliage, was one of the weekend’s quiet highlights.
When it comes to sheer stage presence, no-one can take it away from Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol
It has to be said that, if all this makes you feel slightly nauseous, then you may be in the same camp as young-but-Gammonish Times columnist Giles Coren, who on Saturday welcomed Britain’s increasingly charming ways of not granting visas to visiting artists as achieving something even better than unleashing billions on the NHS – closing gatherings like WOMAD for good. Alas for Giles, there was still a lot from a lot of places to take in across the arena, allowing for programme amnesia, and some swift footwork, to set in. Saturday’s first concert of the day, on the Radio 3 stage, was the lilting, warming beauties of Ugandan singer and multi-instrumentalist Seby Ntege and his band. No visa required – he’s a Londoner – but sadly for Coren, musicians from far and wide still came through – including Saturday night’s highlights in the Siam Tent, the Moroccan gnawa of Maalem Hamid El Kasri (pictured). It’s been decades since Gnawa came to the UK at full force, and from the source, and after performing at the Proms last week, El Kasri and his four singers and percussionists, with the superb French-Moroccan drummer Omar El Barkaoui accentuating the powerful, complex Gnawa rhythms running under the dominating sound of the bass ghimbri, were energising and inspiring. 
More rhythms, and a new high in festival sound systems, were to be found at the d&b Soundscape stage, hosting DJs, electronic artists and bands including Leafcutter John and rising British jazz trio Mammal Hands. So in one part of the arena, you might find roots acoustic music from Senegalese-Belgian trio Tamala, while in another, the electro-rap poetry of young Israeli firebrand Noga Erez, blasting out of the 30-plus speakers mounted around the d&b marquee.
But when it comes to sheer stage presence – and stage costume – no-one can take it away from Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol in the Big Red Tent on Saturday, with her strong, tight band delivering thick, dark,Turkish Gothic surf guitar music, and bringing a pungent sense of the Istanbul underground to the festival stage. I’m not sure which great Glam artists last wore a gold cape, thigh-length silver boots, black hot pants and a crop top on stage, but Akyol carried it off brilliantly. And even with the crashing end to high summer that came with the wind and rain of Saturday and Sunday, so does Womad itself, drawing a world closer even as it appears to be tearing itself apart.
