MUSICAL instruments could be an area's next export - to North Korea.

Children in the Asian country love nothing better than singing and dancing, according to North-East diva Suzannah Clarke, who is a major celebrity there.

While on a three-week visit to North Korea, where she shared centre stage at an international music festival, the opera singer had lunch with the country's Prime Minister and also dined with its Foreign Secretary and Minister of Education.

"It was amazing, fantastic and also very humbling," said Ms Clarke. "We would be deep in the countryside and yet get people waving and shouting over."

North Korean television has even made a documentary featuring her mother, Sheelagh, a Redcar and Cleveland district councillor, who accompanied her daughter on the visit to Pyongyang, the capital of North Ka, for the festival.

Ms Clarke said: "I want to start a project to get musical instruments to the children in North Korea.

"I noticed the children do not have much equipment in the schools, although they are very musical.

"I think that where we have a country with differences on foreign policy, barriers can be opened on a cultural level. Perhaps, this might be a tiny gesture, but it could have a big effect on their attitude."

Ms Clarke, born in Normanby, near Middlesbrough, sang a North Korean Friendship Song when the veterans of the 1966 soccer team revisited Teesside, in 2002.

The seven surviving members of the team, who famously knocked favourites Italy out of the 1966 World Cup, at Ayresome Park, spread the word when they returned home to North Korea.

Ms Clarke, dubbed Teesside's unofficial ambassador, is building bridges between the West and North Korea, where more than four million people lost their lives and millions more were maimed during the Korean War.