“Blog o’clock.” With those words, our manager Ian wakes me up to one of the worst hangovers I can remember. So, according to our Texan friends, at our showcase last night we “bought in the game,” which was nice to know after a day spent tracking our gear on DHL, to find that it’s all coming except our cherished Juno 60 keyboard – a very important part of our set. That day, me and Martin had walked all over Austin flyering our gigs, and we paid a visit to a scrap metal yard to scavenge some percussion. We went over to French Legation, the old French diplomatic quarters from the 1840’s where we are playing on Saturday – the grounds and venue look absolutely beautiful in the fine Texan spring.
After that we head back to the apartment to re-hash our set and headed over to the venue, after some frantic phone calls to make sure they had power adapters. Again, the streets of Austin are heaving and buzzing, so if all goes well we should have a good crowd. Setting up, we are beset by wave of technical problems- already one keyboard is down and our Casiotone decides to give up as well. Paranoia and stress come over the band as the crowd gather and it dawns on us we are going to be doing our first SXSW show seriously underpowered, with unfamiliar borrowed or broken gear.
The Casiotone finally works, just as the sound man is losing patience, and we begin our set to a full house. For some reason, I now feel totally at ease with the situation. It takes us a little while to get into the set but there’s soon whooping and hollering from the crowd and my thoughts of it getting rowdy prove correct – the assembled Texans are a boisterous bunch. We close with debut E.P track Billion Planets which sees Martin dancing in the crowd to a groovy krautrock-esque outro where we bang our found percussion, including a metal tea pot.
At the end of the gig, people on the street lean through he windows of the venue to congratulate our drummer Charlie – “you bought in the game!” proclaims our stetson hatted friend Russel.
After the more than respectable, very sweaty show, we head out into the heaving Austin night, banging percussion and drinking. Soon, I am extremely hammered, and we manage to catch sets from Broken Social Scene and an incredible show from Austinites White Denim. Everything else is very blurry, hence the blurryness of this blog. Still no fresh new Americans bands though, which we will endeavor to find. I run into some very bedraggled Hurricane Katrina survivors who demonstrate their rapping skills to me, and a girl we met invites us to shoot machine guns on sunday. Other stuff happened, but it’s hard to recall now. Stay tuned…
Photo by Scott Chasserot
