FOUND's SXSW Diary: Day Three, Parte the First

Yesterday is a bit of a blur. It was definitely the craziest day yet.

It began well, with a fantastic Mexican breakfast in a local diner – we all had different variations of huevos rancheros and breakfast tacos washed down with large mugs of Oaxacan coffee. This is where things started to go a little weird. That coffee was STRONG and the waiter just kept refilling our cups. Chris drove us in the back of his white van to collect our gear from our friend Lauren’s apartment and then we were to go on to the British Music Embassy to check in with the sound engineer and stage manager before our gig at 2.45 pm. We had a quick look round the American Apparel thrift yard sale – Kev, Gav and Alan all picked up brightly coloured garms but I really wasn’t feeling it. I was beginning to feel pretty jittery – in fact downright paranoid. The coffee had us all wired and it wasn’t a nice feeling.

We went round the corner to the venue which was fast filling up. Come On Gang! kicked things off with a flamboyant intro from Mr Vic Galloway who got the crowd to sing happy birthday for the band’s guitarist, Mikey. The venue was now packed out and for the first time in ages I was feeling really nervous about playing – a combination of that crazy Mexican coffee, hangover and now a couple of free beers wasn’t settling my nerves. Come On Gang! stormed through their set and got a great reaction from the capacity crowd, spilling onto the street outside with people queuing to get in. Vic introduced us and we took to the stage to a crowd of at least 250 people. Ziggy was keen that we keep the change overs between songs brief as his banter hasn’t really been going down so well at these odd industry gigs. His patter’s shit anyway, so it’s for the best.

I found it a pretty tough show. I was messing up a fair bit – my bass strap kept on falling and I had to do all kinds of goofy things to try and keep hold of the guitar. Annoyingly for me this has been captured on film – Stuart Thomas from the Scottish Arts Council filmed our set with Alan’s HD camera. Great.

Still, even though I looked like a chump, it was a great gig and the crowd seemed to be loving it. We ended on Let Fidelity Break, which went down a storm. Then we went about the dirty business of meeting and greeting industry folks, handing out business cards, CDs and flyers. We met some good peeps, including a guy from the Dutch Music Centre who’s going to try and get us over to play at one of the London Calling events at Paradiso in Amsterdam – which I’d love to do.

End of part one . . . more later