After a terrible summer of floods and washouts, the weather gods showed little mercy at Womad’s 25th anniversary gathering over the weekend. Sporadic rain, some of it torrential, quickly turned the festival’s potentially idyllic new Wiltshire home into a mudbath.

Even so, conditions never sank to Glastonbury levels and the overall atmosphere remained typically good-natured.

A key strength of this global musical smorgasbord is its egalitarian ethos, with a pick-and-mix menu that relies less on superstar names than other festivals.

That said, Peter Gabriel effectively served as the weekend’s headline act on Friday. A Womad co-founder and enduring figurehead, Gabriel’s songs tend towards the ponderous, but his shimmering rearrangements of Solsbury Hill and Blood of Eden provided moments of grace.

Gabriel also spiced up his set with guests cherry-picked from the rest of the bill, including the Chinese flautist Guo Yue and the blind Cambodian bluesman Kong Nay. But it was the Senegalese hip-hop trio Daara J who virtually hijacked his show, bounding around the stage in flowing white robes like hyperactive Jedi Knights.

As is often the case at Womad, many of the most exciting acts were multicultural hybrids rather than purist museum pieces. Lending a rare blast of punk-rock energy to an otherwise sedate festival, the London-based Asian Dub Foundation had a large crowd dancing on Saturday night with their raucous fusion of bhangra, hip-hop and elasticated drum’n’bass rhythms.

Likewise the culturally promiscuous New Yorkers Balkan Beat Box, who cooked up a similarly bastardised racket out of Middle Eastern and Central European ingredients. One of the festival’s more intriguing live debuts was The Imagined Village, an umbrella project dedicated to reviving ancient English folk songs in a contemporary context.

Backed by a multiracial band mixing traditional acoustic instruments with reggae basslines and plucked sitars, this sprawling collective featured a revolving rota of singers including Billy Bragg and Sheila Chandra, plus the poet Benjamin Zephaniah via prerecorded video. The danger with this kind of earnest laboratory experiment is that it can turn emotionally raw music into an overly cerebral exercise in political correctness.

But the performance warmed up in its latter half with rousing reinventions of old standards, including Scarborough Fair, alongside Bragg’s own patriotic manifesto England, Half English. Womad’s flexible definition of world music also incorporates American soul veterans Candi Staton and Isaac Hayes, both of whom played over the weekend.

Staton was on mighty form, blending gospel and disco with deep-fried covers of Stand by your Man and In the Ghetto.

Hayes proved more disappointing, arriving late on Saturday to ramble through a laidback easy-listening set better suited to a jazz club than a festival.

By the time he swapped interminable shag-pile soul serenades for the burnished funk of Shaft, a combination of heavy rain and soporific music had driven away half the crowd. Thankfully, this being Womad, there were plenty more interesting pan-global alternatives on other stages just a short walk away.

The weather gods could have been kinder, but this moveable feast has lost none of its eclectic, utopian spirit.

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