SXSW Blog Part Four (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

So we’re sitting in the lakeside bar of the five star four seasons hotel drinking Ice tea that is so classy that they make the ice out of tea so that it doesn’t dilute the drink when it melts. Julia and I are with Keith (who we’ve been travelling with and who is the person we are most likely to say we owe it all to, should we ever suffer an attack of gushing sentimentality at a low-rent corporate awards show) and Becki who we’ve only met this week, who is here working and who is lovely.

She’s reeling off the Old testament length litany of bands she’s seen in the past few days and asking if we like the ones she mentions. And as we keep bowing our heads sheepishly and mumbling, er… no, we hate them, actually… we have no wonder what we’re doing in this business at all.Keith points out that he’s seen other bands’ blogs about SXSW and that they usually consist of excited tracts about all the shows they’ve been to and how they were all very good. Ours isn’t really like that, is it?

Take today: we did see a great band, as it happens and we played what I thought was a good gig but the main thing we did – and the thing I’ll look back on fondly when I’m buying food next week at home – is go to the Bob Bullock museum near the state capitol and see a high-tech educational attraction about the history of Texas. I love high-tech educational attractions. They are probably my favourite thing in the world. This one was among the better ones. They showed slides and little dramatisations on screens that faded away to reveal static scenes behind of Hardship struck Oil prospectors and the dead of the Alamo. And when there was a storm on screen the seats shook and the room filled with smoke and wind. When there was a reading from a pioneers diary about rattlesnakes a hydraulic spring poked you from within your seat making you jump and the class of fourth-graders on a school trip behind you scream and say ‘oh my god’ to each other. It was ace. And well worth commemorating with the purchase of a Texas flag design formal shirt. (If you’re not in a band, you’d be amazed what you can justify to yourself with the simple words: ‘for stage’).You see, aside from the unresolved rejection issues and our deep sense of personal inadequacy, we got into this for the travel. We don’t understand bands who see nothing of the places they visit.

In Berlin once, we had been flown out for twenty-four hours to play at British Music week, we didn’t have time to do much, but by God if we didn’t go to the Brandenburg gate at four in the morning and have a damn good look at the fucker. The band we played with had been there for several days but had only seen the inside of a bar. A really cool bar, yeah? But a bar just the same. It is beyond us.

No one in the museum has an SXSW badge on except us. The guitar playing fools - they don’t know what they’re missing. I’d build a high-tech educational attraction to explain it to them, but they’d never come.

So on to our show, which is in a hard-to-find scout hut of a bar called the palm door. Apparently it was a well-known dive called the Red Rum until recently and this is why no one knows where it is, but it’s nice inside and has an enjoyably rickety outer terrace that lurches out over a trickle of water at the bottom of a mini, semi-concrete canyon. The guys putting it on are likeable New Yorkers and the atmosphere is great.Relaxed, receptive and Fringe-y. We are preceded on the bill by O’ Death who are a sensational blend of bluegrass instruments, wild biker looks, entrancing drumstick trickery and screaming/shouty vocals. They suit the 90 degree heat and swamp-shack surroundings perfectly and are easily the best thing I’ve seen so far without a high-tech educational attraction in it.

Our show is pretty good too. Everything clicks and there is enough space on the stage for Al to wave his guitar about and pull aggressive faces without knocking Julia off her stool. Perhaps predictably, Americans are intrigued by our new single ‘America’ (which is about the European left’s willingness to find accommodation with religio-fascists as a consequence of their dogmatic anti-American position) as, being live music, you can’t hear most of the words.

The subtleties of such a dialectic tend to be harder to discern when it is being shouted ovcr a rock band. Still, explaining ourselves gets conversations going and we are soon making five minute friendships and swearing blind that we’ll register for the kind of Web 2.0 start-ups that Duncan Bannatyne sneers at on Dragon’s Den.

So we finally end up in the four seasons (and my, that’s a very nice hotel indeed) wondering why we got into this business when we don’t really like music very much. But, of course, we’re not really wondering any such thing. We know why. It’s because we like the edges and the backrooms and the terraces and the smoking cabins. We like naked men in beards playing ukuleles. We like the bars of hotels we have no real business being in. It’s not us, it’s everyone else, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.


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