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Laneway
Slowthai, Phoebe Bridgers and Finneas are set to headline the first Laneway festival to be held at Western Springs Stadium. (Photo compilation: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureJanuary 24, 2023

An exclusive tour of Laneway’s new home, where everything is doubling in size

Laneway
Slowthai, Phoebe Bridgers and Finneas are set to headline the first Laneway festival to be held at Western Springs Stadium. (Photo compilation: Tina Tiller)

Bigger stages, better sound, more food and bars and twice the crowd capacity. Everything at Laneway’s first event in three years is going to be bigger than before.

It doesn’t look like much. Watercare has a major project underway in the middle of the field and graffiti covers its hoardings. A recent Jack Johnson concert messed up the outerfield and Auckland’s constant early January rain has left it spongy and soggy. Through the gates, the stadium is covered in mud, evidence of a speedway event that had race cars churning up the dirt track.

Julian Carswell gazes at the state of Western Springs Stadium and declares: “We’ve got a lot more space.” The executive producer of the Auckland leg of the St Jerome’s Laneway festival has just one week to turn this hodgepodge of a site into New Zealand’s biggest summer music festival – and the biggest Laneway event ever.

Laneway
Western Springs Park, where the biggest ever Laneway will soon be held. (Photo: Chris Schulz)

But he’s optimistic. Since Laneway was forced to change venues due to sheer demand – tickets for the 2023 Auckland event sold out in a record 90 minutes, forcing a move from Albert Park to Western Springs – Carswell’s been in charge of working out how to double everything the festival has to offer.

When you’ve been operating at one size for the past 10 years, that’s no mean feat. “We’re going to have double the bars, double the amount of food vendors,” he says. “Lots of that cool decor and art.”

Carswell had a hunch ticket sales might balloon, but even he describes watching the show sell out in 90 minutes as “surreal”. Laneway relies on picking some of the world’s hottest indie artists and bringing them down under before they go on to much bigger things. Billie Eilish, The 1975 and Tame Impala all performed at Laneway before headlining Coachella. The festival keeps pulling that same trick, year after year. “It’s one of the crazy things about Laneway,” says Carswell.

Laneway’s 2023 layout (Supplied)

Covid and closed borders stopped that trend in its tracks, forcing organisers to cancel its 2021 and 2022 events. When it returned, a stellar line-up showed that time hadn’t put a dent in enthusiasm, pushing systems to breaking point.

When tickets for 2023 were released in September, many fans missed out and weren’t shy about complaining. Carswell gets it. The line-up’s incredible. “Phoebe [Bridgers], Turnstile, Fred Again,” he reasons. “Three years of no shows then the hottest artists are coming? Anyone in the world would want to go see that show.”

So, here we are, on another muggy, drizzly Auckland summer day in mid-January, wandering through Laneway’s new home. Come January 30, Western Springs will become the Australasian festival’s fifth New Zealand site since kicking off at Britomart in 2010, heading to Aotea Square in 2011, then moving to Silo Park until 2017, when it seemed to find its spiritual home among the lush greenery and shade provided by the trees in Albert Park.

With a main stage on Princes Street, another nestled in among the University of Auckland buildings and a third by the park’s rotunda, it just felt right.

Laneway
Laneway in its previous home in Albert Park. Photo: Supplied

But now, a different vibe. Laneway will be the first large scale music festival at Western Springs Stadium since Auckland City Limits in 2018. Laneway will operate in much the same way, with “three main stages” spread from the speedway to the outerfields. All those extra ticket sales – organisers predict more than 26,000 will show up, double Albert Park’s capacity of 13,000 – will allow the festival to do things it couldn’t previously. Two stages, called Good Better Best and Never Let it Rest, will be built side-by-side on the outerfield, allowing organisers to set up one while an act plays on the other, letting the music flow constantly. “You can stay there all day,” says Carswell.

Another stage, called Pine Tree Bend, will be set up inside the speedway, and a third, Everything Ecstatic, will be sited on the grass bank looking over the site, with Western Springs’ terraced seats and the Lakeside area closed off. Everything else is going bigger. Wattage is being boosted to fill the larger venue. Separate shade structures are being introduced to help protect punters from the sun. Specialist art has been commissioned to turn the massive venue into something more recognisable as a Laneway site. There’ll be twice as many bars. For the first time, a record store will open, with a pop-up Real Groovy store offering punters the chance to buy vinyl of their new favourite artist that they’ve just seen perform. 

Laneway
Laneway’s set times for its new, bigger home at Western Springs. (Image: Supplied)

Stages will also offer different vibes. Inside the stadium, Pine Tree Bend will offer louder acts like Turnstile, 100 Gecs and Fontaines DC. On the the outerfields, punters can relax and enjoy Finneas, Joji and and Phoebe Bridgers. Up on the grassy field where the third stage sits, dance-friendly acts are scheduled to play next to a hangar where the Ponsonby rugby team keeps its kit. Punters can choose to end their night with pop act Haim, rising dance producer Fred Again or the local dance duo Chaos in the CBD.

Putting this together sounds like a lot of work. Carswell already has a day job, and he readily admits Laneway’s New Zealand leg is being scaled by just a handful of part-timers. After he leaves, he reveals he has a to-do list “seven pages long”.

Time, then, for one last question: will Laneway stay at Western Springs for good? Carswell isn’t sure and doesn’t want to make a prediction. Organisers have kept the Albert Park resource consent open, just in case Laneway can’t bag this many big artists to fill a venue of this size again. “This might be a bit of an anomaly going this big, this year,” he admits.

But Carswell also says: “We’ve outgrown Albert Park.” Perhaps we’ll just have to see what happens on January 30, and go from there.

Keep going!
Three’s AM and TVNZ’s Breakfast are back at it (Image: Tina Tiller)
Three’s AM and TVNZ’s Breakfast are back at it (Image: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureJanuary 23, 2023

Everything we learnt from the return of AM and Breakfast

Three’s AM and TVNZ’s Breakfast are back at it (Image: Tina Tiller)
Three’s AM and TVNZ’s Breakfast are back at it (Image: Tina Tiller)

Our morning news shows are back for another year. Tara Ward tuned in bright and early to bring us these highlights.

There’s only one place to turn for your life lessons these days, and that is breakfast television. It’s the only show where you can learn about inflation and lymphatic drainage in the same half hour, not to mention a rare universe where stories about sausage crime, the war in Ukraine and the weather happily exist side by side. This morning, Breakfast and AM returned to our screens refreshed and rejuvenated after their summer break, and it turns out they’ve lost none of their magic. Here’s everything we learned from the return of our early morning current affairs champions.

Breakfast’s new set is really, really bright

Wow (Screengrab: TVNZ)

TVNZ’s Breakfast returned with a loud bang this morning, showing off a fresh set that may or may not require sunglasses at six o’clock in the morning. Perhaps this background kaleidoscope of bold colours represents a rich sunrise, or maybe it’s a metaphor for the fractured state of the world as seen through the complex lens of morning television, or maybe as Anna Burns Francis suggested, “it’s a punch to the face.” Either way, good morning, Aotearoa!

Meanwhile, AM’s background was a mysterious scenic wonderland

Where is this majestic New Zealand city behind Ryan Bridge, and when can we all move there?

I’ve asked Google Maps but it doesn’t know either (Screengrab: Three)

There’s some new-old faces on Breakfast 

Changman, ABF, Matty Matt and J-May (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Breakfast kicked off 2023 by welcoming Anna Burns Francis and Chris Chang to the team, and it felt like they’d always been there. That was because they had, with Chris previously filling in on Breakfast and Anna regularly crossing live from cold places throughout America. It was “Changman” this and “ABF” that, and while Matty reckoned they were already “part of the furniture”, Anna was just glad they’d all turned up on time. Also new: this big bird, continuing the short history of big birds watching over Matty McLean on the Breakfast sofa.

Big bird, big news (Screengrab: TVNZ)

It was the battle of the Chris’s

It was a very merry Chris-mas when Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon appeared on Breakfast and AM simultaneously after the seven o’clock news, and AM kicked things off with this extremely chill image:

Chris was the winner on the day (Screengrab: Three)

Breakfast missed the chance to have Chris Chang ask Chris Hipkins about whether there are too many men named Chris, instead leaving it to Anna Burns Francis to question Hipkins about things like “the economy” and “the election”. Boring! Luxon, meanwhile, started speaking in rugby metaphors, saying Hipkins becoming prime minister is simply an openside flanker moving to number eight. How many number eights have also been named Chris? Makes you think.

Chris Chang is still waiting for his invite to Matty McLean’s wedding

Breakfast kicked off with a quick debrief on Matty’s recent nuptials, but poor Chris Chang was quick to point out his wedding invitation was seemingly lost in the post. Awkward? Not at all.

Someone on Waiheke Island is putting sausages in letterboxes

Both AM and Breakfast covered the important issues of the morning, like business confidence and water safety, but they saved the most important issue until their final hour. A mystery figure is leaving sausages wrapped in bread in people’s letterboxes on Waiheke Island, and both Breakfast and AM are determined to get to the bottom of this heinous crime.

Super sausage scandal (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Both shows ruled out Waiheke resident The Mad Butcher as the culprit, with AM asserting that Sir Peter Leitch “would never treat sausages that way”. “Usually a sausage in a letterbox is a good thing,” Ryan Bridge mused, but Breakfast offered a more shocking theory, put to them by none other than The Mad Butcher himself. “He says it’s a hoax,” they reported, but without pointing the sausage finger, that sounds like something the Surfdale Sausager would say to put us off the scent. Is this a spicy joke stuffed inside a casing of confusion, or someone’s new year’s resolution gone wrong? You decide.

Jenny-May Clarkson once went on Celebrity Treasure Island and shot Marc Ellis in the neck

Look, it was just a paint-ball thing that happened “a few haircuts ago”. It’s not like she’s putting sausages in someone’s letterbox, OK?

New Years resolutions suck

“Are they motivating or do they just remind us of our personal failings?” Breakfast sliced straight into our fragile emotional cores after eight o’clock, with a discussion on new year resolutions. Matty’s 2022 resolution was to learn the guitar, but he revealed his guitar had sat in his car boot for the past 365 days, and his 2023 resolution was to get it out of the boot. None of his colleagues held any hope, while on Instagram, a Breakfast poll revealed that 85% of viewers were resolving never to make a resolution again. “Thank god,” sighed Anna, as guitars in boots around the nation sobbed in cold, dark silence.

‘Coming up next: something’ is the supertease of 2023

And after that: something else (Screengrab: Three)

AM knows how to keep viewers hanging on. “Something’s coming up,” Ryan told us as the show went to an ad break. “Tune in, it’ll be next.” Can’t argue with that.

AM and Breakfast screen on Three and TVNZ 1 every weekday morning from 6am-9am. 

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