11:08am Thursday 11th February 2010
By Jez Lowe
THIS week we get the chance to hear some of the region’s finest yet often unheralded folk acts, as they take the spotlight around the clubs. Tonight Steve Dawes and Helen Pitt are at Darlington Arts Centre, with a wide selection of traditional songs, and tomorrow we have a choice of innovative multiinstrumentalist Jon Loomes at Henshaw’s in Knaresborough and a great double bill at Reeth’s Memorial Hall featuring Northumbrian duo Landermason and Tyneside songwriter Gareth Davies- Jones.
On Saturday local hero Chris Milner is at St Johns Chapel Town Hall, George Welch and Stewart Hardy are at Washington’s Davy Lamp and there’s another singaround at The Ship in Middlestone Village. Ray Thom is centre-stage at Guisborough Rugby Club on Sunday and on Monday, popular North Yorkshire songstress Wendy Arrowsmith is at Newcastle’s Bridge Hotel.
I’m off to play folk clubs in the deep south this week, after spending seven days, Big Brother-style, with a bunch of songwriters and poets in a remote house in Northumberland last week, writing songs about the Roman Wall. It was a sort of follow-up to my sojourn on the Darwin Project in Shrewsbury last year, but with more relevance to our own region of course.
Along with Rory McLeod, Julie Matthews, Boo Hewerdine, Ruth Notman and poets Elvis McGonigal and Kate Fox, we’ll be presenting the results at Brampton Live Festival in July, and at selected venues thereafter, so keep an eye out for that.
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