Fawns
NARC/Ouseburn Festival 2022
Newcastle

Despite the ubiquity of online music content today, I confess to a liking, no … to be honest, a genuine preference for its analogue bedfellow; old-fashioned ink on paper.
Newcastle’s NARC magazine is now 185 issues old, so by my reckoning for the last 15 years, they have been the independent reference point for alternative music, art, literature, comedy, film, theatre and culture in the North East.
In fact, I’m underselling NARC here – they do loads more than just publish a monthly FREE magazine, they have an online TV channel, an excellent website and are across all the social media sites. They also release an annual free compilation download on Bandcamp, and importantly for this live music aficionado they put stuff on.
Case in point; a stage outside The Cumberland Arms on a sunny July afternoon, which was their contribution to the 2022 Ouseburn…

The Delines
Jumping Hot Club
Gosforth Civic
Newcastle

Is it possible to subjectively review a live show of a band that you already consider to be rather excellent? Possibly not, but here goes.
BBC6 Music’s Gideon Coe had been my gateway into this particular drug, he had championed The Delines 2019 album ‘The Imperial‘ which I had grown to love deeply and had proceeded to gorge myself on, almost to the point of overdose.
So, when I got wind of new material, again via Gideon Coe – anticipation bit deep.
But hang fire I thought, perhaps a bit of delayed gratification might be called for.

The Delines, Jumpin Hot Club gig at Gosforth Civic Theatre had been rescheduled a couple of times and I had sworn to stay clean of the new stuff until I had the pleasure of hearing it live and fresh in order to savour…