XpoNorth opens for business

In the words of director Amanda Millen, the event is a showcase, conference and festival for the creative industries, one that takes in everything from rock music to gaming, crochet to animation. Its situation in the Highland capital gives creatives in the region and in Scotland a platform on which to learn, connect with others in Europe and beyond, and promote themselves and their work.

"When I say it's a festival, some people think we're talking about T in the Park, a tent in a field, but it's not like that at all," says Millen. "It's an opportunity for industry to gather in the Highlands but also for our businesses to network and meet with industry representatives. We have people not just from the UK but from Europe and America coming over, so we try to make the level of speaker quite high, quite aspirational in terms of where they sit within the industries that we're talking about."

The daytime events are mostly for delegates only, though it's free to register. In the evening, pubs and clubs across the city will present showcases by some of the 64 invited bands. Included in this year's line-up are local act Spring Break, Glasgow hip-hop duo Hector Bizerk, and fellow Glaswegian Kloe, whose slow-burn electro-pop won her a slot on the Introducing stage at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival, held last week.

Among this year's other highlights are a visit from the Screen Machine travelling cinema, which will set up for business in the city centre, and two "playback" events celebrating the 20th anniversary of Glasgow music label Chemikal Underground. In these, audiences will hear a pair of classic albums played in their entirety on a state-of-the-art sound system - Mogwai's 1997 debut Young Team and The Delgados's Mercury Music Prize-nominated 2000 album The Great Eastern - with members of the bands on hand afterwards to talk about the albums and their legacy.

Elsewhere, Ronnie Browne, folk musician and founding member of The Corries, will be interviewed about his autobiography, published earlier this month, and the keynote speech comes from veteran Australian music promoter Michael Chugg, the man who first took bands like The Cure and The Police down under and who has since worked with acts like Elton John, Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Coldplay. He currently runs Sydney-based Chugg Entertainment.

Other speakers include designer and educationalist Professor Norman McNally; Munich-based designer Cordy Swope, formerly bassist in 1980s Phildelphia punk band Ruin; Mark Hogarth, creative director of Harris Tweed Hebrides, the Lewis-based company which supplies Chanel, Paul Smith, Margaret Howell and others; and Shauna Richardson, a pioneer of what she calls Crochetdermy - creating massive animals out of wool, some of which she mounts like hunting trophies.

XpoNorth began life as a music festival in Aberdeen in 2000. When Millen joined in 2007 she expanded it to include screen-based activities such as film, gaming and broadcasting. Later, craft and design, and literature and publishing also came into the fold.

It's that expansion and what it means which has brought about this year's name change. "The idea of the rebrand is that we've taken this opportunity to say we're a creative industries festival and we have four sub-headings within that, with equal profile and equal presence," Millen explains.

But behind it all is the recognition that Scotland's creative industries are a potential economic powerhouse and that by gathering together those same four fields of endeavour, XpoNorth can be the arts laboratory that promotes, nurtures and mixes them up together. So if you hear banging, fizzing and popping from up Inverness way, don't worry. Everything's good.

XpoNorth takes place across Inverness on June 10 and 11. For programme information, see xponorth.co.uk