Laneway 2010

It was a strange day. The potential level of disorganisation of Laneways was always in the back of my mind, especially considering the fact that this thing was going to be held in Britomart. But there were always going to be teething problems — this was, of course, the first year the Australian festival had branched out into New Zealand. Cue the Lameways/Rainways quips if you must, but as the day wore on no one could figure out what was going on behind the scenes. There were endless lines, meaning you had to wait up to an hour to get a bite to eat. The set-up at the bar was even worse — you had to wait in line to get into the bar and then you had to buy coupons for the bar and then line up again to actually get something to drink. Why? At one stage the schedule was a full hour behind and they even started switching up the order of the bands. On top of that there were wayfarers, models, bloggers, a surprising number of coathanger tattoos, fashion disasters (one dude was wearing brown roman sandals with tapered jeans) and guys with girls that were way out of their league. Everything just felt wrong.

Luckily we still had the music. The xx proved why they deserved the hype and they were easily the highlight of the day. For some reason I thought that that the band were only playing as a three-piece temporarily — they’re not – so it was up to Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith to prove to everyone that they could translate such a dark, brooding, minimalist record into working in a live setting. They did it well too and the group came decked out in all black everything except for the silver chains, and after beginning with the intro track on their album they launched straight into Crystalised and followed it up with Islands. It was great apart from the dickhead who decided it was a good idea to play the bands remix of You’ve Got The Love while the band were walking off stage.

And then came the real kicker — a few songs into Daniel Johnston’s set and some genius decided to let Cut Off Your Hands take the stage next to him to try and catch up on time. The rest of Johnston’s set was drowned out and their were obviously a lot people astonished that the organisers would even let something like this happen. The setting for Johnston to play was all wrong anyway. He was excruciating to watch anyway and the kids in the crowd that weren’t familiar with his background and material would’ve had no idea what the hell he was doing there.

The rest of the evening turned out to be pretty good though — The Dirty Three led the game as Warren Ellis took requests from the crowd, made some jokes that went over some of the crowd’s heads and generally left fans of the band awestruck with their performance. After they finished, there was a half hour gap for no apparent reason until we were told that Echo & The Bunnymen would play before the 3D’s. It turned out that N.A.S.A would play last instead of Florence and the Machine as well. So much for this 10:30pm curfew.

But the night belonged to Florence Welch — I’m not even going to try to describe what she was wearing but her stage presence was more than enough to warrant some excitement from the crowd. I’m not a huge fan of Lungs but on stage the 23-year-old showed that she knew how to work a crowd and she stood out among the other performers of the day. She was cute, funny and energetic and she has a great voice too. I have no idea how she manages to jump around so much and still stay in key but she does it pretty well. Unfortunately, by that stage the wind had picked up and the sound was starting to get muffled but she tore through some of her strongest tracks such as Kiss With A Fist, Drumming Song, Dog Days Are Over and of course, You’ve Got The Love.

Even though things could’ve been better, it was a nice end to the disorder that threatened the day. Let’s hope that the organisers iron out the kinks and come back even stronger next year.