Laneway 2025 was a mixed bag. Once in a lifetime performances were witnessed, countless people were shoved around by drunk losers, snacks were smuggled in under my polka dot mini shorts.

Now, one might be thinking that the torrential downpour during Barry Can’t Swim’s set would top my list of the event’s lowlights. However, I can safely say that I waste no time in donning my nostalgia lenses to erase all the shivering and panic that may have transpired. The rain was fine, it’s now a great story to tell and undoubtedly embellish in the future. In my view, the crowd behaviour and the event organisation were the real crimes.

In terms of the crowd control and organisation, the constant bottlenecks created by unrelenting bag checks—even once inside the venue—and poor exit management felt frustratingly avoidable. Entrances and exits sporadically opened and closed in an unpredictable manner, which separated my friends and I from loved ones in the throngs attempting to leave the event. Some people were allowed out directly onto Epsom Rd, a quick and efficient exit, but this path was quickly shut, leading thousands of people to congregate in a pulsing bottleneck at the single remaining exit. This was awful planning and was incredibly confusing to navigate. There was little to no signage, and we ended up having to walk all the way back around Flemington Park to reach the mystery exit that others were permitted to use just minutes before us.

Going into this year’s festival, I wasn’t sure what to expect crowd-wise. I knew that many people were only there for one reason: Brat. Almost everything Brat-related I’ve seen in the past eight months has been relegated to social media. Of course, people I know have been listening to the album (or ‘bumping that’ to the clued in and cultured), but “Brat Summer” hadn’t yet graced our shores.

Yet, on Valentines Day 2025, grace Flemington it did. All the FOMO felt by Melbournians over the devastatingly USA-centric SWEAT Tour was channelled into this headlining set at Laneway. Shocking fluorescent green was in greater abundance that I’d previously known possible, and people were fighting to stay close to the stage. The entire day was filled with breathtaking and high-energy performances, from local legends The Vovos kicking off the day after gates opened, to a beautiful sunset-accompanied set by Beabadoobee and her band. I enjoyed every performance I watched, even while biting my tongue at poor crowd etiquette. All the while I was being jostled by pashmina-cloaked anonymites I was thinking to myself: “What ever happened to grace and decorum at concerts?”

Many large groups were inebriated to a point of rudeness, invading people’s personal space repeatedly, and talking loudly over the sets of other artists. Their behaviour felt symptomatic of a larger issue with post-pandemic concert etiquette (or a lack thereof). In the last few years, there seems to have been an uptick in antisocial crowd behaviour and general hostility at live music events, something which has been wrongfully attributed to young people—the easy scapegoats—by older generations. Let me tell you, these people twerking for photos against me and yelling over Djo’s slow songs were not particularly young.

I partially blame the ungodly inflation of concert ticket prices, as well as the fight-to-the-death mission that now accompanies online ticket sales. People have spent hundreds of dollars (in this economy!) to be in this mosh, and they no doubt had to fight tooth and nail to get to the front of the queue in a cut-throat pre-sale lobby. Thus, they feel that they have truly paid their way into behaving however they so choose, which is apparently with regard to only themselves and their iPhone camera. The other prong of this issue is that everyone is always on that damn phone. I know. Go ahead and throw tomatoes at me but tell me I’m wrong! The individualistic mindset that is bred by spending hours a day tethered to social media cannot be understated or overlooked in this context. I had people hitting me in the face to try and get photos, or simply blocking the artist from view with a recording camera. People were looking at me with disdain for singing along while they were trying to record shaky iPhone footage. I watched a large portion of Beabadoobee’s set through another girl’s phone screen, which I could do at home! All I’m saying is that a sense of community and of collective belonging could go a long way toward improving the modern concert experience. We are all just here to have fun in the moment and watch some great performances.

When it came to the music, most poor patron behaviour dissipated in the wake of incredible performances by headliners and smaller artists alike. A good live set—particularly washed by post-storm delirium—can cure most grievances. Each artist had their own stage setup and unique style which transformed the energy between sets, resulting in ebbs and flows of fast-paced pop and surf rock from the likes of Skeggs and Remi Wolf to slow and mesmerising shoegaze sets by Eyedress and Djo. The balance was struck quite well to ensure that the audience that stuck around for multiple hours on one stage were never bored, yet also not fatigued by back-to-back moshing.

There is also no mistaking that Melbourne’s ego was stroked unabashedly by the headlining artists, culminating in Charli’s screams to the crowd that Melbourne was “the coolest city in Australia”. Clairo brought out Charli XCX to sing ‘Sofia’, a song she hadn’t played live in three years, which felt like a bonding moment between the crowd and the artists. Without a moment to process what had just happened, Beabadoobee beckoned Clairo onto stage during her set to sing ‘Glue Song’ for Melbourne’s Valentine’s Day treat. The performances we were graced with that evening felt incredibly special and intimate, despite the inexplicable event setup and repeat instances of poor behaviour in the crowd.