FOUND's SXSW Tour Diary: Day One

We’ve now been in Austin for a full day and are beginning to acclimatise. Our 20 hour journey was surprisingly smooth and we made it through immigration and customs in Newark Liberty airport without the grilling that I’d been fearing...except for a light fingering.

It’s going to take a while to get used to this city and festival. It’s hot. It’s been in the high 80s since we arrived, which I think is around 28 degrees, so hotter than the hottest Scottish summer. You cannot move for bands. It’s spray-on-jean city. It’s like the West End of Glasgow, Shoreditch, Hawick (Burnfoot) and the Lower East Side magnified to extreme proportions.

We’re staying out in the ‘burbs with Rachel and Chris – who’ve made us feel right at home. Rachel works for a contemporary art gallery and their house is covered with canvases. Chris is a computer programmer and jazz guitarist. So they’re a good fit with us. We ate some tacos and drank some beers with them then crashed out.

In the morning Chris took us downtown on the bus, right into the heart of SXSW and we got down to business. We played our first gig at a place called Peckerheads. straight after The Proclaimers. They were an excellent opening act for us. I think we did quite well.  It was busy for us and people seemed to be in to it but we had a technical nightmare – two of our electronic instruments didn’t work because of the voltage difference. There was fuck all we could do about it though so we just put our heads down and went for it. I reckon we were pretty nervous but it was still a good show. Casio Kids had been playing earlier in the same venue and I was really chuffed to hear their single, Fot I Hose live.

After the gig we dumped our gear and went to catch a band we know called The Cheek who were fun but so loud that they gave me bad tinnitus, then on to see Come On Gang! and a great Liverpool band called Wave Machine. By this point we’d had enough live music for the day and escaped to a bar called The Ginger Man where Ziggy, Kev and Gav invented a variation of clay pigeon shooting using beer mats, darts and a dart board – you get the idea.  It went on for three hours without any of them pinning a beer mat – although Ziggy came the closest. I think we are supposed to be trying to flyer for our gigs and set up meetings but darts/clay pigeon shooting is pretty addictive.

We’re going to run our electro gear off batteries today so we should be OK. Also, I think Primal Scream are opening for us.