Laneway Festival Detroit 2014 cancelled

After an impressive 2013 debut, St Jerome’s Laneway Festival has been forced to cancel its 2014 Detroit event.

A statement posted to the Facebook page last night by promoter Danny Rogers outlines the reasons, which involve timing issues, and an inability to book appropriate acts for the event.

Rogers also states that he hopes the event will return to Detroit in 2015, and that no other American cities will be considered for the Laneway expansion “unless Detroit can be a part of it.”

The full statement is below.

We’ve decided to postpone Laneway Festival Detroit this year due to timing. A big thanks to all of you for your support and interest in the event. We had an amazing time last year and hope to return in 2015!

Last year was an incredible show and all of you who were there know that we put our heart and soul into this. We delivered what I genuinely believe was the most awesome festival I have ever been part of. Once we had gotten through the event we sat down and planning began.

Some of the first questions we asked ourselves were these: what did we learn from Laneway Detroit? We learned that people in Detroit are some of the most passionate people on the planet. Detroit people are very proud. And so giving. In 11 years it’s always been a curated event, but in Detroit we had to think differently. I wasn’t going to blow my partners’ money just for the sake of putting on an event.

We tried to get the very few acts that we felt would be appropriate for Laneway and none of them were available. We had one that went all the way to the wire and then changed its mind at the very last minute – bless their beautiful heart too, they were under so much pressure to be everywhere and anywhere and something had to give. We decided that we needed to be honest with ourselves and sit it out this year and review it again next year.

Thank you again for being so incredibly supportive of Laneway Detroit. We’ll work on this for next year and hopefully your will and support can bring us back into market. We have no intention of doing any other city in America unless Detroit can be part of it.

The 2013 line-up featured Australian breakthrough acts such as Flume and Chet Faker, alongside international heavyweights The National, Savages, Chvrches, and many others.