Newcastle/Gateshead may have lost out on the race for European Capital Of Culture but is still clocking up the millions as the place where people want to party. Viv Hardwick talks to the new man in charge of arts investment, Keith Merrin.

WHEN it comes to having a party, there's no better prepared place in the country than Newcastle and Gateshead, says one of the organisers of £12m of festivals which aim to put the North-East on the international map.

Keith Merrin is the new acting creative director of the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative and says of the four festivals set to celebrate music, the Tall Ships race, sport and visual arts: "We're the only UK city at the right stage to do something like this and alongside it we have a programme which tells us whether it's working. People like the regional development agency aren't going to put money into this unless they can see a clear benefit."

With funding in place for festivals stretching into 2010 and Jarrow-born Merrin himself selected as the North-East's only candidate for a new training scheme to find tomorrow's Arts elite, you'd expect him to be the initiative's automatic choice to succeed former director Paul Collard.

But the man seconded from Tyneside's Bede's World Museum is aware that the £70,000-a-year job is currently being advertised and is anxious to play down his position as favourite.

He accepts that it hasn't done his CV any harm to help launch the four festivals last week or to be selected for the Clore Leadership Programme, being run by former Culture Minister Chris Smith.

To be honest, Merrin is almost the ideal name when it comes to merry-making. His thoughts are, firstly, on a rolling programme of music events based around Gateshead's Sage, where ticket sales predictions are being exceeded. Here, the initiative is providing extra funding to ensure a visit from the cult heroine of performance art Laurie Anderson - still best-known in this country for her 1981 No 2 hit single O Superman - on May 1.

Merrin explains: "Our aim is to showcase things like The Proms at Riverside, Chester-le-Street; Stockton Riverside Festival, Brinkburn Priory Music Festival and the Stanley Blues Festival and to help to bring higher profile world class artists to those events and to re-run new festivals like the Orange Evolution Festival on the Newcastle/Gateshead Quayside and the Boss Sounds Festival, a reggae festival in different parts of the region."

Next comes the International Festival of Rivers And The Sea from June 25 until August 7.

"This covers the period of the Tall Ships Race visit during July 25-28. There are exhibitions in most of the region's museums related to rivers and the sea and performances at theatres.

"What we really want to do during that period is persuade people to get their friends and relatives to visit, particularly those who haven't returned to the region for a long time, because a lot of activity is high profile and free. The whole region is going to be animated with activity."

With hotels and B&Bs expected to be fully booked soon, celebrities like Robson Green and Jonathan Edwards are leading a campaign to invite friends and relatives to stay at their North-East homes.

The Festival of Sport starts in September 1 through to the middle of October.

Merrin says: "It is the 25th anniversary of the Great North Run this autumn and what we're hoping to do is get as many people in the region to participate in sport. One of the interesting things about the region is that we're traditionally thought of as an area that likes sport but, in terms in participation, we're lagging behind other parts of the country. We love our sport, but people have to run off all the pies rather than just eat them."

The festival also takes in the National Surfing Championships which is coming back to Tynemouth in October.

Launching the celebration spirit into next year is the Visual Arts Festival, which is based around the British Art Show 6 running from September 25 until January 12, 2006, which only happens every five years, at Gateshead's Baltic Contemporary Art Centre.

Despite the resignation of the Baltic's artistic director Stephen Snoddy a year after he was appointed at the end of 2003, behind the scenes staff have continued to work with London's Hayward Gallery, which curates the show.

Other galleries and exhibition spaces around the region are also expected to be busy.

On the tricky subject of arts funding, Merrin says: "We've invested £12m and that's levered in other funding from the business sector and the final total will be much bigger. Without a doubt it will be the biggest cultural programme in the UK this year, probably the biggest ever of its kind. We know it will bring a lot of money and business into the region because our prediction just for the three days of the Tall Ships is that we'll have a million extra visitors here."

The money has come from regional development agency, Newcastle and Gateshead's Councils, Arts Council England and the Northern Rock Foundation and also from the Millennium Commission.

"We can maintain it and have funding in place for 2006-7 through to 2010. It was always intended to be a programme that ran this far. This is really to whet the appetite in the region to see at what scale the region is about to operate on."

There's also a small matter of that other event, the Labour Party Spring Conference at Sage this weekend, and yet another opportunity for the region to showcase the changes that have happened over the past ten years.

Merrin says: "One of the great things we are seeing is a net inward migration and a reverse brain drain of people from knowledge-based industries. We are gathering the key information to show that people can't criticise all this as a waste of money. Art here will have a value in its own sake but also has a value for the region's economy."

He's also finally laying the ghost of TV art critic Brian Sewell's recent insult that the North-East's palate wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate major exhibitions.

"People of the region genuinely do take an interest in cultural activity and the popularity of things like the Angel Of The North and the Baltic is that people take them to their heart and visit them often."

In fact, he argues that there's room for plenty more. The North-East is only really filling the gap of under-investment in the arts over many years, he says.

And his next tip for great things is Middlesbrough's new £19m Modern Art Museum, due to open next year. Let's hope Keith Merrin really is mastering the art of success.