ARE YOU READY TO GONG CRAWL?
The Gong Crawl. It’s the best bits about a music festival and the best bits about a pub crawl slapped together like two hands full of velcro. It’s been over a year since last year’s Crawl and we are itching to get back on all fours.
As such big fans, we wanderers considered it a welcome duty to speak to Dan Breda and Phoebe Price, the humble achievers behind the organisation Speed Drive Inc. and its baby The Gong Crawl. Now 3 years old, Gong Crawl, much like the worms on this year's posters, has found its wings and holds its own as a part of Wollongong's cultural fabric. In our morning chat, Phoebe and Dan revealed the ins and outs of running an epic event like this, what’s different about 2025’s Gong Crawl, for better or for worse, and how the ills of the music industry can be as obvious and unpleasant as a bad smell.
With 14 venues and over 70 acts, Gong Crawl has grown “about 30%” since last year, which means “30% more thinking” for Dan and Phoebe, which I think is an understatement. Taking over the responsibility of booking the major stages La’s and Dicey’s from Yours and Owls, Speed Drive handled the brunt of the work for 2025’s crawl. “What’s positive is that there are heaps more venues that want to be a part of it,… heaps of people want in”. With such an extensive list of venues and bands, we were intrigued by how the programming went about.
“It starts with a wishlist”, Phoebe says. “Then, once we get a headliner or a couple people interested, we start curating it better like, ‘this band would work here too’... The venues are differentiated by genre … I think people really loved that last year specifically”. This is true! Heavier bands have been designated to Dicey Riley’s, Indie Alt bands to La La La’s, softer folky sounds will live upstairs at Society City and VanQ’s lineup has all the “shoe gazy, emo adjacent [bands] like Garage Sale”. For all the guitar haters, there are house and techno DJ’s playing at Heyday and the Humber rooftop, and a special country bluegrass matinee featuring Slippery John Sausage at 2 Smoking Barrels which also deserves a mention.
Before Speed Drive, Dan and Phoebe spent their fair share of time on stages across the country and the globe as the leads of their respective punk bands Hoon and Private Wives. This point of view guides them in planning and running the Gong Crawl, now snowballing with interest and investment. This year in particular, they have found it challenging to maintain an epic Gong Crawl lineup as their artist-focused ethos often clashes with the “unrealistic expectations” of booking agents. This is a true asset of Speed Drive. They are both artists first; they're good guys hiding amongst the suits. Dan and Phoebe were not shy to share with us the bitter realities involved with the other side of things. “[You ask] ‘what’s different [this year]’, and I automatically think… money”, says Dan, “It's not that we have more money. It's that booking agents want heaps more money for bands. It makes it harder to put on an event like this..”
I think it's important for me to say: I’m not including this part of the interview to make the industry seem like an evil greedy cult, or to make Phoebe and Dan out to be shit talkers because that’s plain not the case. I’ve left it in to show that these two have worked hard to keep the Gong Heavy sentiment alive, and have kept your best interest in mind while organising their event. As Phoebe said, “Wollongong has a lot of people that really do have a love for music. We've said that to bookers when we [spoke] to them. When they pitch a band or we pitch the event, we say 'This is an event that is proper for music lovers in Gong’ [...] it's an event that people go [to] for the music.”
I’d say this is the real draw of Dan and Phoebe’s event. Whether the punters know it or not, the Gong Crawl is so good because the people who run it are trying to benefit you, the venues, and the bands. They love live music and they know that Wollongong loves it too. Most of the Gong Crawl is made possible by funding from promoters, brands and the government, which takes lots of hard work to organise. At the end of the day, there’s no huge paycheck for Dan and Phoebe… they’re doing it for us, for their scene.
So, for their sake, get out and about this Saturday night and let all their hard work pay off..
It’s free, it’s local and it’s undoubtedly going to be wildly fun…