Tour de Moon is a unique, immersive and free (FREE!) festival, which is touring three UK cities. Newcastle is one of them. Not many festivals celebrate the relationship between the earth and the moon through a series of thought-provoking, exciting and ori…

Grayson Perry’s tapestries – chronicling the life story of a fictional Sunderland man – are back in the city. Grayson Perry remains one of the most well-known, and best-loved, artists in the UK and his hugely popular series of six tapestries, The Vanity o…

Charm Of Finches are a sister duo from Melbourne who have built up a sizeable following among those of us who love melodic and baroque folk. And this, their third album, is simply magnificent. It’s filled with haunted tales of love and grief – and whisper…

Brace yourselves for two shows: Tarot in the first half, and Cautionary Tales in the second. Both twisted. Both hilarious. In the heart of Edinburgh, a live tarot reading is held. Then, sketches spin out of the cards. When the show finishes, the significa…

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…

A spin on the classic haunted house story, Tell Me I’m Worthless paints a bone-chilling picture of fascism in Britain. The novel follows two former best friends: Alice, a trans woman who sells ‘sissy porn’ to make ends meet, and Ila, a half Asian, half Je…

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…

Writer-director Emil Vogt’s second feature is a slow-burning and genuinely unsettling sic-fi horror. Seven-year-old Norwegian girl Ida (Fløttum) has just moved with her family, mum (Petersen), dad (Svartveit) and severely autistic older sister Anna (Ramst…

Claudia Rankine is the author of the acclaimed trilogy on race and whiteness in the US – Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen and Just Us. Her play The White Card, written before the world turned upside down in 2020, has it’s European premiere at Northern …