Crawling Through King Street
A roll of film from one of my favourite days of the year in Sydney.
There were over two hundred bands playing across fifty four venues. It was every music journo and alcoholic's dream.
There are only a few days in my calendar year that I know, without a doubt in my mind, will end with me being completely and utterly wasted, but daringly hopeful. Hopeful that there will be some solace in the inevitable hangover, and hopeful for what is to come. Those few days include Mardi Gras — because, well, duh — the King Street Crawl in the first half of the year, and the King Street Crawl in the second half.
If you’re not from Sydney, I guess there is no real reason for you to know what King Street Crawl is, but it’s essentially a free, live music festival that runs down two main roads and across four suburbs in Sydney’s Inner West. It was started just over ten years ago by a couple of brothers in response to Sydney’s struggling live music scene, and presumably as a bit of a "fuck you" to the then-new lockout laws that had been put in place throughout Sydney’s CBD. It had four or five wonderful years and then COVID came along and fucked it all up, along with everything else good in this world. With a few iterations of the festival floating around in the years that followed, it was only last year that we saw the official return of the King Street Crawl by those same damn good Rule brothers from Music and Booze Co.
While I considered making fake media passes for my friends and I to skip the long lines, I reflected on some of my previous crawls and realised that half the fun is actually found in the waiting. So, we decided to lean into the journey rather than just the destination, and honestly, thank god we did. We danced with strangers, got offered more free beers than we could possibly drink, ran into old friends, made new ones, and watched men wrestle each other to the ground, because I guess sometimes that’s just easier for our boys than to admit they want to cuddle.
On the other side of those lines, we got lost in the mosh to bands like Sex Mask and discovered artists like Jamaica Moana.
I also got to see some of the bands nearest and dearest to my heart, like Kate Moth, for the millionth time.
Now, just over a week later and having only lost a couple of days to that god-awful hangover, I feel the usual mix of fulfillment and dejection. It's not entirely dissimilar to the feeling when Christmas or your birthday has just come and gone and you have to wait an entire year to experience it all again. But I’m choosing optimism today, folks, as it all feels like quite a small price to pay to see this nanny state we live in finally come alive.
