For a public transport line, the 86 tram has a surprisingly prolific musical legacy. Courtney Barnett has sung of meeting a paramour along the route – which snakes its way from the edge of Melbourne’s CBD through the inner-city hubs of Fitzroy and Collingwood, all the way up to leafy Bundoora; and comedy musician the Bedroom Philosopher released an entire album, Songs from the 86 Tram, featuring the viral hipster-decimating hit Northcote (So Hungover).
This month, The Eighty-Six – a new music festival named for the tram line – takes over cultural venues along a select strip of the route dubbed “the Bonsoy belt”, namely the stretch of High Street that runs through the inner-north suburbs of Northcote, Thornbury, Preston and Reservoir.
High Street is packed with live music venues, and festival organisers and are promoting The Eighty-Six, which runs from 23 to 31 October, as “the biggest party a tram line has ever thrown”.
More than four dozen live music venues along High Street – including restaurants, bowls clubs, record stores and cinemas – have signed up to host gigs, screenings, talks and parties. The flagship event – Super Saturday – falls on 28 October, with a 22-hour bumper lineup of free curated events that encourages punters to walk or tram-hop (on the 86, of course) between venues.
“The idea is that every venue has its biggest Saturday night, all in one weekend. It’s different people doing different things, but all at the same time,” explains Woody McDonald, The Eighty-Six’s co-founder and artistic director.
Rather than dictating The Eighty-Six’s sound or direction, McDonald programmed Super Saturday by match-making each of the venues with one of 50 curators brought in from across the city’s diverse cultural scenes.
“[Community radio stations] 3RRR and PBS were obvious [curators],” he says, as were record shops Northside and Rowdy’s – each serving as “churches for their respective sounds”.
Finding Figaro, purveyors of parties in the underground DJ scene, were brought in to curate the sound spilling out of Capers, a lively bar in Thornbury which reimagines a yiayia’s living room – down to the plates and vinyl seats – and even has a Greek salad martini on its menu. Down the road at the Bulgarian Parish hall in Northcote, OK Motels – the team that throws weekend-long mini-festivals from motels around regional Victoria, and who recently hosted another on a steam train – were approached to apply their philosophy to their first inner-city show.
Outside its daylong keynote event, The Eighty-Six program includes the Independent Music Exchange record fair; a double bill featuring US indie bands Bright Eyes and Warpaint; a live show for American pop culture podcasters How Long Gone; and a Halloween-themed dog show and street party hosted by pasta impresarios 1800 Lasagne. US band Built to Spill will pull from their archives over a four-night residency at Northcote Social Club, while Bez, the in-house party machine from British band Happy Mondays, will try to sit still for a sit-down in-conversation at Thornbury theatre.
As a child McDonald lived briefly in Melbourne’s inner north and had his first real taste of music at Preston primary, where the school bell didn’t clang but was rather programmed to play pop songs of the era. He dropped out of school at 14 to work in music, sticking up posters and promoting gigs. For almost 20 years he programmed the beloved Meredith music festival, and in 2020 became head of music for the inaugural Rising arts festival.
When McDonald moved back to the inner north a few years ago, he became excited by the new “very DIY, very spirited” venues that had cropped up. He namechecks Shotkickers, a live music venue in Thornbury, and gestures around at the beer garden of Capers where our interview is taking place. Like the 60-odd other bars, clubs and spaces along this stretch of High Street that have lured punters and residents for decades, these new venues were carving out their own distinct, contained music communities, he says.
It spurred McDonald to knock on doors with a pitch. “I went in [to Creative Victoria] campaigning for small venues,” he says. “I thought a festival that stayed in the bar and venue culture would be a really good way to showcase Melbourne.”
Once he received the green light for The Eighty-Six, McDonald found his artist in residence in revered reggae maestro Dennis Bovell, who will present screenings of 1980 British reggae classic Babylon at Thornbury Picture House, and just a few blocks up, join a lineup of DJs at the regular Housewife’s Choice Sound System party at the Croxton Bandroom.
McDonald is especially eager to see legendary Detroit producer and DJ Theo Parrish, who he has booked to play for 10 solid hours at Northcote theatre – “which is madness! But that’s the only way he plays at home in Detroit; he kind of hangs out all day instead of rushing in for a two-hour peak,” he says.
“Most festivals take an unusual venue and make that the focal point. I wanted to flip that, and use places we go to all the time,” he explains.
Zooming out of the CBD was an inspired decision, as was steering away from other cultural hubs in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Brunswick. It was also a move that signals back to the earliest years of Melbourne’s musical history.
“Back in the 50s, this was where all the gigs were. Preston City Hall was the first rock’n’roll venue in Melbourne. And there’s a club just up the road here, with big silver doors that was the first venue in Melbourne, of the pop era,” McDonald says of the Arcadia Ballroom where, in the 60s, a young Johnny Chester would perform in between tours supporting the Beatles, Roy Orbison and Tammy Wynette. “There was a really big working-class rock’n’roll scene in the north. Way before St Kilda [did it], Preston and Thornbury inspired the rest of Melbourne.”
The Eighty-Six is set to continue that legacy by setting the stage for the people, communities, scenes and sounds of the inner north to show the city – and the tram line – what they can do.
• The Eighty-Six runs from 23 to 31 October at various Melbourne venues. See here for full program
• This article was amended on 18 October 2023. An earlier version said Woody McDonald grew up in Melbourne’s inner north, when he only lived there briefly as a child. It was also amended to clarify that 3RRR and PBS are curating events, not hosting them.
