Sydney's crackdown on buskers

Hi everyone,

Last week I wrote an angry list of seventeen questions that Sydney’s buskers might want to ask the mayor, which I sent to 380 local street performers on Friday. I’m now working on an article about the situation, so I haven’t had enough time to do a full newsletter this week. Sorry!

However, due to the huge amount of feedback I got on my arrests newsletter, I thought maybe we could start a new regular section to add to these emails called #buskingisnotacrime. After that, the usual “Closing My Tabs” section for our paid subscribers.

Thanks,

Nick

You may have noticed that #buskingisnotacrime appears in the footer of our website:

It comes from a campaign we did about a decade ago, where we asked street performers to send in photos of them holding that hashtag on a sign, uploading their photos to social media and tagging us (@buskingproject on Instagram).

We’ve never done anything with them. We’ve also all-but-stopped using social media (I’m bad at it, social media companies are evil and we don’t have the budget to hire someone else to do it).

However, the photos are a lot of fun to look at, and everyone who’s been involved over the years told us they had a good time snapping the pics. Thousands of you have joined up since we last talked about them, so I thought I’d invite you again: please send me your own version of the photos below.

The first we ever received was from Charlotte Campbell in 2014. That’s so long ago her sign even has our old URL on it (www.thebuskingproject.com):

And here’s the Barefoot Busker, Geordie Little, who was one of the original members (possibly co-founders) of the advocacy group Berlin Street Music:

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News, stories and gig opportunities from around the world that I’m not writing about elsewhere, available for paid subscribers. This week: another bodycam arrest video, Birmingham’s back in the news, a legend retires, and six positive stories about the power of street performance to sustain a career and launch you to stardom…

In a previous newsletter I mentioned Charlie Wilson’s arrest. On August 20th, he got into the Bury Times, his local newspaper, for being a “talented street singer”. His local newspaper just wanted to celebrate him for singing in the centre of town, because he was “putting smiles on faces”. He’d only been singing publicly for 2 weeks by then, and the paper commended the 17-year-old’s bravery.

Seven days later he got arrested. In the recently-released bodycam video below, you can see a cop arrives, threatens him, answers his questions indignantly, then puts him in handcuffs for not providing his name. After the incident, the cop’s superintendent met Charlie and his mother, and told them that the cop should have used more “discretion”, that his actions were “not proportionate or necessary”—but that he was right to stop Charlie from busking:

Also, the Birmingham Busking Ban is unsurprisingly still making the news, this time featuring an overlooked impact of such crackdowns: