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Raised in the suburbs of Gateshead on a diet of David Bowie and The Beatles, I’ve been a near-obsessive music fan for as long as I can remember. Really, I blame my parents. Even before I could tell the difference between rock songs and nursery rhymes I had a Dansette-style record player and a basket full of old seven-inches that included The Small Faces’ entire Decca catalogue plus early releases from The Who, Cream, The Pretty Things and The Rolling Stones (all thanks to my Mum’s youthful fondness for Mod and R&B).

From teenage years riding the wave of mid-nineties Britpop to too many late nights at university spent analysing obscure European electronica on the dance floors of Liverpool’s nightclubs, to countless sweaty gigs watching mediocre indie outfits with pen and notebook in hand, my thirst for new music has never been quenched. I’ve got a spare room full of CDs and vinyl and an iPod that has packed in under the weight of promo pre-release MP3s.

But it’s still the grassroots music scene that I love the most. There are few things better than discovering new bands in scruffy pubs, on CD-Rs, on MySpace pages. It’s what drove me to write about music in the first place. At school I was always eager to sing the praises of my latest finds, boring friends and classmates with my incessant hyperbole about the great and the not-so-great (Menswe@r, anyone?).

I’m also hugely excited by the music in my native North East. Often unfairly overshadowed by the more commercially successful cities of Liverpool, Manchester and London, Newcastle nevertheless remains a genuine hotbed of musical talent. From the early echo-laden innovation of Hank Marvin to Maximo Park’s intelligent 21^st Century art-rock, Tyneside has produced plenty of groundbreaking pop music, all of it laden with a typically Northern sense of creative integrity.

With bands like Detroit Social Club and Little Comets inking lucrative record deals and with successful local artists keen to stick around, there’s a real buzz about the music scene up here, and rightly so; Tyneside rocks. (TR)

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