Apparently, the man from Pinnacle distribution thinks that we are going to get our heads kicked in one day. I can’t imagine why. In the musical culture I thought I lived in, introducing We Hate The Kids with ‘We’d like to thank South By Southwest for this marketing opportunity, so stick that in your fucking blackberry – this is a song about how we hate you’ would be at the lower end of normal for rock’n’roll attitude. Not so. These days it’s all about being pleased with the living you scrape out, mugging gratefully for the people whose job it is to follow you about and swiftly londoning up the hertfordshire accents whenever you’re on the radio. I’m frequently shocked at how nice everybody is.
For example, we’ve got a song called ‘New Art For The People’ that, in its first line, uses the word ‘come’ as a noun. I’ve seen young, alternative minded people on the internet complaining that this is ‘designed to shock’. Really? Are you that prudish? It’s seedy, yes – as is the thing being described – but shocking? Have you actually listened to a Pulp album, or is it just cuddly uncle Jarvis and his cheeky working-class synthesiser that you remember these days? Have you listened to Suede? Elastica? even Sleeper? Frankie Goes To Hollywood shocked Mike Reid a bit in the 80s, maybe, but the young? Fuck no. This generation is the reason David Cameron looks electable – and that IS shocking.
We played two shows on Saturday. The first, we had been told, was in a 2,000 capacity central venue called Pangaea with some other bands who have achieved what passes for fame. As it turned out, it was in the garden of a shop three miles out of town called the Pangaea Patio and the other ‘famous’ band had taken one look and buggered off. The temptation toward prima donnaism hastily throttled (Don’t you people know who we are…? Oh, right, yeah, you don’t. Fair enough). It was a pretty good time all the same. It was another opportunity to hang out in lovely Austin, eat Pizza at a joint owned by Texas U. alumni who had decided to turn hanging out eating Pizza into a career, and generally enjoy the sun. Playing solos whilst leaning against a Texas live oak as a petrol scented breeze blew my daft fringe over my eyes felt good: the feeling slash must crave just before he steps out of weddings to rock on cliff tops.Back in downtown, we pulled up to our official Showcase at the Rio Grande – usually a Mexican restaurant that puts you in mind of Casa Bonita from that episode of South Park. It has a big neon Texan over the door and an indoor pond with a canoe in. The event manager pulls us over to one side as soon as we arrive and asks if we are the kind of band likely to want to jump into the indoor pool. Apparently, the lead singers of 6 bands have already seen fit to jump into it over the week and – while he doesn’t mind them jumping in – he won’t let them back on stage with wet clothes on account of all the electricity and significant risk of death. We assure him that we aren’t that kind of band. We’re all for rebelling against industry smugness, musical arrogance, indie self-satisfaction and conservatives, but we leave rebelling against perfectly sensible advice for the less syllabic of our countrymen. He seems mildly relieved.The venue fills up, pleasingly, and we are properly nervous. This translates into a show that we are all very happy with. The kind of show where you walk on feeling awful and off feeling amazing – where the crowd laughs in the right places, is quiet when you are and loud when you stop. We introduce ‘Waiting For Pete Doherty To Die’ with ‘this is about British Music, because it’s just so amaaaazing’ and people cheer like they get it.
We’re happy.
The rest of the night is all crowded rooms and chatter. We talk to journalists and weirdos and cousins who have a band with no name who are really into Cold-play and want to know if they’re big in England. We watch a Detroit beat combo called The Singles who play a likeably unaffected version of happy sixties pop that is alright for making no claim to credibility. We walk sixth street again as it works itself into its nightly frenzy. We are fliered and gurned at, ID’d and hobbled by the Texas distances.We end up at bar with a outside stage where, we are assured, there is good music to be heard all year long – an Austin place among the bars the locals leave for kids and Tourists. We want to see Matt and Kim – a Brooklyn duo on drums and cheap synth whom Keith TOTP has hosted in his Camden fortress. They are preceded by an indie electro-preacher in a gold Jacket rapping the crowd into a frenzy with a rant about the ‘assholes on sixth street’ – he’s ace. As are Matt and Kim who have the best grins in Indie and some of the better tunes.
SXSW has a downside. It really does. Its buzzes and PDAs and hype-generation-meetings are everything you hate about the music industry made flesh. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.". Much of SXSW is for small minds – names are on lips where notions should be. But there is something there that it can’t clean and that the british invasion can’t ruin. It is the spirit of Texas and America where nothing is as simple as the rest of the world imagines. It is in the backyard bar where a happy man in a hoodie tells a crowd of stagedivers that he loves them. It is the next day, walking down sixth - miraculously tidied and spotless bearing no hint of the bedlam the night before – when a bedraggled, presumably homeless, teenager wanders over asking if we’ll pay her to read a poem to us and then, when we give embarrassed English coughs and say sorry but no, asks if we’ll listen to it anyway because she’s trying to expand her vocabulary. It’s the mexican waiter who, bored of serving, sits down at our table and tells us how the previous night he was bummed out because he lost $100 on a boxing match but then some rich assholes started hassling him in the street about his ponytail – one of them said he could have $100 right there if he’d cut it off, so he did it, cause whatever, right? – and now he was back even.
There is a palpable sense of life returning to normal on Sunday. We all meet up in town, deciding whether to stay in Austin or drive down to San Antonio – we’ve got a reasonable economy and we wanna see some history.
The odd convention pass flutters in the breeze from the coming storms and immaculately haired guitarists sit in cafés nursing three day hangovers and forests of wristbands. There are probably last minute meetings to be found, blackberries to be courted and industry to be charming at – but it’s hot and it’s dusty, and we have a car with Del Reeves on the radio, and it’s eighty miles down the highway to the Alamo. The Texas sky is big and the sunset impossibly distant - but hell y’all if we ain’t gonna do our darnedest to ride off into it.XX.
Simon Indelicate, Austin 2008
PS.
Just listened to Huw Stevens SXSW Radio 1 show – he was going on about some british hope [Florence & The Machine] who’d been amaaaazing. Apparently she jumped into the indoor pond at the end of her set. Just remember, kids: One of six. In four days. And I know for a fact that the event manager didn’t let her back onto the stage...S
http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk
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