THE new year kicks off with some great music around the local clubs, with plenty more on the way in the months ahead.

Tonight, singer-songwriter Penny McLaren-Walker is at Darlington Arts Centre, and then on Saturday, Washington’s Davy Lamp start their season in the traditional way, with a visit from the all-singing, alldancing, all-playing crazy gang known as The Doonan Family.

On Sunday, Guisborough Rugby Club have local lads Brian Barnes and Tony Curtis as their first attractions of the year, on a free transfer from their usual position at the town’s Friday night folk club, held up the road at the Golf Club, and with a good range of musical attractions of their own coming up in the months ahead. Teesside’s top acoustic guitarist Eddie Walker is very much on home ground at The Sun Inn in Stockton on Monday, and that same night there’s a fresh start in a new venue for The Foresters Folk club, formerly at Coatham Munderville.

In future, they’ll be meeting at The North Briton in Aycliffe Village, and they start their tenure there this week, with the ever popular Bert Draycott as their special guest. On Tuesday, the regular folk night at The Daleside Arms in Croxdale gets off to a good start with local band Phyllosan as the main attraction.

Finally, for those of us who haven’t overdosed on television over the last few weeks, there are a couple of notable programmes on BBC4 coming soon, starting with more editions of the Transatlantic sessions, featuring Celtic music from both sides of the pond. As well as that, there’s a show soon dedicated to one of my own favourite blues singers, Sister Rosetta Tharp, whose music influenced so many of the Sixties’ guitarists, and who looked astonishingly like my grandmother might have done, wielding a Gibson electric guitar.