Wednesday review

Those who know me will understand that the only time I’m really happy is when I’m placed in the corner of a muddy field, next to a grassy verge, with a can of cool lager, and am tapping my foot to some band I’ve probably never heard of and will probably forget within the next ten minutes. In other words, festivals make me happy. The rest of the time I’m just a grumpy, cynical bastard who moans about not actually being at a festival...

So imagine the delight of being confronted with streets filled with seemingly endless converted gig venues, jam packed with like-minded music fans, foaming at the mouth in mutual agreement at such an astounding array of worldwide talent. The best way to describe how I approached things for the next few hours is by combining the sayings ‘kid in a candy store’ with ‘bull in a china shop’. You get the idea.

If you’re a bit of a newbie to this event (as indeed I was) then things can seem a little overwhelming. The temptation to stand, blinking uncontrollably, not knowing which way to turn, while the world revolves around you at breakneck speed, is definitely a hard one to shake off.

The band’s that play during the day seem to be a bit of a ‘trade secret’, as most things at SXSW are. On arrival in Austin you’re met with two separate festivals. There’s the official, SXSW seal of approval, music badge wearing showcase gigs, and then there’s this completely different underground festival filled with free booze, even better bands, and heaps of random freebie crap that’ll take the next three months to chuck out.

A quick scan of a few internet sites, and a hunt here and there, and you can find out what’s going on in and around the festival, official and unofficial. But if you decide not to plan in advance, you might miss out on a lot of great bands and parties. So being prepared is key. Of course, I wasn’t prepared in the slightest and if it weren’t for the aid of some particularly helpful Texans I’d still be circulating the suburbs of Austin wondering just exactly where everyone was.

During the day there’s not that much going on in the convention center, despite the huge pools of people that collect on the escalators, in the stair wells, clogging up the lobbies, and just about everywhere else. There are a couple of interesting panels on how to get one foot in the door of the music industry, how to manage bands, and how to tour on a shoestring budget, but as I learned from the film panels earlier in the week, they aren’t really as helpful as you might think.

The SESAC day stage café was showcasing a varied collection of bands, like the hip-hop indie / pop hybrid that is The Gray Kid, an artist that shares his unusual blend with artists like Mc Lars and DJ Format, but perhaps not quite as inspirational as either of those. Castanets seem to transcend weirdness with their unique mix of sounds and noises. Experimentation is key here, but when you’re given just 15 minutes to prove what you’ve got it’s not a time-slot that really suits them.



By far the best band to play this stage today is London’s Scanners, taking some beautiful thoughtful melodies and overlapping them with some wonderful vocals. It’s great to watch, and is performed with great professionalism, something a few of acts at this year’s festival seem to be missing. ‘Lowlife’ hums along at a plodding pace, gently coaxing the listener along with it, while tracks like the brilliantly titled ‘Violence is Golden’ throw up influences like The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and The Breeders.

Parisian three piece Prototypes do a good job of attempting to top Scanners, although they never quite get there. Their take on the electro scene has an amusingly European disco feel, and had they taken a more dance path than a rock one I think we would have seen a group built in a similar way to Junior Senior. Instead, it comes across more like a synthesised version of The Ravenottes. Very good though.

Over on 6th Street (the place to be if live music’s your thing) a bar called Emo’s (no relation to the genre, so I’m told) is playing host to a number of bands. Flying the flag for Scotland is The Twilight Sad. I watched with muted embarrassment; if this was the best of the UK’s new bands then the next few years look pretty dire for British music. More noise than music, and definitely not a patch on Scanners.

Foals describe themselves as ‘disco-house’, and fit quite neatly into the same batch of bands like White Rose Movement, Kubichek!, The Sunshine Underground and LCD Soundsystem. Despite a few technical problems before their set at the Levi’s Fader Shin-Dig on the other side of town, they still managed a brilliant performance of high energy, staccato guitar playing with heavy electro overtones. The mass of photographers down the front gave the whole thing a slightly superficial feel, but nevertheless an excellent set.



Over at The Hilton Hotel, just one block from the Convention Center, Pete Townsend was delivering his keynote speech, chatting about his new internet concept that would involve members of the public actually owning a 1/3rd of the copyright to songs, as well as life surrounding The Who, both past and present. There weren’t any particularly groundbreaking revelations, but Pete did talk openly about life for people after the war, and how The Who’s music affected people differently on both sides of the Atlantic.



Once the night kicks in the atmosphere really does shift up a gear. People start streaming out from all over the place, and the legendary 6th street is closed off to let the drunken pedestrians sway from one side of the road to the next. The atmosphere is brilliant, the drink is pretty cheap everywhere, and the pizza prices quite easily piss all over UK festival prices. You gotta love this exchange rate.

For UK acts Stubbs is the best place to be, and The Sunshine Underground put on a performance of tremendous proportions. "This is our first visit to Austin", is met with "about time!", amusing frontman Craig Wellington to dedicate their first song to that particular heckler. It’s by far the greatest set of the night, and it is such a joy to see how far The Sunshine Underground have come in such a short space of time. The set peaks with the brilliant ‘Commercial Breakdown’, and the anthemic ‘Borders’, sounding rather like We Are Scientists with a British twist.

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