‘Never been about headliners’: Behind Laneway’s trend-defying success

This story is part of the February 1 edition of Good Weekend.See all 12 stories.

I’m shivering in the middle of a rain-soaked laneway in Melbourne’s CBD, and not one of the pretty ones, either. There aren’t any cool cafes in Caledonian Lane; a tiny, truncated strip of asphalt between Lonsdale and Little Bourke streets, ­currently home to some industrial-sized bins, the unglamorous backsides of restaurants and a few bored, vaping shift workers. As unremarkable as it is easy to miss, it’s difficult to imagine anything interesting ever happening here, let alone the origin story of a national touring music festival.

When he moved into the heart of the city more than 20 years ago, Jerome Borazio saw something different. The son of Polish-Italian parents whose family is steeped in hospitality, Borazio immediately took issue with the fact that every licensed premises in town seemed to only cater to stiff corporate types. “Because I wore shorts and thongs, I wasn’t welcomed,” he says, still rocking beaten-up pluggers today at one of his own watering holes, a floating barge-bar in Southbank.

“My argument was always, ‘Do I need special clothes to drink beer?’ ” When Borazio noticed that a poorly patronised deli in an easy-to-miss lane was up for sale, he jumped at the opportunity to transform it into a safe haven for creatives like him. “F--- them. I’ll just build my own dive bar and we’ll just have a no-suit policy in return,” he says, laughing.

Borazio, now 53, is one of those mythical figures who always seemed destined to do things differently. He’s a larger-than-life character, a sort of benevolent Belushi, the kind of man who not only enjoys being the life of the party, but also making sure the party includes everyone. Though he’s Melbourne to his core, he lives these days on a farm on the Mornington Peninsula, where he tends to nearly 100 animals, including a fair few llamas. When I meet him on an overcast Thursday, he offers me a lager – at 11am. If you wrote Borazio as a character in a book, it would not be half as dynamic as he is in real life.

Christened St Jerome’s, Borazio’s ­anti-establishment establishment quickly became a cultural institution, known for its long drinking sessions among the city’s creative community and its raucous DIY music gigs. Some of the buzziest acts of the day, from a young Lily Allen to The Avalanches, would rock up at whatever constituted a stage – milk crates and plywood, DJ decks atop an air-conditioning duct – and the crowds would inevitably follow. On the eve of the bar’s first birthday, Borazio and his childhood friend Danny Rogers (by then working with him behind the bar) wanted to throw a party to celebrate, but realised they’d very much hit capacity. It was time to consider spilling outwards.

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In 2005, some 1400 punters sardined themselves into Caledonian Lane for the inaugural St Jerome’s Laneway Festival. “How hard is it to shut down a lane? Back then it was a one-page document,” Borazio ­reminisces. “Now I reckon it’d be 500 pages.”

The experiment by the two mates in fostering ­community and creativity has been growing incrementally ever since. Two decades later, Laneway – as it’s now known – is one of our longest-running national festivals and a name brand among artists, managers and bookers internationally. It’s popped up in Singapore, Detroit and London. In 2024, there were 125,000 ­hungry fans at stops from Perth to Brisbane, all the way over to Auckland. When it announced its 2025 lineup, boasting an all-female top tier of acts including Charli XCX, arguably one of the most talked-about ­artists on the planet, it sold out Sydney and Melbourne on its opening day of general sales – 70,000 tickets – for the first time in its history.

Rogers would be the first to put it to you that this is an extremely unusual turn of events. “We’ve just been blown away by every step,” he tells me at the trendy Ace Hotel in Sydney, which incidentally sits next to a grimy laneway much like the one where his festival started. “Every year we’re like, ‘What the hell, how is this still happening?’ ” Much like co-founder Borazio, Rogers, two years his junior, is a consummate storyteller. He can tell you the genesis of every act he’s booked for the past 20 years; where he found them, who introduced them to him and, often, why they came back. Softly spoken but roaring with ideas, Rogers, with his ­piercing aquamarine eyes, is not only the yin to Borazio’s yang, but also the antithesis of what Australians have come to expect from a promoter: the brashness of Michael Gudinski or Michael Chugg, the world-beating ambitions of Big Day Out’s Vivian Lees and Ken West. In fact, the word Rogers frequently uses to describe his festival’s success is “humbled”.

Early years for the festival in Caledonian Lane, Melbourne, 2007.

Fair enough. While the post-pandemic years have been far from kind to the Australian music festivals, 2024 will likely go down as its annus horribilis. A lethal combination of high interest rates, increased supplier costs, the weak Aussie dollar and a public pinching ­pennies due to cost-of-living pressures has moved this once-beloved national pastime out of reach of its core audience. (That’s before you get to our frequent bouts of wild weather, which knocked out more than 20 festivals in 2022 alone.) Some of the country’s most beloved ­festival brands either kicked the bucket, ran out of funds or went on hiatus. In northern NSW, following a year of disastrous flooding, Splendour in the Grass was ­cancelled due to slow ticket sales, while Bluesfest called it a day after 35 years, with founder Peter Noble saying “the current circumstances make it impossible to continue the festival in its current form”. Regional festivals Spilt Milk and Groovin’ The Moo disappeared from the calendar, as did the Falls and Harvest festivals.

Sprawling in scale and volatile by design, music festivals have always been a tricky business in which to make money. Now it’s harder than ever. This masthead recently reported surges in public liability insurance premiums for live events and venues up to 10 times what they were a few years prior, amplified by the ­increase in natural disasters worldwide, leading the Australian Festival Association to declare a ­“crisis” in March 2024. In NSW, there is also the well-documented issue of ­overpolicing, with the excessive use of sniffer dogs and strip-searching as well as ­exorbitant “user pay” fees being cited in recent par­liamentary inquiries into the health of the live music sector. Finally, there’s the ­consolidation effect, with a raft of festivals (boutique and major) being snapped up by larger players. Live Nation, which owns Secret Sounds, promoter of Splendour and many ­others, was sensationally accused of monopolising the market in an ABC Four Corners ­exposé last October. TEG, its main Australian competitor, bought a ­minority stake in Laneway in 2021, leaving Rogers and Borazio in “substantial” control.

Although there have been exceptions to this trend, notably the long-running cult favourites Meredith and Golden Plains festivals in Victoria, and Strawberry Fields in NSW, you’d be hard-pressed to find another decades-long, national touring festival in Australia that’s not only surviving but thriving. Its closest countrywide competitor is the dance/hip-hop-inspired Listen Out from veteran promoter Fuzzy, which recently hit 11 years. “​​I don’t really have a comment on other festivals,” Rogers says. “They’ve all had different things ­unfold that were beyond their control, but I don’t really understand their models. I don’t look at them thinking, ‘I want to be like that.’ I don’t look at that at all.”

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“Yeah, so it’s a bit fuzzy, but I imagine the stage would have been over there …” That’s Travis Banko, head of programming, who’s been with the Laneway festival for more than a decade. With his strawberry-blond hair, hoodie and sneakers, Banko is an effusive music fan in his early 40s who, much like Rogers, his boss, still seems in awe of the fact that he gets to turn his lifelong passion into a job.

Festival founders Jerome Borazio (left) and Danny Rogers have been mates since childhood.Credit: Eddie Jim

He’s pointing towards the double-wide loading dock for Myer, which was the site of the festival’s very first stage. It was so small that Broken Social Scene, a nine-piece Canadian indie band, famously had to squeeze onto it in uniform lines of three. Restaurants on Swanston Street sold food to punters out of their back doors. “I guess we didn’t ­really understand boundaries, which let us really go for it.” Borazio chuckles when I ask him about it. “It was organised chaos.”

As a music journalist, I’ve attended around nine Laneways since its inception. In Sydney, the festival has slowly graduated from a scungy back lane in Circular Quay to the courtyards of a sandstone arts college in the city’s inner west and, this year, the iconic Centennial Park.

‘Fans know the integrity in our lineup and how well considered it is from top to bottom. It’s not a headline with some fillers. Laneway’s never been about headliners.’

Jerome Borazio

One of the things that has kept the festival humming, and where so many others have failed, is its programming, which is essentially Rogers’ full-time job. “I do the music; he just drinks beer and sends me text messages,” he jokes about the division of labour between him and Borazio, whose prime domain is sponsorships, as well as the festival’s equally renowned food and beverage offering. “That’s probably one of the reasons why our relationship has worked so well. We don’t get in each other’s way. We respect each other’s skills.”

Programming, which many in the industry say Rogers and his small team excel at, is something of a dark art. The job of a festival programmer is perennial, keeping one’s foot firmly in the culture and ear to the ground every day of the year. It’s staying in constant contact with managers and agents, seeing hundreds of artists play across the world. Building long lists and shortlists, which change right down to the wire. Conversations that can take years to come to fruition. But more than just knowing what’s hot, it’s having an innate sense of taste, something that’s incredibly hard to fake.

“I’ve knocked back huge headliners many times,” Rogers says. “These are acts that every other festival has booked, and I’ve said no, even when I knew they were worth a lot of ­tickets.” Borazio backs this up: “Fans know the integrity in our lineup and how well considered it is from top to bottom. It’s not a headline with some fillers. Laneway’s never been about headliners.”

Much of this comes down to a willingness to take big risks. “Danny has a history of ­having faith in talent before the market has told him to have faith in talent,” says Emily York, a respected Victorian tour promoter who was also Laneway’s first-ever publicist. “He’s found himself in these situations multiple times where he’s booked an artist before they’ve had this huge explosion.”

Charli XCX at the 2020 Laneway in Brisbane: one of the big-name acts that the festival has fostered since their early careers.Credit: WireImage

It feels less serendipitous to Rogers, who maintains he’s simply practising core aspects of Laneway’s DNA: fostering community and breaking new talent. “I’ve always said, ‘How do you make headliners? You push them forward,’ ” he says. Charli XCX, whose star power reached supernova levels last year, not only played a smaller billing at Laneway in 2020, but also met her future husband while on the tour. “I’ve seen her perform heaps of times and I felt like she was building towards this,” Rogers explains. “I loved how hard she worked and even in the two records [released in 2024], you can see how dedicated she was to bringing other people up. She has this beautiful energy and fans respond to that.”

Indeed, the bulk of Laneway’s recent ­big-name acts – Billie Eilish, HAIM, Gang Of Youths, Fontaines DC, Clairo, Courtney Barnett – are repeat offenders, who often took earlier afternoon slots years before anyone was chasing them down the street for selfies. Perth’s Tame Impala, now a stadium proposition globally, has played multiple times, from openers to main-stage closers.

Billie Eilish performing at Laneway in Sydney, 2018.Credit: Daniel Boud

Finding a space for each act no ­matter where they are in their careers is part of the challenge Rogers sets ­himself each year. “I’ve always been obsessed with catalogue artists,” he explains, citing the likes of Nick Cave as inspiration. “And I wondered, ‘Could Laneway be like that for me?’ ” He says he fixates over each lineup to the point of fanaticism, occasionally driving his staff mad towards the pointy end: “We’ll be six weeks out, 85 per cent done and there’ll be two or three [acts] left. Even if it’s a killer lineup, I’ll tell the guys these acts matter more now than any of the others on the bill.”

This hand-wringing is something to which Banko can attest. “We’ve usually got somewhere between 25 and 30 slots, and 200 acts that may genuinely deserve it,” he says. “Every artist is really scrutinised over. We’re not just throwing cash at a wall and seeing what sticks.”

Festivals of Laneway’s pedigree tend to announce their lineups at least four months before the first show, but the process of securing artists can happen much earlier. “We’re already in some discussions about 2026,” Rogers says, only weeks after tickets for this year’s festival have gone on sale. Others arrive closer to the final buzzer, often the sort of rising acts who will one day return as headliners. Competition to lock in these rare gems can be fierce. What’s the secret? “On a programming level, [Laneway] has always been open-minded,” says York. “Where Danny has gaps in his knowledge, he does a really great job of engaging with younger people who continue to have their finger on the pulse.”

HAIM performs live on stage during Laneway in Brisbane, 2014. Credit: WireImage

Ruby Miles is one such example. The sunny 28-year-old has been working with Laneway for six years as a junior programmer and already boasts an impressive hit rate for booking buzzy artists, from Phoebe Bridgers to Fred Again, the DJ-producer who’s subsequently achieved unprecedented levels of local fandom, selling hundreds of thousands of tickets within hours of shows being announced. “I definitely feel like I’m an advantage to the programming team just because, firstly, my screen time is eight hours a day,” she says. “I spend so much time on TikTok and it’s all just music, fandom, crazy town.” Miles likens ­putting together the lineup to “playing 4-D chess” – a constant flow of Google Sheets and WhatsApp chats, mentally moving artists in all directions.

That Miles has been afforded such agency is no accident. Both Rogers and Borazio have always amplified young voices to keep the festival fresh. “I have been to other festivals and I haven’t met the Ruby in their teams,” Miles says. And she isn’t even the most green; Rogers’ teenage ­daughter and her cousin have also been involved in programming. “We even had an ­intern for a while, who was 16, and she was sending us little fortnightly emails about ‘What’s hot at school right now’,” Miles says. “As much as I feel like I’m with it, sometimes you have to put your biases to the side and think about what a 16-year-old wants.”

One also has to think about what a teenager or young person realistically has at their disposal. In the midst of a protracted cost-of-living crisis, a one-day festival ticket could easily be considered a luxury, ­particularly in a touring environment where general admission prices to arena or stadium shows start at around $120 and rocket rapidly from there. “We need to make our value proposition enough for the punter to ultimately hit ‘buy’ on the website,” says Banko. “So we have to get that balance of acts just right every year.” The Australian market is ­inundated with tours, York agrees. “But I think we’re still in a place where if something’s really hot and great, it’s going to sell and experience success. And you’re ­seeing that with Laneway.”

The other, often-overlooked key stakeholder in this equation are the artists themselves. The Big Day Out was once renowned as the tour that everyone wanted an invite to, a mantle Laneway has arguably taken on. Borazio provides top-notch food and drink from local suppliers, while Rogers ensures they’re sharing flights, hotels and backstage areas with like-minded performers. “I always want to be in good company,” says Bea Kristi, who performs as Beabadoobee, boasts nearly 20 million global listeners a month and is one of Laneway’s big draws this year. “I definitely care about being in the right mix of artists on the bill and for it all to make sense. I have a lot of love for the lineup this year. It’s a bit like a touring circus!”

‘We still get the fear. Someone will say, “Mate, 2014, you never topped that one. Good luck.” ’

Jerome Borazio

As much as it bets on musical acts, Laneway also plants itself in locations many promoters would prefer to overlook. “When we started, Caledonian Lane was derelict and known for heroin users,” says Borazio. When it popped up in Detroit in 2013, “our show was two months after the city was announced bankrupt”. Borazio believes part of Laneway’s underdog charm is that it has helped re-energise ­neglected urban spaces. “We moved into Footscray [in 2010]; it was not perceived as an up-and-coming area,” he says. “Same with Port Adelaide [in 2014]. To know that you can be part of changing a perception of an area, that’s an incredible feeling.” Rogers adds that every Laneway added after the original has been driven by locals. “It’s someone calling us and saying, ‘I’ve got a laneway or this space we could do this in’, and then us seeing that they understood what we were doing and ­saying, ‘Why not?’ ”

Of course, Laneway is not in any laneway anymore – and hasn’t been for some time. Its two biggest stops, Sydney and Melbourne, are now inside a 189-hectare public park and a racecourse, respectively. The audiences at each would pack out more than 20 Caledonian Lanes. Surely the pair are nervous about growing too big? “I was always worried that once you get past like 15- or 20,000 people, you don’t know who you’re talking to as an audience,” Rogers admits. “When we had 35,000 people in Melbourne [in 2023], I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to turn into, like, ­bro-ville, everyone on ’roids. But then I walked in and I saw the crowd and it was people just like us.”

Does he think they’ve nailed the balance? “I’m not saying everyone has loved it getting bigger,” he deadpans. “We still get the fear. Someone will say, ‘Mate, 2014, you never topped that one. Good luck.’ ” Borazio says that while they’ve made their fair share of mistakes, his hospitality background has come in handy when ­designing the festival at scale. “We learnt our lessons over time. I mean, a laneway is only so wide.” Rogers agrees: “If you go into a space and everyone’s been treated like a caged animal, don’t be surprised if they act that way. The thing you always remember about a festival is how easy or painful it was to get home.”

Maybe there isn’t any one reason Laneway is still around when many of its contemporaries aren’t. Festivals are fickle beasts, after all. “There was no firm business plan,” Rogers says as he skips out to see yet another showcase of young, unsigned bands at SXSW Sydney. “It was a labour of love and it still is. That’s reflected in the ­relationship Jerome and I have 20 years later. We don’t hate each other, we love each other. We go on holidays together; my kids have named half his animals.”

But as massive delivery trucks reverse out of Caledonian Lane, I’m reminded of something Borazio told me as we polished off our last lager back on his barge: “You can take the festival out of the bar, but you can’t take the bar out of the festival.” He should know: for the first six years of Laneway Festival, Jerome was still ­running both. If there is a silver bullet, reckons York, this is it. “A big part of the success of the festival is that its roots were firmly placed in a local community and in something very real,” she says. “Obviously there are certain things that you can never replicate in spaces that big, but their spirit has remained true to that.”

When Borazio and Rogers first met as teenagers in the ’90s, their parents saw the spark – and immediately resolved to separate them. “I guess they thought we were a bad influence on each other,” Rogers says, laughing. “Maybe they were onto something.” Today they’re in the unique position of running a festival where the ­average attendee is as wide-eyed and bushy-tailed as they once were. And there’s no end in sight. “It’s so ­interesting, discovering all this new music,” Borazio says, gazing out at the murky Yarra River. “I don’t feel 53 at all. I forget how old I am. I genuinely look forward to it every year. The butterflies are still there.”

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