Laneway crowd safety initiative crackdown on inappropriate behaviour

The recent Laneway Festival featured a new a resource for patrons to report inappropriate behaviour.

Fans at the recent Sydney Laneway festival. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Outside of the musical highlights at the recent Laneway Festival — which included English shoegaze act Slowdive, Californian R&B group the Internet, and a towering headline set by Philadelphia rock band the War on Drugs — I noted with interest a crowd safety initiative from the organisers, who had established a resource for patrons to report inappropriate behaviour. On signs dotted throughout the festival grounds and displayed on digital screens were phone numbers that were being monitored for calls and texts.

“We were really inspired by the campaign Camp Cope launched last year, #ittakesone,” says Katie Stewart, Laneway’s general manager, referring to a three-piece rock band from Melbourne whose debut album is out next month. “The idea behind #ittakesone is it takes one person to ruin the atmosphere at a gig and it also takes one person to speak out and call out inappropriate behaviour. On average, we were receiving about 15 calls and up to 20 texts per event. This year we only received one complaint of inappropriate behaviour. The caller alerted the operator about someone acting inappropriately in the mosh pit; however, the caller then advised they would alert security nearby instead.”

While these are small numbers, considering that the touring festival was attended by a total of about 53,000 people in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Fremantle, the hotline feels like a step in the right direction. Hopefully other event organisers will take note. There’s no excuse for acting like an antisocial dickhead anywhere, let alone at a music festival, where people have paid good money to see their favourite artists.

Will Laneway be looking to continue this initiative? “Absolutely,” says Stewart. “We felt strongly about having a positive conversation with our audience around behaviour and creating a culture of respect. We feel the hotline provides not only a service to those who have concerns on the day, it also encourages patrons to come into the event with a fresh perspective about the type of behaviour that is and isn’t acceptable.”

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Brisbane City Council’s Ed Kuepper Park. Picture: Jane Grigg

Congratulations to Ed Kuepper, who can now add to his CV the rare privilege of having a Brisbane City Council park named after him, after a petition by local resident Maurice Murphy gathered more than 800 signatures last year. Ed Kuepper Park is located in the southwestern suburb of Oxley, just down the road from the garage where his musical career began with a rather good rock band named the Saints more than 40 years ago.

“In the mid-1970s, in his childhood home on Lawson Street, the Saints wrote the iconic song (I’m) Stranded,” reads the signage. “In 2007, (I’m) Stranded was one of the first 20 songs added to the National Sound and Film Archives’ Sounds of Australia registry, and is recognised worldwide as an early touchstone of the punk movement. Bob Geldof famously said, ‘Rock music in the seventies was changed by three bands — the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Saints’.”

Kuepper took to Facebook this week to share the happy news. “I’ve been told by several people that it’s unusual for a living person to have something like this named after them, in case that person f..ks up and does something to embarrass the authorities later,” he observed. “In my case, I believe they must have thought I was at rock bottom from the outset.”

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