goNorth 2009 @ Inverness (Various), 11-12 Jun

And so it seems the festival season has crept back upon us, sidling up with all the stealth and dexterity of a hungry cat, almost eerily unnoticed. First there was Hinterland, then Stag and Dagger, but now the focus quite literally goes north with, um, goNorth. Now in its ninth year, the festival has become a valuable fixture on the Scottish music calendar. As well as a quite wonderful line-up of homegrown talent – the gorgeously spare Trapped in Kansas and the decidedly more sprightly angular art-pop of Nacional, to name but two – goNorth also offers a range of seminars and workshops in almost every conceivable area of the creative arts, from publishing to fashion and textiles, and just about everything in between. As if this wasn’t already enough, it’s probably worth going for the enigmatic and intriguing “Magical Mystery Tour” (even if only to find out what this actually entails), as well as a Skinny sponsored stage featuring Naked Strangers (the band, not an assortment of flashers), Vcheka, St Deluxe and Hey Enemy. Oh, and did we mention that the entire thing is free? [Michael Hunter]