St Jerome’s Laneway Festival
Melbourne CBD
February 1, 2009

It really is a shame that a festival with so much potential, and with such a unique creative force behind it, was dragged down by logistics.

St Jerome’s Laneway Festival has always been a tight squeeze – last year it was near impossible to move during headliners Feist and the Presets – but the decision this year to incorporate Little Lonsdale St as well as Lonsdale and its offshoot alleys should have freed up plenty of space. Instead, under the nieve assumption that audiences would be evenly spread, the organisers used the extension as an excuse to send numbers soaring well beyond what either street could hold.

To be fair, the festival must have been a nightmare to organise. The two main stages were separated by Swanston St, which remained open to the public. So to get from one to the other, you would essentially have to leave the event, and re-enter.

This created painful bottlenecks at the best of times – exits and entries were very limited – but the real problem emerged when the majority of the crowd tried to converge at the Little Lonsdale St for big-name acts Architecture in Helsinki and Girl Talk. The street just couldn’t support the numbers, initially resulting in queues that were blocks long, before the street was deemed full ahead of Girl Talk’s performance. Not good for those who paid over $100 to see the US mash-up king.

That said, there were still plenty of other good acts on offer, and it isn’t fair to discredit the entire festival on a painful ending.

Sunday laziness kept me from catching the opening act, Tame Impala, which was quite disappointing. Asking around after the performance, punters who managed the resist the snooze button assured me I missed a very solid set by the retro-rock three-piece.

So it ended up being the girls from Beaches who eased me into the festival, taking to the Lonsdale Street stage at 1pm. The sun nicely complimented the chilled out, indie psychedelia, and the group seemed to be having a bunch of fun up on stage, which always makes for an enjoyable show.

After wandering past some obscure DJs down the smaller alleys off Drewery Ln, I stopped by the festival’s kitch little arts market in Knox Ln. It did feel a little contrived – especially as corporate sponsorship was plastered absolutely everywhere – but the novelty of discovering these features in tiny lanes was still very enjoyable, touching on that idyllic notion of Melbourne as a network of quirky byways, each housing their own unique treasures and communities.

Over at the Little Lonsdale St stage, San Fransican many-piece Still Flyin’ was doing a good job of barely fitting on stage, and an even better job of getting the crowd moving. The group was well-placed early in the festival; its upbeat cheeriness – built on the fantastically fun foundations of trumpet, bongo, and glockenspiel, plus a guy whose sole job seemed to be dancing around in brightly coloured clothes – was hard to resist.

The mood was different at Lonsdale St, where a calmer crowd was bobbing along appreciatively to Port O’Brien’s folsky-rock sounds. The band performed well, but at the halfway point of the set I realised I was sick of being ‘that guy’ waiting to hear TV-famed ‘I woke up today’, and left the fans to it. After hours standing in the heat, beer also beckoned.

It’s easy to feel a little guilty ditching acts for brews at festivals, especially on review duty, but things were different here; the dingy laneway bars were as much a part of the broader celebration as anything happening on stage. Of course they lost their hidden-away appeal after they filled to the rafters, but there was still something about sitting in a genuine bar – as opposed to having an order processed at one those makeshift beer tents – in the middle of a music festival that just felt right.

Loosened up, I made my way to NZ-born, UK-based Cut off your Hands. The band was already pushing capacity at Little Lonsdale at 5pm, so I watched the three-piece wedged between a big bin and a sweaty, shirtless teenage guy – the fact that it was still enjoyable was testament to COYH’s abilities. Hits ‘Oh Girl’ and ‘Expectations’ were very well received, with passionate sing-alongs and as much dancing as the limited space would allow.

This is where things took a turn for the worse. The drinks taking their toll, I slipped out to find a toilet (there were none within the event grounds at Little Lonsdale), returning to find the exit I’d used had been blocked for entry and that the line at the main entrance was about 100 metres long, four people wide, and moving at snail’s pace. Goodbye Drones and Architecture in Helsinki.

Instead, I caught a solid set by Augie March at Lonsdale, which attracted a smaller group of more subdued ticketholders. Fewer fluoro sunnies here. The set was peppered with tracks from last year’s Watch me Disappear, but 2006 sway-along hit ‘One Crowded Hour’ still won the biggest cheer.

After this, an organiser who must have drawn a very, very short straw confronted the Lonsdale crowd to tell them Little Lonsdale was now completely closed for entry – no Girl Talk for us chumps. Lots of booing.

You couldn’t help but feel bad for the Hold Steady, the alternate headliner that a fair portion of the crowd probably never intended to see. Luckily, the US pop-rockers put on a damn solid, engaging, high-energy show. Front man Craig Finn Jumped and danced his way through the hour-long set, full of poetic tunes about love and life in the Twin Cities, with the overarching message, “stay positive” (which also happens to be the name of the band’s most recent album). It actually was an uplifting performance, and Girl Talk was the furthest thing from anybody’s mind as the crowd roared for more after the Hold Steady wound up.