Laneway Festival

Caledonian Lane, behind Myer, was not a site. It was a Melbourne alley: bins, rats, a bar that had been a Swedish meatball shop. On 27 February 2005 Jerome Borazio and Danny Rogers closed that street, cleared the rubbish and put on St. Jerome's Laneway Festival: about fourteen hundred people, The Avalanches, Cut Copy, Architecture in Helsinki. Anyone arriving in search of Landed — a Powys estate, camping, hill folk — has the wrong hemisphere. Here the ear is indie, pop and rock, and the luxury is that it fits a lane.

St. Jerome's opened in 2004 as a hole to drink with friends: cheap, no dress code, a magnet for anyone who did not want a branded club. Rogers came back from New York, where he had worked as a booker, and Borazio talked him into shifts. Within six months they were talking music. The Sunday Summer Series — The Presets, Architecture in Helsinki, Clare Bowditch, Gersey — and an Avalanches residency called Brains turned the backyard into a rehearsal. The festival was not designed in a tour office. It spilled out of the bar.

On 27 February the lane no longer fitted the yard. There were posters, restaurants talked into selling food from the back door, a skinny stage at one end. Art of Fighting, Eskimo Joe, The Dears and Ground Components with Macromantics fit the same thesis: Melbourne indie and indie from farther away, pop that does not ask for a stadium, room rock. Rogers has said Laneway has never been about headliners. The sentence matters. The ear is built by the alley, not by a cover name that justifies the ticket.

When the lane grew too small, the format travelled without ceasing to call itself a lane. Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Auckland, Singapore, a Detroit that arrived two months after the city went bankrupt, Footscray by the Maribyrnong: each city lent a space a stadium promoter would have skipped. Rogers says the expansions were asked for by locals who understood the thesis. Borazio talks about changing how a neighbourhood is seen. That is told as geography, not as a line of years. The contract stays the same: indie, pop and rock in a place that was not born for ten thousand.

The experience follows the format. In 2005 you walked to the CBD, packed between walls, heard indie bounce off brick. Later, on a river site, you walk farther and the sky is wider, but the ear does not ask for a Welsh field. There is no hill camping. The after is the city: a tram, a bar, an ear that still carries the kick of the alley. By day pop asks for talk. By night rock asks for less distance. Anyone who came for the Avalanches and anyone who found Cut Copy in the same lane share the same squeeze.

Laneway is not Landed. That correction is not an archive footnote. Landed is Doldowlod, Grubby Brown, a shed, folk and electronic rock for a few hundred. Laneway is a Melbourne alley that became a circuit of cities, with an indie ear that does not apologise for having fitted between bins. Mixing them is the error of anyone who only reads a land name and assumes one map. A reader who enters through Caledonian Lane deserves the right name: St. Jerome's, a bar, a lane, not an estate.

There is a useful contradiction: the festival grew and, at the same time, refuses to owe its soul to a headliner. Fifteen thousand on a Footscray site do not erase the fourteen hundred in the alley. Growth changes neighbourhood; it does not change thesis. Anyone who treats Laneway as a branch of a European circuit has the wrong origin. The origin is a Sunday, a yard, and two friends who decided the lane could be closed.

Anyone who stops now inside what remains of that idea — an urban site, an indie ear, a saint’s name from a bar — understands why this festival is not a field. The bins are gone; the bounce of guitar against brick is the memory the later river sites still owe. Between 27 February 2005 and the Avalanches on a skinny stage, between Borazio and Rogers and the cities that asked for their own lane, Melbourne had a pop and rock festival that will not translate as a Powys branch. The alley lends the echo; St. Jerome's lends the name. What remains is a lane that learned to be a country without ceasing to be an alley.