SXSW Blog Part Three (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

British music is the new French food. Walking the streets of downtown Austin we are surrounded by the British in droves – they have the same hair and clothes, they play guitars and bang drums and they sing to each other. They congregate at a bar called Latitude which they have painted with the Union Jack and adorned with Arts council funded posters advertising the moderate rock of the regions. Journalists stand and watch them, nodding unsmiling heads while pound signs flash across their pupils.They take the same pictures over and over and tell each other that they did great shows. Like French food - everybody knows that British music is the best in the world, so they buy out second-rate brasseries and microwave pre-seared Steak Frites for the tourists and the drunks sure in the knowledge that the Rubes don’t know what they’re eating.

I had begun to worry that Austin was like Brighton. Brighton was a great town once. My friends were poets (good poets too – not the failed stand up comedians and self-help addicts who populate most readings), anarchists and pegs so beaten up and twisted that they’d fit no hole, square, round or otherwise. They went to Brighton as a last resort and made a place that wouldn’t stare at them – it was a grimy flyposted utopia. Then money heard about it. Money moved in. There was funding, design, self-confidence –all the things that kill a place like that. Slowly it died. Those who couldn’t afford the new prices left. Those who could afford them bred and their dullard, giftless offspring grew up to believe they were entitled to all the world’s generosity and formed dullard giftless microwave steak bands.

Austin has a similar history. If you’ve seen Slacker, you’ll likely know what the place was like in the early nineties and, if you are the kind of person who has gotten round to watching slacker, you’ll likely have wanted to visit. All the ingredients for a Brighton-style meltdown were in place. The difference though – and what we have learned today – is that Austin fought back.

You can see it if you look. There is a window selling Pizzas on sixth street (SXSW’s hub) that has a sign scrawled on a paper plate reading: “Cheers mate! Is not an acceptable tip in Texas”. In the South Congress area (a free bus ride out of downtown) a bass player and guitarist stand in a doorway with a sign announcing that they are “doing it for Johnny Cash” and belt out furious rebel country – the gist of the lyrics being that ‘this town ain’t what it used to be’ and that everyone should ‘get the fuck out’. In Allens boots (a cowboy boot and western wear emporium that is possibly the best shop in the world and that is also now in possession of all our money) the woman selling boots to Julia explains with supreme contempt that the 6th street zip code is really ‘just full of college students…’

Austin, in fact, is fuckin’ cooool. It really is full of gen X obsessives who are relaxed and interested and weird in a good way. Looking for a can of Mountain Dew, Julia and I wander into an emporium selling, principally, bongs and dildos. The desk clerk is drawn at once to Julia’s new boots (they really are very good boots) and he starts discussing the merits of various tobaccos. By the time I get back from looking at illuminati themed joss sticks they are laying Julia’s change all over the counter to see how many state logos she has inadvertently collected. I think this kind of thing is the Austin norm. When the credentialed ponytails have gone back to whichever media village they call home, Austin will keep on with the weird. The guy in the bong and dildo emporium will be talking conspiracy theories with the rebel country busker from SoCo and life will be sweet.

But anyway: music. We see Billy Bragg in a stale room inside the convention centre doing some tracks from his new record. He’s great by default, but he looks a bit annoyed at the setting – and it’s hard to blame him. The rest of our band all go and watch Hanson (yes, that Hanson) and despite my shudders of indie-cred embarrassment they repeatedly insist that it was good. The evening is mainly snatches of drums and occasional diversions of guitar. The atmosphere on sixth is not, as I’ve heard it insisted, wild or crazy. It is full of purpose – everyone going somewhere, queuing for something, relaying meta-praise about someone – but it looks like chaos. There is a lengthy parade of Asian youths in colourful uniforms which – according to the fliers they were passing out – is an advert for the showcase of a band described as the ‘first Korean band to tour Europe’. Surely that can’t be right? There must be another successful band from South Korea… unless… Is this parade from the other Korea? Is Kim Jong-Il here somewhere? Scanning crowds and tapping notes into a blackberry? It is entirely possible.

In the bar of the Hilton late at night, a bearded, roll-necked vision of a liverpudlian mid-life crisis lurches up to our table roaring the lyrics to a song about chicks and that.

‘Come On!’, he yells, ‘Come on, yeah? Yeah? YEAH!
Rock’n’roll, right?’

‘Yeah man’, we smile, ‘rock’n’roll!’

‘Sorry about him’, leans over a smirking shirt in male cosmetics and square glasses, ‘he’s got a number 5 album.’

And that, it would seem, explains that.

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