The sustainability speech might be starting to feel like a broken record, but a shoe built from ex-tennis balls feels fresh, innovative, and very 2023. Palmes Tennis Society is a Danish menswear brand grounded in tennis culture. They usually bring their c…

Veteran Chilean documentarian Guzman’s film is a timely and quietly inspiring essay about political activism, focusing on the female dissenting voices, which revolves around the 2019 protests where one-and-a-half million protestors took to the Santiago st…

Shirley Collins has reached the fine wine stage of her career. Now in her 88th year, this doyen of British folk music is still producing vital work and on her latest album – her third for Domino – she’s chosen a set of songs steeped in the storytelling ba…

Actually, your dad MIGHT like him, but only if your dad likes free-form and improvisational guitar pieces that are untroubled by melody. It’s Tashi Dorji! Cobalt Studio continue to push envelopes in the most pleasing of manners, and they’ve got a real doo…

Cory Arcangel’s exhibition at NGCA is a single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram, screen captured by a smartphone in December 2019. Cory Arcangel is a leading US artist, but this isn’t the first time he’s exhibited at NGCA. I…

QFX are just one of the tip-top talents who’ll be gracing Afterdark, with the venerable night holding a mega reunion event in Gateshead this July. The Afterdark events were huge in the 1990s with thousands enjoying much in the way of hands-in-the-air acti…

‘Requiem for a Fading World’ is an extraordinary work coming to Sage Gateshead that tells a fantastical, post-apocalyptic tale for modern times. You can tell that this show has got plenty of oomph behind it simply by checking out the talent that has come …

The Stone Valley Festival returns to Durham this June with three days of mod, ska, punk and indie sounds. The Stone Valley Festival offers up one of the friendliest vibes around with three days of top quality live stuff from some really big hitters who al…

Artist Marilou Chagnaud’s extraordinary residency for VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) comes to an end this June with a final exhibition in Tarset in Northumberland. The work of Marilou Chagnaud – a visual artist based in the UK – belongs withi…

Russell Maliphant’s ‘Vortex’ is inspired by Abstract Expressionism, in particular the works, and processes, of Jackson Pollock. Experience it at Dance City this June. If, as a choreographer, you’re going to let yourself be influenced by a painter, then Ja…

The Caper is taking over Baltic for one night in June with music, food, DJs, comedy, drink, live art and more. The Caper is one of those real clear the diaries and make sure that you’re there events, and their knees-up at Baltic in June is promising thril…

Degna Stone is one of the most exciting writers working in the north-east and their new work ‘The Lies’ is premiering at Alphabetti Theatre this May. Leah is a bad mother. That’s what she believes, anyway. But now the kids are all grown up, Leah is trying…

I start this with a quote from Francis Stuart’s Black List Section H: “What really attracted him were not the doings of patriots but the reports of certain crimes he read in the papers. He delighted in hearing of riots, no matter where, in civil disturban…