Surf + Sound 2026: Manly's New Three-Weekend Festival, and the Local Boy Closing It

Manly has one very old festival and, from this October, one very new one.

Manly Jazz has been running since 1977 and owns the beachfront for a weekend every September. Surf + Sound is the opposite proposition: brand new, wharf-side rather than beachfront, and spread thin on purpose — three consecutive weekends from Friday 16 October to Sunday 1 November 2026, built around four things at once. Live music in a brewery room. A free art trail you can walk without buying anything. A boardriders competition on Main Beach with three world champions in the water. And the wharf's restaurants doing what they already do, for seventeen days straight.

It is an ambitious first year. Here's what's actually on, what it costs, and which of the three weekends to pick if you're only doing one.

The basics

The important structural point: most of this festival is free. The art trail is free, the surf competition is free to watch, and the closing-night Winston Surfshirt set is free. The ticketed part is the evening music at Felons — five headline shows across three weekends, one room, doors at 7pm each time.

The music, date by date

Everything ticketed happens in the Felons Barrel Room at Manly Wharf — the brewery's indoor room, not an outdoor stage. That's a real constraint worth knowing before you plan: it's a room, it has a capacity, and these are not festival sets on a hillside. Doors 7pm across the board.

It reads like a very deliberate piece of programming: The Whitlams and Skunkhour for anyone who was in a Sydney pub in the nineties, GANGgajang for the one song everyone can sing whether they mean to or not, The Beautiful Girls and Skegss for the surf-adjacent end of it, and Winston Surfshirt to close.

Mudhoney were named in the launch announcement but haven't appeared on the published program yet, and the organisers have said more music is still to come. Check the festival site before you assume the lineup is final.

If you haven't been to Felons since it opened, the Felons Manly Wharf guide covers the room, the beer and where it sits on the wharf.

Winston Surfshirt, closing it out at home

The set worth building a day around is the free one.

Winston Surfshirt started in Manly. Not "started in Sydney" — started here, as one bloke playing around the Northern Beaches before it became the collective that ended up on international festival bills. That origin is audible in the records: the loose, sun-bleached, slightly-behind-the-beat soul that came out of it sounds like this place, in a way that's hard to fake and harder to explain to anyone who hasn't spent an afternoon on the Corso.

"Be About You" arrived in 2016 and did the thing that almost never happens — it escaped. Multi-platinum, all over triple j, and then permanently installed in every beachside pub, surf edit and car stereo on the peninsula. The debut album Sponge Cake followed in 2017 as a triple j Feature Album. Nearly a decade on, it's still the song that plays out of a balcony somewhere on a hot Saturday and makes everyone under forty look up.

The festival is billing the 1 November show as a ten-year celebration of that song, and calling it a defining song of the Northern Beaches — which is generous framing until you've stood in a Manly beer garden when it comes on, at which point it's just accurate.

Two things make this the pick of the program. It's free, which for an act of that size playing a hometown crowd is not nothing. And it's the last night, sharing 1 November with GANGgajang and the finals of the Boardrider Battle — so the festival closes with the local kid playing the song he wrote here, to the beach he wrote it about.

The venue is listed as Manly Wharf with the exact location still under wraps. Watch the festival's channels in the week before, and turn up early regardless — free show, closing night, hometown band, ferry-accessible venue. Do the maths on that crowd.

The Boardrider Battle: 31 October – 1 November

The surf half of the festival lands on the final weekend at Manly Main Beach, and it's free to attend.

• Divisions: Men's Open, Women's, and U18 Junior
• The Legends Heat, Saturday 31 October: Joel Parkinson, Mark Occhilupo and Layne Beachley in the water together. Between them, that's a lot of world titles standing on one beach
• Finals run through Sunday 1 November, feeding straight into the closing night

Parkinson is fronting the whole surf program, and by the organisers' own account the competition was the seed the rest of the festival grew around. If you're bringing kids, or you've been through a learn-to-surf lesson and want to see what the ceiling actually looks like, the Legends Heat is the one — free, on the sand, and about as good a surfing lesson as you'll get standing still.

Bring something to sit on and get there before the heat you care about. Main Beach on a warm Saturday in late October is busy before you add a competition to it.

The art trail: free, and running the whole time

Unlike the music, the art runs every day from 16 October to 1 November and costs nothing.

The Jeremyville Outdoor Art Trail is the main event — large-scale inflatables, sculptures, digital projections and installations, curated by Jeremyville and placed around the wharf precinct for public viewing. Free, no ticket, walk it at your own pace. It's the part of this festival that will most change what Manly physically looks like for a fortnight.

DEFENDER Live Art is the odder one: five vintage Land Rover Defenders painted live by Australian artists down at Manly Cove. Watching a car get painted sounds like a sponsor activation, and it is one, but live painting at that scale is genuinely good to stand in front of for ten minutes.

Both are the answer to "we've got two hours in Manly and don't want to buy tickets to anything."

Eating, and the wharf problem

Dining runs daily across the Manly Wharf restaurants and bars for the festival's full seventeen days — which is less a program than a fact about the wharf, but it does mean the precinct is set up for it.

The practical warning: book anything you care about, particularly on the two Fridays and the Saturdays with shows on. The wharf's waterfront tables are the most contested seats in Manly on an ordinary spring weekend. Add a gig with 7pm doors fifty metres away and the pre-show window between 5.30 and 7 becomes the busiest hour of the night.

If you haven't booked, eat early, eat up the Corso instead, or eat after the set. The guide to eating in Manly has the full picture and the restaurant directory filters by cuisine and price.

Getting there: the ferry lands at the venue

This is the rare Manly event where the transport advice is almost too easy.

The F1 ferry from Circular Quay docks at Manly Wharf. The Barrel Room, the art trail and the Defender painting are all a few minutes' walk from where you step off the boat. Half an hour on the water, no parking, no getting-home problem, and the last services run late enough to cover a 7pm show. Our local's guide to the ferry has fares, timetables and which side to sit on.

For the surf competition, walk the Corso from the wharf to Main Beach — five minutes, and the only leg of this festival that isn't at the wharf itself.

The B-Line bus is the right call from Dee Why, Mona Vale and the northern end of the peninsula.

Driving is the bad option, as usual. Late October is when Manly's parking starts behaving like summer, the wharf car parks are the first to fill, and evening shows mean coming back to the car at 11pm on a Saturday. If you must, read where to park in Manly, park well back and walk in.

Which weekend should you pick?

Weekend one (16–18 Oct) — The Whitlams on Friday, The Beautiful Girls on Saturday. The strongest back-to-back pair of the program, and the art trail is brand new and least crowded. Best pick if you want the music and nothing else.

Weekend two (23–25 Oct) — Skegss on the Saturday, and that's it for ticketed music. The quiet weekend. Genuinely good if you'd rather walk the art trail without a crowd and eat somewhere on the water without a war over the booking.

Weekend three (30 Oct – 1 Nov) — everything at once. Skunkhour Friday, the Legends Heat and competition Saturday, then GANGgajang, the finals and the free Winston Surfshirt show on Sunday. If you're only doing one weekend, do this one. Book a bed and a table now, not in late October — the best hotels in Manly guide ranks the realistic options and the full directory lists everything.

What to know before you go

• Most of it is free. Art trail, surf competition and the Winston Surfshirt closer cost nothing. Only the Felons shows are ticketed
• The music is indoors and 7pm doors. A room with a capacity, not a field
• Spring nights turn cold. Late October in Sydney is warm by day and breezy by nine at night on the water. Bring a layer
• Sunscreen for the surf days. Sydney's late-spring UV is stronger than most visitors expect, and Main Beach has no shade
• Come on the ferry. The boat docks at the festival
• Check the program before you commit. This is a first-year festival with acts still being announced and one venue still officially secret

The short version

16 October to 1 November, three weekends, centred on Manly Wharf. Ticketed music at Felons Barrel Room: The Whitlams, The Beautiful Girls, Skegss, Skunkhour and GANGgajang, doors 7pm. Free art trail and free Defender live-painting the whole seventeen days. Free Boardrider Battle on Main Beach on the last weekend, with Parkinson, Occhilupo and Beachley in a Legends Heat on 31 October. And on the final night, Winston Surfshirt playing a free show ten years on from the song that took Manly with them.

Take the ferry. Book the third weekend.

For the rest of the year's calendar — Manly Jazz, the Surf Open, Taste of Manly, the Cole Classic and New Year's Eve — see the festivals and events page.

Before you plan around this

Surf + Sound is in its first year and the program is still moving: acts are being added, ticket pricing wasn't published when this was written, and the closing venue is deliberately unannounced. Confirm dates, prices and locations on the festival's own site before you book travel around it.

Photo credits

Every photograph here comes from Wikimedia Commons and is used under a Creative Commons licence. In order of appearance:

• Manly Wharf — JustARandomEditor123 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Winston Surfshirt — Bruce Baker (CC BY 2.0)
• Manly Beach — Photoscenic (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Manly Cove — Hardlinerr (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Manly ferry — Kayden Rayward (CC BY-SA 4.0)