Here’s a cold hard fact for you: women are mint. You know what else is mint? A weekend of music, panels and workshops dedicated to celebrating the brilliance of women and non-binary performers hosted at Cobalt Studios from May 20-22. I don’t know about yo…

Indie-pop-rockers The Big Moon are one of the UK’s finest, and they’ll be airing their finery (i.e. playing some songs) when they play Newcastle in May. I thought The Big Moon’s debut album was good. ‘Love in the 4th Dimension’ was released in 2017 and it…

If you’re looking for the heart and soul of roots of reggae then The Abyssinians will be able to hit you up with everything you need. The album that is often held up as the crowning achievement of the roots reggae movement is The Abyssinians’ classic 1976…

Are Spiers & Boden the finest duo on the traditional folk scene. Many think so. They’re in Sunderland in early June. What an extraordinary career Spiers & Boden have had. They burst onto the scene back in 2001 and were soon hoovering up awards like no one…

Four albums, a novel, a book of non-fiction, three plays and five collections of poetry. If Kae Tempest has any laurels Kae Tempest is certainly not resting on them. Kae Tempest first started to twang cultural antennae back in the early 2010s with poetr…

The second album from this Teesside collective is out in May and it’s fucking amazing. And that’s swearing. When I first heard that Nel Unlit’s album was called ‘Ephemera; or, Tosh and the girl’ I thought, “Hmm…” And then when I read it was a concept albu…

This Durham singer/songwriter is starting to make big waves well beyond our region, particularly in country and western circles. We’ve waxed lyrical about Hayley Mckay in the past, but now it seems that plenty of other publications are getting on board wi…

The award-winning GemArts are bringing the very best of South Asian culture to the north-east over the coming months with a programme overflowing with goodies. Of course, GemArts didn’t shut up shop during the pandemic, but it’s in the live arena where th…