SXSW Blog Part Two (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

We’ve now been awake for 45-55 hours. I would be more specific, but what with time zones, daylight saving time and so on – being more specific would involve maths and we’ve been awake for 45-55 hours. Numeracy was among the first things to go.

We’ve just played our first show at the festival for a private party promoted by a man from Arizona who dresses like a pilot. At least that may have been the promoter – it may have just been an actual pilot - or a hallucination of one. At some point a guy in a day-glo green T-shirt was giving away ‘hiphop energy drinks’. At another a similar looking guy was eating twenty-three hotdogs. At least one of them was on television – but it’s hard to say which. Things are blurry.

Having finally gotten the necessary paperwork to travel, our revised plan was to fly to New York spend six hours doing whatever we could think of then get back on a plane, fly to Houston, hire a car and then drive the last 180 miles to Austin for the show. This was a good plan. Admittedly,
on a pie chart, the slice marked ‘sleep’ was reserved for the anorexic at the travel dinner party – not existing as it didn’t – but hey, rock’n’roll, right?

New York is a shock. It’s too big to capture in words or pictures – that must be why people are always trying to. It’s not like London, a small city that has eaten some rather dull villages, it is real city all the way through. It towers and it yawns, shouts and drawls, sticks its chin in your face then steps back and just basks in itself. Our six hours are fast, they have an international standard hamburger in them, and Time Square and mournful Jazzy cab rides and those manhole covers that really do billow steam. It feels like – and may well actually have been – a dream.

The plane chases the night across America and is caught by day as it lands. We hire a very very big car and just about fit ourselves, guitars and cases into it. It’s a weird thing about a country that England so often attacks for homogeneity and corporate standardisation that it is
so much less so than England. States and towns bellow their identity. You can’t look down without seeing a ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ bumper sticker stuck to something and people don’t just fly their state flag but wear it and paint it on plates. Towns decide what they’re going to be famous for and stick to it. There are no terraces. People buy bits of street and build their own idea of what a house should look like on them.

There is nothing at all homogenous about, for example, Tony’s Family Restaurant in Sealy, between Houston and Austin. There are pictures of the local high school football team (National Champions 1939!) on the wall next to the longhorns and chalked up specials and roll of honor, which seems to contain the names of people who were so happy working at Tony’s that they did it until they died.

It makes you mournful, stuff like that, when you’ve been a wake forever and are on your way to a music festival that is really a conference for the industry. Every blog or interview I’ve seen from attending bands has used the word ‘excited’. It worries me this, that all the new bands in the world greet the prospect of playing for some men from A&R departments and establishment magazines with excitement. It is about sales not songs; marketing not music. And it is the bands themselves who do it –as excited as a boyband before the pollwinners party and saying so because that is what you say.

I wouldn’t say we’re excited. We’re thrilled to be here, in America. We’re looking forward to the week – but we don’t lose sight of what SXSW is. Primarily it is something that you can’t afford or spare the time to go to. It is where the NME and the PR departments and the managers meet up to hang around in bars and discuss what they’re going to say happened when they get home. It is the Bildeberg meeting for the lies that drive the music industry.

We check in to places, pick up badges and hire keyboards and wristbands. Everyone in town has a badge around their necks. It is like when they hold the conservative party conference in British seaside towns only with everyone in beanie hats and three-day stubble. I bump into James from our record label.

‘Look’, he says, pointing at a man in a woolly hat being interviewed by a TV camera, ‘it’s Div from Lightspeed Champion’. I have no idea who Lightspeed Champion are. I do know that lightspeed is a constant and that any lightspeed race would therefore be pointless – rendering the concept of a lightspeed champion nonsensical. Perhaps this is what they are getting at. Capturing the ennui of a role in life marked by the language of achievement yet constantly undermined by the knowledge within that there is no factual basis for the plaudits you receive. Probably not though. At any rate, he’s blocking the pavement.

The show is OK. It takes a few songs to find the right sound balance and we have to construct an elaborate three mic stand sculpture to get Julia’s microphone to rest near her face but by the end we’re rocking out properly and being as inadvisably sarcastic as usual. We’ve got three more to do over the coming days and will be better when fully conscious. There is talk of Australians giving away free lager and REM at midnight and a band with three guitarists and steakhouses and margheritas and crazy times – but it’s been 45 hours, maybe 55, maybe more. It is time for bed.

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