‘FLAP!’ yelled Jess Guille to a bird battling headwinds in the stratosphere … and so, as legend has it, the name of this fiery Melbourne band was born.

Flap! is a blistering yet charming five-piece band of brass, guts, words and skins who crank out up-tempo songs, turning street shoes into dancing shoes. They play original music that is both old and new, inspired by the entire human diaspora. Influences from 1920s jazz, Gypsy Brass, English Folk and Trinidadian Calypso can be heard peeping through their antipodean veneer.

Formed during an informal jam at the 2007 Port Fairy Folk Festival and playing their first gig at the Woodstock Cafe at Christiania, Copenhagen, that same year, Flap! have since become Festival favourites across Australia. Flap! are definitely an ‘up’ band, now veterans of the best of Australia’s music Festival circuit.

Fresh from their A Great Day For The Race two-month European tour in late 2012, Flap! are in Castlemaine pumped and hot-to-trot.