Fox 7 News / Brush Square (5th and Neches) / Fox & Hound (4th and Guadelupe), South by Southwest, Austin, Texas, USA
It's gig day; it's sunny; we have a rubbish rental car and some rented equipment, a guitar and a pedal steel; we've travelled five thousand miles to be here; whaddaya say, let's boogie!
It's lucky my body doesn't know what time it is, because we have to get up at 5am to go to FOX7 News, which is a local cable news station. We're playing a song and some 'bumps' into the ad breaks. "We'll cue you and you just jam for ten seconds and we'll fade you out," says Darren the sound guy, not understanding the kind of band we are. We don't jam. So we play two chords and everybody claps.
It's kind of weird to see US TV people close up. It looks like they're still on TV when you're standing next to them. The older, Des-faced, natural-gravity-but-hint-of-subversive-humour anchorman comes over to do an interview and then we perform Strange & Beautiful (there are no albums out in the States, but S&B has been used on a succession of teen-angst shows, so that was the natural choice). I'm playing the pedal steel, which is something of an affectation on a young Englishman in Texas, but I'm hoping they find it charming, like when a reckless young lioncub tries to take down an elephant.
There's time left at the end of the show so they ask us to play them out. The only other song I play pedal steel on is Just for a moment, which is the least appropriate theme tune in TV News history. We get cut off with cheerful studio applause just after the line 'My heart was broken in two'.
South by Southwest has more in common with the Edinburgh festival than Glastonbury. There's no big stage, but thousands of little bars that do live music, centred around 6th Street. During the festival there are five bands on every night in every venue. There are tour buses everywhere, and geeky guys from bands with angular haircuts and cute chicks from bands with nose studs, and then thousands of British music industry types who know your manager called Phil Nelson, and you can't go for two minutes without hearing guitar solos and introducing yourself. It has a holiday camp/Disneyland feel to it, and it's great.
Throughout the day we've met a few people who reveal that they've travelled for 15 hours or thousands of miles to come and see us. That is an amazing thing.
Another great thing about the festival is that there are a thousand bands here you played with once, so you never know who you'll bump into. The Veils have come to see our set, and it's nice to see them again and reminisce about mooning each other on the M6. Then we head off to see Clearlake, but fail because they are on the same bill as Franz Ferdinand, and there is a queue of boys in tank tops around the block. This is what it's like to be Happening. We head back to our stage to watch Athlete and then gratefully struggle into our rubbish rental car and get lost on the way home.
