The folk-punker will absolutely make it to a venue near you, one way or another
Slim Krusty just got back from New Zealand to play a show in Alice Springs. He drove 23 hours after that show, hit a kangaroo on the way, scored a lift with some mates from Cooper Pedy to Adelaide, then traded tattoos for a Honda Civic to get back home to Melbourne. Oh, and got done by the cops for the Civic being unroadworthy.
This type of chaos is pretty standard for Slim, and he loves every minute of it. “I forgot my passport in NZ, and probably spent like five or six hundred bucks on Ubers. It’s like one thing after the other, but that’s why the party hat’s on, man,” he explains as an AI-generated party hat dances around our video call.
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Slim Krusty is a modern punk-rock troubadour who is constantly playing shows, big and small, from tours with Drunk Mums and Frenzal Rhomb to little house shows and gigs in tattoo parlours.
“Every day off I end up just playing another show in someone’s house or something,” he explains. “I like driving as well. I wouldn’t do these lengths of drives for any other job. I wouldn’t drive 23 hours to do a shift somewhere.”
Slim Krusty may be sharing stages with some of the best to do it, but there is also a DIY ethic behind what he does that fosters a culture around him, no matter the size of the room he is playing. As an example, Slim played a show in a tattoo shop recently, and chucked $400 of his own money into a pot as part of an honesty system to make sure everyone attending could get a $100 tattoo.
“I was tattooing for a little bit there, and that’s another industry that’s just struggling, and people don’t have money for tattoos, so we did a pay-it-forward system. If you can’t afford a tattoo, you take out of the kitty, and if you can afford to chip in extra, all good. I said, I’ll play a free show, and this should get new people coming through the store. I thought the kitty would have gone immediately, but it stayed up for ages. Loads of people got new tattoos, and every artist got paid properly for their work and got some new clients. It was wholesome, and it was in the middle of a bloody hurricane as well.”
Slim Krusty gives off more of a hurricane than a wholesome look due to his heavily tattooed… well, everything, but the friendly flower on his chin is the best representation of his personality. This is something that everyone he comes across notices immediately, if his adventures are anything to go by. “If you need a place to stay or a lift if your car breaks down, people have just been so generous with helping out. You get back what you put out, and you can’t get into music to be all about making money, but you can make a community, which makes everything a bit easier to deal with. It makes the world a little bit less lame.”
Slim never thought he’d be a touring, solo folk musician, but his friends pushed him into it. “I just hated the sound of my voice, but I really like playing and travelling and meeting people,” he explains. “The community is the main key to it all, especially with doing the sad stuff. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m sad, come watch me play.’ It’s nice to do sad stuff live, but it’s not a sad time, it’s cathartic and fun and you hear people’s stories and how they relate to stuff in different ways.”
Slim is about to head out on an eight-date headlining tour of the country, which brings him to Revs at the start of November, and the shows will be an equal dose of good-sad and fun. “There’s one thing I know that I know how to do, and it’s fuck up. I don’t care if I forget a song or whatever, I’m not like a tight, refined player, but I think the honesty of what it is comes across when you absolutely just send it and don’t really give a fuck. A lot of other people get behind that, and you just end up screaming at each other, and it makes for some wholesome fun.”
He continues, “If you’re honest with what you’re doing, it will translate. You could write a sad song in a million different ways, but people will know if it’s bullshit. You can’t force funny, and you can’t force sad; you have to have some kind of authenticity behind what you’re actually doing. But I don’t know, if you think I sound like shit, I already know that, so just come out to a show and have fun.”
Slim Krusty is playing the Revs Bandroom on 1 November. Get tickets here.
