When the Half Bent Music Festival was launched back in 2002 it was built around the #58 West Coburg tram.

Audience members could catch that tram between its three main venues in Brunswick West, Trades Hall in Carlton and North Melbourne.

The festival was last held in 2015. Now after a hiatus of 10 years it has been revived with the input of new, mainly younger organisers but the 58 tram remains central to its planning.

Merinda Dias-Jayasinha, a vocalist and one of the new organisers says the inspiration for reviving the festival came from drummer, concert programmer and Brunswick West resident Ronny Ferella.

“He is such a community minded person and is involved in making music that is intergenerational,” she says.

“I think he looked at the scene and the number of musicians coming through and thought of making a place for it all to work together.”

That place ideally could be Brunswick West, Ferella and the festival’s enthusiastic organising team decided.

As well as Brunswick West being one of the locations of the original festivals, it doesn’t have the range of music venues that other parts of Brunswick have, Dias-Jayasinha points out.

Instead the team opted to create pop-up venues in community spaces not normally used for music.

The venues chosen for the three-day festival that runs from Friday, May 29 to Sunday, May 31 are Austramax House, a one-time gas lantern factory on the corner of Melville Road and Albion Steet now repurposed for small business use; the 4th Brunswick Scout Hall in Jacobs Reserve; and St John’s Anglican Church on the corner of Victoria Street and Melville Road.

They are all along the 58 tramline for those who like to hop off and on at each venue or else there is a short walk between the venues – 15 minutes at the most, Dias-Jayasinha says.

The Half Bent festival is a musician-run festival and the organising team also includes Ferella and saxophonist and small music business owner Gideon Brazil, who were both behind the original festival.

Brazil explains: “The festival was reborn out of a change of priorities in our lives – our local community has become more our focus and we want to celebrate our little corner of Brunswick West, the local artists, the gathering places, our neighbours and the weird/wonderful mix of people who live nearby’’.

An Expression of Interest call-out attracted more than 60 replies, he says.

“So it confirmed people want new connections and to be part of something different. It is not a nostalgia trip whatsoever.”