Live Music and Zine Event

FEVER at The Old Bar

Eight bands, a zine fair and one packed room: a full-night collision of live music, print culture and community at The Old Bar.

Year: 2026
Client: Leaps & Bounds Music Festival
Location: The Old Bar, Fitzroy

Festival listing ↗Laura May Grogan ↗The Old Bar ↗Sticky Institute ↗

My role

Event Creator
Organiser
Programmer
Booker
Producer
Event Manager
Marketing Designer

Selected credits

Photography: Laura May Grogan
Presented with The Old Bar, Leaps & Bounds Music Festival and Sticky Institute

The project

FEVER began as a proposal for a night that could make local music and independent publishing feel like parts of the same scene. I developed the event for Leaps & Bounds Music Festival, bringing a Sticky Institute zine fair and a lineup of Sick Visor, The Limited, Operation Karma, Projectile Dysfunction, Forklift Assassins, Heterophobes, Munted Chunts and The Clinch into The Old Bar.

The approach

I shaped the concept, programmed and booked the lineup, coordinated backline and logistics, created the promotional system and ran the event on the night. The design used a moth, saturated red and cut-and-paste textures to give a varied bill one recognisable identity.

What remained

The room stayed busy, the zine tables found new audiences and the event paid its artists well. Most importantly, it created the kind of cross-pollination the project was built for: people arriving for one corner of the program and leaving with something unexpected from another.

Eight bands, one packed bill

The lineup brought together indie punk, political pop-punk, punk pirates, shed-rock, street punk and high-energy live performance from Melbourne, regional Victoria and Sydney.

Indie punk

Sick Visor

A Melbourne indie-punk duo pairing a massive sound with fast, fun and unguardedly honest songwriting.

Political pop-punk

The Limited

A pack of political pop-punk brats from Sydney, armed with four chords and the occasional fifth.

Rock

Operation Karma

A bold Naarm/Melbourne trio combining gritty guitar riffs, cutting sax lines and sisterly harmonies to confront gender inequality, mental health and everything in between.