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At a gig in a Middlesbrough art gallery, the room smells of blood. Rainbow confetti is strewn across the floor. Someone has been making music by rattling rusted springs from their dad’s sofa. Movement artist Shlinga bends and rises around tuned gardening wires; later, Finn Darrell pulls needles from their skin as loop pedal harmonies fill the air. This was a recent gig being hosted by Industrial Coast, a music label and event promoter in Teesside that has found itself at the forefront of radical English art.

Twenty-four-hour noise sets, 50p tickets and £999 digital releases are just some of the label’s unfashionable marketing techniques. Gigs happen in old shopping units or any available space, and the people on the doors are lax about entry rules. The point, I’m told, is to get open-minded people in the room.

The loose collective draws many into its fold and refuses few, but Steve Kirby is undoubtedly its most important figure. The 58-year-old from Stockton-on-Tees began the project in 2018 as a reprieve from his corporate job for a global engineering company. Despite his age, Kirby is a canny social media manager, and the label’s pithy, propagandistic Instagram posts – “BORO IS NOT THE NEW BERLIN” – have cultivated a reach far beyond the River Tees.

Kirby thought that untrained, amateur bedroom musicians would make the perfect talent pool. “It was always going to be people doing stuff in their front rooms with a bit of kit,” he says. “I was running a label from my kitchen, so it was a natural fit.”

After securing Arts Council funding, Industrial Coast went on to stage established artists such as Scott King, Coil’s Drew McDowall, and Evicshen. Kirby packed in his corporate job in favour of graveyard shifts stacking stock at Marks & Spencer, to make more space in his life for Industrial Coast. “Fortunately, my wife works, and she’s very supportive of what I’m trying to do with the label and the gigs.”

Like many northern towns, Middlesbrough has struggled immensely after deindustrialisation. Drugs are a particular problem. A recent study showed Middlesbrough has the highest traces of cocaine in daily wastewater of any European city. In 2019, 26 in 1,000 residents were users of crack or opiates. When I arrive in the port town’s “entertainment quarter”, police officers stand above an unconscious woman they believe is under the influence and has collapsed between an empty Debenhams and House of Fraser.

But in defiance of deprivation, Middlesbrough has built its own artistic ecosystem. As well as Industrial Coast, there are institutions including The Auxiliary – which runs the town’s Sonic Arts Week – and Creative Factory, along with venues such as Cafe Etch and micropub Disgraceland. The scene has had support from BBC Radio 6 Music host Mary Anne Hobbs, and the MIMA art gallery – which is currently housing New Contemporaries 2026 exhibition – is hosting the Turner prize later this year. Label collaborator and local photographer Rachel Deakin easily finds her muse in Middlesbrough: “The light is magic – it hits different on this part of the coast.”

As their paternal patron, Kirby has evidently influenced Middlesbrough’s young artists; several have shaved their heads in solidarity with him and have taken to calling themselves the Avant-Sharps, a reference to the longstanding Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice community.

Wren Adobe is one of these shorn acolytes. The 23-year-old musician is studying in Manchester and can’t wait to move back home and build on the town’s momentum. While they admit some spots in Boro could be “ropey” as a nonbinary adolescent, they assert that “Middlesbrough has the best art scene in the country”.

Adobe traces the town’s “mercurial” sound and visual art back to its “deprived, dark history”. But that inspiration can be double-edged: deprivation is forging worrying new political lines. “If somebody votes Farage or whatever, they shouldn’t be,” Adobe says. “At the same time, they’re doing it because they’ve been fucking tricked.”

Seb Hewison, a 19-year-old poet who became a musician at Kirby’s behest, says there is a need for young people in the area to express themselves. “Most who are interested in music and art go to uni,” he says, “but for other lads, things turn into something bad.”

Kirby hopes to keep encouraging the likes of Adobe and Hewison to believe their work is worthy to escape their bedrooms. He points to Scarborough-based artist James Balf as an example: “He’s worked with Rainy Miller, performed on bills with Richie Culver” – two leading lights in the “northern gothic” scene that has made waves across the north in recent years. “This is a guy who’s 43 and I don’t think he played live until last year.”

Like the northern gothic scene, Industrial Coast promotes artists creating work about – and in – their forgotten northern home towns. “There’s a lot of people who wanted something interesting but didn’t want to go to London,” says Haydn Landis, 26, an artist from Hartlepool who is heavily involved in Industrial Coast. “They were just like: ‘Fuck it, let’s start it here.’ There is no real reason to stay in Teesside, but the people that do stay, the ball’s in their court.”

Middlesbrough has evidently turned deindustrialisation into industrial music. And for the town’s nascent artists, having nothing is just an opportunity to create: “It’s one of the roughest places in the country,” Landis declares. “I think it’s great.”