Laneway is one of those festivals that I had obviously known about for a long time, and if you follow Australian music even remotely closely, it is pretty difficult not to. Every year the lineup drops, everyone starts talking about who they want to see, there are inevitably a few names halfway down the poster that you have never heard of, and then a few months later you realise one of those artists is suddenly everywhere.
But when I actually started looking into the history of Laneway, what surprised me was just how literally the name describes where all of this came from.
Because before there were huge crowds across Australia and New Zealand, international artists flying in to play the festival and lineups that people now wait months for, there was genuinely just a little bar sitting in a dirty Melbourne laneway.
Jerome Borazio opened St Jerome’s Bar in Caledonian Lane in 2004, inside what had previously been a Swedish meatball shop. From everything you read about the place, it wasn’t exactly glamorous. It was small, there were bins and rats around the laneway and Borazio has spoken about originally wanting somewhere that he and his mates could basically hang out and drink.
Somewhere along the way, though, it started becoming a place where Melbourne’s music community wanted to hang out too.
Danny Rogers had returned to Australia after working as a band booker in New York and became involved with the bar, and the two eventually started putting on Sunday shows behind St Jerome’s as part of what became known as the Summer Series. The Avalanches were around the place, Architecture in Helsinki played there, The Presets played there, Clare Bowditch played there, and gradually this little bar started developing a reputation for music.
That eventually led to the fairly simple idea of taking over the laneway itself.
So in February 2005 they moved the bins, convinced some of the neighbouring restaurants to open their back doors and sell food, squeezed a stage into Caledonian Lane and held the first St Jerome’s Laneway Festival in front of roughly 1,400 people.
Apparently, they even forgot to put a roof on the stage.
I love that detail because when you know Laneway as this huge touring festival, it is easy to assume there must have been some ambitious plan behind it from the beginning. Maybe Borazio and Rogers had looked at the Australian festival market and figured out that there was room for something smaller and more alternative, and this was the first step towards building it.
But that doesn’t really seem to be how it happened at all. It feels much more like there was already a community forming around this little bar, they were already putting on artists they liked, people were turning up, and eventually somebody thought it would be fun to make the whole thing a bit bigger.
And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger.
Laneway expanded from Melbourne into Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland, and at different points there were even editions in Singapore and Detroit. Eventually it became impossible for the festival to remain anything close to what it had been in Caledonian Lane, because once thousands and then tens of thousands of people want to come to your festival, you obviously can’t keep squeezing everyone behind a little bar in Melbourne.
Laneway wasn’t originally competing with Australia’s biggest festivals by trying to become another version of them. There were already festivals that could give you enormous stages, massive international headliners and tens of thousands of people.
What Laneway seemed to develop instead was this reputation for having really good taste.
And I don’t mean that in the slightly pretentious sense of someone telling you they listen to music you haven’t heard of yet. I mean that if you go back through old Laneway lineups now, there are genuinely some names sitting much lower on those posters than your brain is willing to accept knowing what those artists eventually became.
Tame Impala is probably my favourite example of this.
They played Laneway in 2009 when they were still very early in their career. Kevin Parker has since talked about how early their set was, to the point that they apparently started playing before the festival gates had properly opened.
Just imagine that for a second. There are people now who travel across countries to see Tame Impala headline festivals, and at Laneway in 2009 they were playing so early that some of the audience wasn’t even inside yet.
Billie Eilish played Laneway in 2018 when she was only 16. This was before her debut album, before “bad guy”, before the Grammys and before she became one of the biggest artists in the world.
Flume has an even funnier history with the festival because before he played Laneway as an artist, he was actually volunteering there. In 2010 he was apparently carrying water between stages and getting distracted watching The xx when he was supposed to be working. By 2013, he was on the lineup himself and his career was exploding.
Now obviously Laneway isn’t responsible for making all of these artists famous. Billie Eilish was going to become Billie Eilish whether she played Laneway or not, and the same is true for plenty of these names.
But I don’t think that’s really the point. What is interesting is how often Laneway seems to have caught artists during that little window where the music was already there, the potential was already there and the people paying really close attention probably already knew, but the size of the audience hadn’t quite caught up yet.
There is something really enjoyable about going to a festival where you don’t know everyone on the lineup. You obviously want enough artists you already love to justify buying the ticket, but some of my favourite festival experiences have been the completely unplanned ones. You have an hour to kill before the next artist you want to see, you hear something coming from another stage, walk over to see what is happening and suddenly you have discovered someone.
Laneway seems to understand that feeling really well.
It is almost like the big names get you through the gates, but the rest of the lineup is where the festival gets to show you what it thinks you should be listening to.
And that is probably where its importance to Australian music becomes bigger than simply being a successful festival.
We talk a lot about supporting Australian music, especially now when there is so much conversation around how difficult it has become for local artists to break through in their own country, but before anyone can support an artist, they have to actually hear them.
And festivals are still one of the best places for that to happen naturally.
You might buy a Laneway ticket because there are two international artists you really want to see, but you’re there for the whole day, so you end up watching an Australian artist you had never heard of because they happen to be playing on the stage next to you. If they’re good enough, maybe you look them up afterwards, listen to their album on the way home and the next time they come through your city, you’re buying a ticket specifically to see them.
That doesn’t mean I want to romanticise Laneway as though it is still some little underground festival operating behind a Melbourne bar, because it obviously isn’t. Laneway today is a major festival with huge international artists, enormous crowds and an operation that probably bears very little resemblance to what Borazio and Rogers were doing in Caledonian Lane in 2005.
The music has changed too. Laneway was once much more closely associated with a certain era of indie music, whereas now you can move between indie, pop, hip-hop and electronic music across the same day. For people who grew up with an older version of the festival, I can understand why that might feel like Laneway becoming more mainstream, but I also think it would be strange if a festival built around finding interesting new music still sounded exactly like it did 15 years ago.
Music doesn’t work like that, and neither does discovery.
What probably matters more is whether you can still look halfway down a Laneway poster and find artists that make you curious. In 2024, around a third of the lineup was reportedly making its Australian debut, which suggests that even as the festival has become much bigger, there is still some willingness to ask its audience to take a chance on something they haven’t seen before.
And that willingness might become increasingly important because Laneway is now trying to survive in a very different Australian festival landscape from the one it grew up in.
We have watched festivals disappear, pause or struggle over the last few years as touring, production and artist costs have increased while audiences themselves have less money to spend. Laneway has survived all of that so far, but it isn’t immune to it either.
For 2027, Adelaide and Perth are being paused, leaving Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland on the festival run. Organisers have spoken about how difficult it has become to move artists and crews across so many cities in such a short period, and while they have said this isn’t necessarily goodbye to Adelaide and Perth, it does make you wonder what the next version of Laneway looks like.