Day 1
Day Off, Austin
Howryall doon tedey ahmngo'hed n freshn yr caaafeee. Alll raht, yall havagud deynar.
We're in Austin. It's not my habit to complete my diarising on days off, but since I never actually write it at the time, it doesn't matter. Does it.
Aqualung has never had a record deal in the USA. America was left out of the original deal for reasons too interesting to go into, and so our appearance at the South by Southwest music festival (AKA SXSW) is being funded by Matt as a speculative-to-accumulative venture. For this reason we are travelling as light as possible and staying at the Best Value Inn.
In a parallel universe known as the Past, Matt and I came to the festival as part of an unpopular group called RUTH. We stayed in Austin for a week at the Holiday Inn on I35 ate every day at the nearby cajun diner called Dixies who tried to kill us with their sweet pancakes, hot tea and eggs over easy. It was a great adventure, and by the time we came home we were 1. extremely fat and 2. convinced that RUTH's future lay somewhere other than with the Artist Record Company, to whom we were signed.
When we got home we left ARC and met a manager called Phil Nelson and signed a deal with Mercury Records, who suggested we change our name. We thought if we were going to change our name, we might as well pretend that we were a different band altogether, so we concocted a stupid story about how my brother Matt (who was some kind of fragile musical monk) had come to see my band (that he wasn't in) play at SXSW, but before the gig we got into a fight with a Texan band who punched our singer and made him disappear in a puff of fiction. And who should step up to save the gig with his electrifying vocal performance, but Matt Hales, who had previously only been interested in plagal cadences? Who would have guessed at the powerhouse talent hidden within this studious young man? It was very Clark Kent (and even a little Klark Kent).
Like I said, it was a stupid story. It was more trouble than it was worth and my friend Ian has never forgiven us for writing him into it, but it means that SXSW has a crucial place in our history. That was four years ago. And what do we find when we get to Austin? The Holiday Inn on I35 has become the Best Value Inn and Dixies has become Jack's Backyard, but otherwise everything is exactly the same...
