Led by the extravagantly talented Georgia Shackleton, The Shackleton Trio are renowned for five-star laden live sets, and they’ll be showing just why they’re so special when they come to The Cumberland Arms this August. As part of their highly anticip…

The utterly fabulous Thunder and Rain are a Nashville-based “newgrass” band, and, thanks to ever reliable local promoters Jumpin’ Hot Club, they’re playing Cluny 2 in Newcastle this August. Thunder and Rain have carved out a unique space in the modern Am…

Cud? Didn’t they used to be one of the most distinctive and genuinely entertaining indie acts to emerge in the pre-Britpop days? They still are! What’s more, they’re playing Sunderland in early September. While many of their contemporaries leaned rathe…

Attention Kate Bush fans! The rather brilliant Let Me In are returning to Newcastle Cathedral this August to pay homage to one of the UK’s finest singer-songwriters. Oh, man! Are you prepared for this? An evening of pure gothic melodrama and sublime ar…

The ever reliable Jumpin’ Hot Club are bringing the fantastic Garrett T. Capps to Newcastle in early September. Bunting up! Newcastle’s Ouseburn Valley is about to get a massive dose of Lone Star weirdness and I, for one, am absolutely here for it. Bec…

Roll up, roll up, and let this Newcastle band into your life. (Particularly if you like your alt-rock to have a louche, rather decadent feel about it.) I’m listening to ‘Shadows from Lamented Light’ from CIRCUS’s fabulous debut album ‘A Kiss Before Dyi…

Fresh off the back of their Finsbury Park homecoming gig, Wolf Alice took to the stage at Exhibition Park in Newcastle, bringing their energy packed fan favourites from 2015 to the present day. The stage was set with their familiar silver star curtain and…

Whoa, mama! Very feisty duo The Courettes have two dates in the north-east this August (in Newcastle and Stockton) where they will be hitting us up with their awesome wall-of-sound-heart-of-soul. I caught The Courettes the last time they played the reg…

The force of nature that is Shelley Fairchild has flashlit the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Album chart many a time, and she’ll be taking the roof off The Forum theatre in Darlington when she plays there this August. Shelly Fairchild embodies the …

Jenny Don’t and The Spurs like to honour the past while setting it on fire with a DIY, punk-rock spirit. Feel their mighty force when they romp into Newcastle this August. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, Jenny Don’t and The Spurs have spent over a decad…

With the summer heat nicely cooking Newcastle, the Jumpin’ Hot Club are turning up the temperature even further still this August with a high-energy Summer Blues/Reggae Special at Gosforth Civic Theatre featuring the award-winning Errol Linton. The a…

The Last Train Home Music & Comedy Festival is steaming into Darlington in early September with big riffs and big laughs galore. Spread extravagantly over three venues—Darlington Hippodrome, The Hullabaloo, and The Forum Music Centre—this year’s Last T…

I got to see The Awakening, the debut show from The Feminist Cult Agenda, as part of Live Theatre’s Unearthed Festival, spotlighting new talent and showcasing performances with a feminist slant. If The Awakening had slanted any more feminist, it would’ve …

Two local all-female variety shows, Hendrika Seguro-Bigg’s Girlie Show and Rosie Bowden’s Lasses, teamed up at Live Theatre this month to deliver a weird and whimsical mixture of skits, stand-up, music, and other revelry. Contending with swelteri…

Just how is Durham Fringe going to squeeze 140+ performances into five days this July/August? Those 11 venues will probably help. I’ll not waffle on about how amazing this year’s Durham Fringe is (but it really is) because I’d like to dive in with some…

I can’t stop thinking about Jason Isbell’s teeth. A man with his history of cocaine and alcohol addiction shouldn’t have two decks of perfect shiny whites, but he does. Maybe they’re just a representation of his story, and his songs; all about surviving a…

Ah, the damage you can wreak with a gauzy scarf, a tutu, an overweening ego and perhaps just a hint of chest hair. Yes, the Trocs have been on tour again, delighting all afficionados of classical ballet with a programme of dance excerpts that embody every…

This was the first time that Irish shoegaze/noise rock band Just Mustard had played Newcastle. The five-piece from Dundalk are riding high at the moment having secured support slots for the likes of Fontaines D.C. and The Cure this summer, and they …

China Crisis are marking 40 years in the game with their 2026 Tour. If the Gosforth show was anything to go by, they’re doing it in style, just without the usual overblown anniversary hype. Kicking things off earlier this year, the tour feels more like a …

The only thing I love more than a romcom is a romcom parody, and The Fit Prince - or, The Fit Prince who gets switched on the square in the frosty castle the night before (insert public holiday here), to give it its full title - is nothing if not pure, ta…

During WWII composer Benjamin Britten, an East Anglian lad, toyed with the idea of settling in America, but was drawn back to coastal Suffolk by a Victorian poem about life in the fishing village of Aldeburgh which became the basis for his first opera, “P…

Difficult to imagine that back in the late eighteenth century Beaumarchais’ trio of plays (and, indeed, the operas based on them) about wily servant Figaro presented a political hot potato. Valets and barbers weren’t supposed to be smarter than their up…

Echo and The Bunnymen were back at Newcastle City Hall with their “Very Best of Echo & The Bunnymen 1978-2026” tour which celebrated the songs that have brought the group twenty top 20 hits and nine top 20 albums spanning across their legendary career. I…

Though this 1930 comedy of manners must be one of Noel Coward’s most popular and enduring plays, there’s no doubt that the social conventions creating the plot are so dated that a younger audience probably needs footnotes. In a lovely, neatly turned game …

It seems impossible that a decade has passed since the release of Ken Loach’s uniquely powerful Newcastle-set movie “I, Daniel Blake”. I say uniquely because the film deals with issues of social justice not via politics, criminality or violence but by hi…

Right from the start of the play, where a queen has effectively disinherited her son by marrying the brother-in-law who less than two months earlier had surreptitiously murdered her husband the king, it would be fair to describe the Kingdom of Denmark as…

On the night I went to see Pilot Theatre's production of Noughts and Crosses, they had the most terrifying, difficult-to-impress audience that I can imagine. Not reviewers. Worse: a whole room full of teenagers. Noughts and Crosses is adapted from the …

I am, first and foremost, a literature nerd, so when I heard that the latest show at the People's Theatre was all about the life of Mary Shelley, I jumped at the chance to see it. As the daughter of two of the biggest political philosophers of the 18th ce…

Newcastle’s abundantly talented Melanie Baker has just signed to Tambourhinoceros, news which gets a hearty “Woo hoo!” from me. And the first fruits of Melanie Baker’s dalliance with Tambourhinoceros is her latest single ‘Sad Clown’, which is a blister…

Dolder are Dani and Zara Dolder, twin sisters from Newcastle who have been turning plenty of heads recently with their harmony-dunked alt-pop. And one of the heads that Dolder has been turning is that of Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards, who, on hearing a t…