SXSW Music Festival - 15th - 20th March

This was a truly great week on our trip so far as we got to see loads and loads of live music that we've been really craving since we've been on the road.

We stayed out of the centre of Austin as all the central hotels got booked up really early - we even had to book ours about 9 months in advance. Was easy to jump onto the public bus into town where all the action happens though.

Austin itself is a magnet for funky, cool hipsters (like ourselves of course) and we did find it pretty funny how hard some people were trying to look painfully cool. 6th avenue is the kind of central hub of all the live action and walking down the street is like stepping into a musical warzone. There's just so much going on that it's really hard to take it all in and difficult to know where to start. Best plan of attack we found was to roughly plan to see a few of our favourites and then stumble across the rest.

The number of venues is also mind boggling and loads of them are free to the public. We had our passes which also got us into most of the other venues free and also provided A LOT of free food and drinks which was an absolute result. It's amazing how quickly you can get drunk when you haven't really been drinking for a few months. Free food of the week was also definitely tacos and we must have had at least two a day each - yum.

Venues also came in all shapes and sizes and we saw a couple of bands at the huge convention centre (with everyone sitting on chairs which was weird), The Strokes at The Auditorium which was a proper outdoor venue and Bombay Bicycle Club at a pizza restaurant (after walking an hour in the heat to get there). The British Music Embassy was the best venue by a mile, although Stubb´s gets an honourbale mention.

The quality of bands on show massively varied from the absolutely god awful to the excellent and the British contingent definitely led the way in terms of quality (although we saw some awful Brits as well).

We tried to mix it up a bit on the last night and went to see one of the yee-ha boy Texas bands, but they were pretty middle of the road although the hicks lapped it up - no-one fired a celebratory gun into the air though which was a let down.

For any muso's reading this (if indeed ANYONE reads this) have listed who we saw and starred the excellent ones - have also included a (B) for b0ll0cks so don't bother with those...

All in all would definitely recommend SXSW, but it's bloody hectic and much better if you do your homework first and also stay in the centre of town.

We also found fame courtesy of a local blogger who snapped us at the Jim Jones gig on Thursday: http://bit.ly/mhD9En

Bands

Wednesday

Street Chant
The Naked and Famous (*)

Thursday

Revolver
The Boxer Rebellion (*)
Jim Jones
The Strokes (*)

Friday

Jonquil
Clock Opera (*)
Dam Mantle (B)
Unicorn Kid
Pop Up
Rachel Sermandi
King Creosote (*)
Bombay Bicycle Club (*)
The Vaccines (*)

Saturday

DJ Yoda (*)
Pete and the Pirates (*)
David Thomas Broughton (B)
Little Comets (*)
The Lost Brothers
Doll and the Kicks
Kill it Kid
Brown Brogues (B)
The Answering Machine