LAST weekend’s Saltburn Festival was a roaring success, and it was nice to catch up with some old friends and familiar faces. There’s a lot of hard work and organisation that go into events like this, as you know, and plans are already in hand for next year’s festival.

Meanwhile, we’re gearing up for Whitby Festival, which begins tomorrow night and lasts a whole week. Music, dancing and song will take over the whole town, and the names of all the guest artists who’ll be appearing would take forever to list, but the refreshing thing about Whitby is that it gives us the chance to hear current well-known names alongside more obscure, but no less talented performers.

A highlight of the festival is always the nightly Traditional Song sessions run by Ken Hall and Peta Webb, organisers of one of London’s best known folk clubs at The King and Queen in Foley Street, in the legendary Fitzrovia district of the West End. Coincidentally, that was the first place that a very young Bob Dylan ever played in England back in the early 1960s.

Ken and Peta manage to bring all the magic of their intimate club atmosphere to everybody’s favourite Yorkshire seaside town every year, and that will be just one of many amazing shows happening on a nightly basis over the next week.

We still have Sedgefield and Bellingham festivals to come in the weeks ahead, so there’s plenty to look forward to before the local club scene kicks back into action in September. I’ll be heading off to Australia next month for a six-week trip, so be sure to send me advance notice of anything you want me to mention in this column at jez@jezlowe.com.