The uber-successful St Jerome’s Laneway Festival traces back to the infamously seedy, now defunct, Essendon Grand Hotel. It was the early ’90s when founders Danny Rogers and Jerome Borazio met while working at the venue. Rogers was 17 and Borazio, whose cousin managed the bar, was a few years older.
“He invited me back for a few beers at his parents’ house,” Rogers says. “We drank about eight bottles of their champagne. They came back the next morning and saw these two kids in their kitchen quite intoxicated. That was the beginning. I guess that night I never would have thought that 22 years later we’d be best of mates and running a festival that’s spread around Australia and overseas.”
After finishing high school at St Bernard’s College in Essendon, Rogers dabbled in everything from travelling the world and working in bars to stints as an accountant and plumber. “I was sort of trying different things and could never find my thing,” he says. He lived in New York for several years but returned to Melbourne after becoming homesick.
By that stage, Borazio was running a couple of successful bars in Melbourne, including the funky
St Jerome’s in Caledonian Lane. The pair reunited and decided to stage St Jerome’s Summer Series, a laidback event showcasing music every Sunday. It proved an instant hit, and the seed was planted. “Some of the boys from The Avalanches and us got together and had a few beers and thought we’d extend on what we were already doing,” Borazio says.
The St Jerome’s Laneway Festival made its debut with nine acts in 2004. “We used the bar and closed down the laneway and it was like a celebration of the venue being there,” says Borazio. “Just putting it on was pretty incredible. We got all the local community involved so there were people selling food out the back of their shops. It was just a great day.
“I think it grew more organically than snowballed. It came from us enjoying the music and doing what we were doing.” The festival quickly developed a cult following. In 2010, having outgrown the limited laneway, it controversially shifted to Footscray, on the banks of the Maribyrnong River.
Today, Rogers and Borazio sit on wooden bench seats overlooking the Melbourne skyline and seemingly couldn’t be happier with their new surrounds.
“I don’t think we ever had some wild ambition to grow the event in any real way,” Rogers says. “We both just enjoyed hosting an event and doing something different. We wanted to push the boundaries a bit … It felt like there were a lot of cookie-cutting music festivals out there.”
The St Jerome’s Laneway Festival is now held in five cities across Australia, and Singapore and Auckland. This year it expanded into the lucrative US market, in Detroit. At a time when many music festivals are struggling to stay afloat, Laneway is climbing higher.
“It was fantastic,” Borazio says of the recent Detroit experience. “It was humbling to be all the way over there in the States and see it unfold. It did feel surreal. Singapore was so close to home; so was New Zealand. But out there … it was pretty damn special.”
Rogers says he and Borazio kick the process off each year by attending the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
“That’s usually the start of us getting together,’’ he says. “Then I sort of go away and start thinking about the line-up.”
This year’s crop of acts includes Haim, Lorde and Cashmere Cat. “I think the festival’s about new and emerging acts and future superstars,” Rogers says. “Five or six years ago we were begging bands to play and now we’re in a position where they are a bit more open to us.”
Over the past decade, Laneway’s bill has included performances by The Temper Trap, Gotye, The Panics, Cut Copy, Warpaint, Florence and the Machine, Mumford & Sons, Bat For Lashes, Laura Marling and M83. Away from Laneway, Borazio runs several successful bars such as The Workers Club and Sistabella, and has others in the pipeline.
Rogers lived in London for about four years but has returned to Sydney where he lives with his wife and three children. He started Lunatic Entertainment in 2002 and manages acclaimed acts Gotye and The Temper Trap.
“With Wally [Gotye], I was recommended by someone to him. He reached out and I met him and thought he was a terrific fella,’’ he says. “We went from there. That was eight or nine years ago.”
What’s it like being a manager and seeing your stable succeed? “I feel really proud and happy for them because they’ve made music and people have connected with it,’’ Rogers says. “In both cases, they’ve made great music, so being part of that and helping in my small way, you feel really great.”
Rogers and Borazio attend every Laneway Festival and soak it up with the punters when given the chance.
Rogers has his pet story about the eclectic Ariel Pink that makes him cackle. “Ariel was special,” he says.
“We’ve had some real characters. Every year these personalities really start to come out. You spend a couple of weeks with all these characters. I remember Ariel Pink was really scared around me at the festival. He didn’t want to talk to me.
“On the last day I was in his band room talking to one of his guys and he walked in and walked out and I said, ‘Mate, what’s your problem? Have I done something wrong to you? He’s like, ‘Nah nah you’ve done nothing wrong’. I said, ‘Well, cool, we haven’t really met properly cos every time I go to talk to you, you don’t want to. I’m Danny, I’m the organiser’. And he thought that I was an undercover cop. For two weeks he thought I was following him around.”
Rogers says he’d be a happy man if Laneway could continue on its merry way. “It’s so hard to look too deep into the future,” he says cautiously before Borazio butts in with: “I wouldn’t mind doing one in the Bahamas.”
» The St Jerome’s Laneway Festival is on Saturday, February 1, at Footscray Community Arts Centre, 45 Moreland Street, Footscray. Tickets: $156 Details: melbourne.lanewayfestival.com
