More from Laneway on criticism

Tue 3rd Feb, 2009 in Local News

Following on from yesterday’s statement about the crowd control issues that occurred at the Melbourne St Jeromes Laneway Festival on Sunday, promoters have released an extended account of what caused the events.

The new statement addresses the issues that were raised about timetabling at the event and also raises the involvement of a “key stake holder” who according to the promoters put up strong opposition to the festival’s liquor license only weeks before the event, forcing them reduces the capacity of one of the stages.

“This year, the Melbourne leg of the festival expanded to meet demand of previous years while retaining the city location. The increased capacity was agreed in consultation with all relevant authorities and site was doubled in size while only 35% more tickets sold. At no point did the number of people within the overall festival site come close to exceeding the designated capacity.

Unfortunately, it is not always possible for festival organisers to accurately predict how many people want to see each act on their line up. We acknowledge that our expectations in this instance were different to the reality on the day; and that the variety of artists scheduled to play at any one time to accommodate our audience’s preferences did not do so. Balance of line up is something that we considered very carefully and we believed that we had this as close to right as humanly possible.

As the evening progressed, numbers to get into the Little Lonsdale St precinct became greater than we felt the area could handle. Public safety was the paramount concern of the organisers at all times and accordingly, this area was restricted at various points, with patrons encouraged to go to other stages. In addition to this, the unsafe and reckless behavior of a small number of people within the Little Lonsdale Precinct (some of whom were not ticketed patrons) led to the decision to stop entry into this area and ensure that our resources were able to focus on the safety of our event attendees after 7:30pm. It was not possible to communicate this to the audience in such a short period of time and as a result many of the people lined up were not aware that we were trying to manage a very busy area that seemed to build very quickly and get very restless.

Once we understood the reality of the numbers we moved to get a live feed sent from the Lt Lonsdale st to the State Library in anticipation for Girl Talk and informed all waiting festival goers of this second option for experiencing the Girl Talk show.

In addition to the popularity of some bands over others, the issues faced on Sunday were also impacted by last minute changes to planning enforced by authorities. In the weeks leading up to the festival, it was touch and go as to whether the festival would even go ahead. We were met by strong opposition from a key stakeholder who objected to our liquor license, enforced us to keep the Lonsdale St walkway open to foot traffic on the southern end and also maintained strong will against the opening of St Jerome’s Bar. It was quite a surprising position to be faced with considering that same stakeholder had been a great supporter of the event in the four years previous and didn’t make any complaint until last December, after we had been approved for the site. This, in turn, led to the festival being forced to reduce the capacity in the Red Bull stage area right down to 250 capacity for the liquor licence – a ruling that we did not receive until last Friday afternoon and one which gave us nowhere to arrange an area for people in Caledonian Lane. The issues with this stakeholder also required further compromises by us in order to proceed with the event, including changes to crowd control which caused a massive cluster of people on the Lonsdale St / Caledonian lane entry forcing people to be stuck in queues. Police were monitoring this and, specifically, the overall capacity into this area and at no point would we have put the license or people’s safety at risk by going over these numbers. None of this had ever caused problems for the festival in the past but in the current climate in Melbourne, they became massive issues that we struggled to overcome at short notice.

As part of developing the precinct and supporting local businesses, many of those businesses were encouraged to open so that people could enjoy their excellent hospitality with ticket-holders being encouraged to access food and other facilities in the immediate vicinity, instead of hosting those amenities within the site. Unfortunately, a flow on effect of the overwhelming popularity of the artists on the Lt Lonsdale St stage, the free flow of festival-goers out to these nearby facilities became problematic as the re-entry became increasingly difficult.

Some have stated over-selling and greed as the reasons why the problems occurred. However, not selling to our licensed capacity, encouraging people to leave our site and go and have dinner at one of the hundreds of offerings in the area, charging $4 for a beer and offering fifty artists for $90 plus GST shows that that is not the case. We hoped that by providing six stages (including two open stages at the State Library and QV), fifty-five artists from all over the world and activating a city that we felt would embrace and love our vision, we would help deliver the most incredible event Melbourne city had witnessed.

We are deeply disappointed that the above factors marred some festival- goers’ experience and assure them that their concerns are being taken very seriously and will be incorporated into planning for next year’s event. We can assure them that if we are faced with the same issues in the future, we will not be staging the event here in Melbourne.

We’d like to take this moment to thank the many music fans, bands, managers, media, sponsors and stakeholders who have shown such strong support. The Police should also be commended for their assistance on the day.

We hope this will answer some of the concerns people had and that people will understand that this was a logistical challenge that succeeded for the most part because the people that came are music fans and the people that run it wanted to give them something unique.
We do not wish to pass on the responsibility – just give people an overall perspective as to what took place.

We would also like to acknowledge that we have had personal letters and we will respond to them all next week when we return from the last three dates of the festival.”