Nine years on from its inauguration, Musicport made the bold step this year of moving down the coast from its traditional home in Whitby to the recently refurbished Spa Theatre in Bridlington. The new venue is certainly very impressive. The main hall, with its seated balconies and ornate rotunda, housed a large main stage and had plenty of room for additional performances on the hall floor. The sound was a little patchy at times but it was nevertheless a vast improvement on the cramped conditions at Whitby.

Away from the main hall there is a more traditional theatre with excellent sound and lighting plus a further stage in a room overlooking the North Sea. Further performances took place in the Café Bar which also enjoyed sea views. The Cloudbase collective, who provide much of the late night entertainment, also had their own splendidly illuminated venue.

There were plenty of bars scattered around the complex with a decent choice of reasonably priced draft and bottled beers. The same however could not be said of the choice of food with little more than cakes & snacks at the Café Bar and a very limited selection of school dinners style hot food available in a room adjoining the hall. Unsurprisingly we generally chose to eat elsewhere.

The standard of entertainment was of the usual high calibre that we have come to expect at Musicport. Friday night headliners, The Levellers, pulled in a good crowd thanks to their loyal fanbase, although we could have done without Mark Chadwick’s repetitive & patronising “Hello World Music fans”! Toumani Diabate turned in his usual breathtaking virtuoso performance on the Saturday evening and Rolf Harris rolled back the years on the Sunday to a, sadly by then, rather thinning audience.

I suspect that a considerable number of people may have been put off Musicport this year by the fact that it has moved home. The rather brash kiss-me-quick nature of Bridlington certainly can’t match Whitby’s quaint charms. But the new venue is infinitely better than the old Spa Pavilion so we can only hope that next year the numbers attending will return to their previous levels and beyond and thereby safeguard the future of an event which has rightfully established itself as an important date in the UK World Music calendar.