No pressure, Laneway.

The country's best showcase of local and international indie talent returns to a very different festival landscape. Can it handle the heat?

Imagine you took the past four years off from your day job.

As a worldwide pandemic caused chaos, you relaxed, put your feet up and watched everyone else attempt to adapt and pivot, to make things work under incredibly stressful circumstances.

When it was finally time to return to your job, to slide your feet back under your desk, to switch on your computer and do the thing it is that you used to do – that is, curate and promote one of the country’s hippest, coolest festival line-ups – you arrive to find things aren’t quite working in the same way that they used to.

The landscape around you has completely and utterly changed.

Things suddenly cost a lot more. There’s a waitlist for stage builds, and staff want better pay. Some industry veterans have retired or found greener pastures. People are listening to 90s alt-rock again.

Making things worse, you suddenly have a lot more competition fighting for the same headliners and crowds you used to have almost exclusively to yourself.

So, after four years away, you have some questions to answer.

Are you still relevant?

Are you match fit?

Have you still got what it takes?

Is this what you still want to do?

That’s exactly the position Laneway finds itself in.

Fans enjoy Laneway at the festivals’s previous home in Albert Park.

For the past four years, the New Zealand leg of Australia’s St Jerome’s Laneway festival – the biggest and best on offer in Auckland, an event that’s come to fill that January slot left vacant by the Big Day Out – hasn’t existed in Aotearoa.

Covid saw events in 2021 and 2022 called off. Then, last year, just when Laneway was set to make a triumphant return, Cyclone Gabrielle rolled in and smothered Western Springs in water, washing all those dreams away.

So tomorrow, when Western Springs’ gates open at 11.30am for the first Auckland Laneway festival in four years, the event has some things to prove.

• Can it continue its tradition of acting as a talent spotter and trend-setter, choosing artists on the cusp of breaking big (Billie Eilish, Grimes, The 1975, Tame Impala) and putting them high up its bill before anyone else does?

• Can it still create memories that last the ages, like the time Jess B played for two delirious hours and consistently killed it, or when Marlon Williams rolled in as a last-minute replacement and completely stole the show?

• Does a boutique music festival used to the smaller confines of Silo Park and Albert Park work on a bigger scale in the much larger venue that is Western Springs?

• What will change now that the R18 age restriction has dropped to R16?

• Can it even begin to make up for the last four years of Covid cancellations and wash outs?

• And is this the line-up that’s going to make all of that happen?

• (Also: is Peaches Hot Chicken going to be there? Please?!?)

In our fractured landscape, with more than 100 festival events vying for attention, it feels like a lot is riding on a veteran like Laneway coming back bigger and stronger than ever, showing the new kids on the block how it’s supposed to go, and restamping its authority.

I hope it works, I really do. I’ve been to every single one – including its queue-heavy debut down at Britomart and that weird second one in Aotea Square. Some of my favourite festival memories have happened in the concrete jungle that was Silo Park, and amidst the lush greenery of Albert Park, which felt like Laneway’s spiritual home.

Like the time I had an incredible conversation with a random gap toothed-New Yorker cut short because he wanted to run to the same stage I was heading towards. It wasn’t until the same guy bounded onto the stage that I realised I’d been talking to Wiki, one of my favourite rappers who I hadn’t recognised at all.

Or the times I saw pretty much anything on that weird stage surrounded by boats behind a silo that would often be crammed with way too many people wanting to see some pretty major acts, like Danny Brown doing his dubstep rap thing, Purity Ring putting on a thrilling show closer in 2017, Run the Jewels running riot and Banks making people cry in the mid-afternoon sun.

Lorde pulled out of the 2014 festival to make the Grammys but put on a post-Laneway show amidst the silos that’s among the best gigs I’ve seen her play.

Same goes with Marlon Williams, who made me fall out of a tree.

(I missed Laneway so much over the past four years I wrote this.)

Laneway’s the only festival I’ve been to that can boast of having had Grimes, FKA Twigs, Chvrches, Jon Hopkins, Charli XCX, Earl Sweatshirt, Jorja Smith, Anderson Paak., Vince Staples, Hudson Mohawk and Tame Impala on the same bill.

“It’s about the best bands you can find and people having the best times they can watching those bands,” says Mark Kneebone in this crazed 2013 video that follows the festival’s former co-promoter from 4.30am as he gets Silo Park ready for Laneway.

Will that happen tomorrow?

Will the venue, the music, the crowd, the food, and the weather combine to create something special?

You’d have to say the odds are good, wouldn’t you?

Wouldn’t you?

I don’t know the answer.

I don’t even know if anyone has that answer.

But the weather forecast is good, no major dramas are scheduled, and I am holding a single Laneway ticket in my hand for the first time in four years.

I can’t wait to find out.

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Five must-see acts at Laneway…

1. Get thee to Western Springs early to see Boiler Room fave Erny Belle (12.20-12.50pm, Never Let it Rest stage) help warm up Laneway’s new venue and to see her play ‘Pitt Stop’, one of last year’s best songs that drags Aldous Harding vibes through the Pacific Isles.

2. Things will get louder when Blondshell (1.40-2.20pm, Never Let it Rest stage) takes over, Sabrina Teitelbaum’s post-grunge Californian project that should culminate in ‘Veronica Mars,’ her thrilling ode to early 2000s TV binges.

3. I saw Home Brew (3.20-4.05pm, Pine Tree Bend stage) at one of two triumphant Powerstation shows last year, and they’re in hella good form. The difference, for Laneway, is they have a brand new album to showcase. If they play ‘80 Down Scenic’, my day will be complete.

4. Nia Archives (6.45-7.45pm, Everything Ecstatic stage) has been dishing out excellent doses of updated emo trip-hop for the past year. It’s a wild card choice, but as one YouTuber puts it: “This song is for dancing and crying at the same time.”

5. I’ve seen Stormzy (8.50-9.50pm, Never Let it Rest stage) absolute monster the Logan Campbell Centre, so expect to be entertained when the grime giant closes this year’s Laneway out. He’s older, wiser and more experienced than when he was last here, and he needs to make up for his abrupt 2022 cancellation. Live favourites ‘Vossi Bop’ and ‘Shut Up’ should quickly make amends.

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