Scots at SXSW: Is it worth the trip to Texas?

I WON’T be the first writer who, when asked to describe the South by Southwest festival (SXSW), has puffed out their cheeks and asked themselves: “Bloody hell. Where do you start?” SXSW is a massive, garish carnival of chaos which takes place in Austin, Texas every March, and manages to combine very significant levels of business with the kind of partying the like of which I have never seen anywhere. Admittedly, I am kind of sheltered, but the whole thing really is just nuts.

This last week, not only was every venue in Austin – and believe me, there are a lot of them – pressed into service, but every other bar was swiftly turned into a venue, along with every vacant lot and parking space in the city. Opportunistic bands play on street corners, in back gardens, hotel lobbies, bicycle shops, soup kitchens, pizza restaurants and pretty much anywhere else you can think of.

SXSW started as a music festival back in the late 1980s, and grew fast, becoming known as one of the places to go where up-and-coming bands might be noticed by a label, a booking agent or manager. It is with this in mind that a large contingent of Scottish bands and assorted music industry professionals head out there every year.

It swiftly expanded to include SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive, and as the bottom fell out of the music industry, Interactive suddenly came to dominate the formal part of the festival, its reputation buoyed by playing host to the launches of services such as Foursquare and Twitter in recent years. Massive ballrooms in every hotel in town are given over to keynote speeches, panel discussions, open debates and startup mixers.

For music, however, it may be a conference, but it is also just a massive, massive party. I first went along four years ago. I flew using soon-to-expire air miles, and I stayed on a friend’s floor. I didn’t have an official badge or a wristband, so my pal had to sneak me up the back stairs of the Scottish Showcase to see Frightened Rabbit, We Were Promised Jetpacks and Hudson Mohawke.

Mind you, even full badge-holders get turned down from events all the time, simply due to venue capacity. This year the BBC’s Vic Galloway and I ended up scampering across town after being unable to get into The Flaming Lips, to the painfully cool Secretly Canadian showcase which was also full, before ending up on Rainey Street watching a Sudanese Brooklyn band I’d never heard of before.

But even with a badge you have to reconcile yourself to the fact that there is so much stuff on, you’ll have to miss loads of things you want to see, and you don’t really need the full badge to have an amazing time. Unless somewhere is full, you can usually just pay $15-$20 (just over £10) on the door to get in, and as long as you don’t want to charge around all night to different showcases, which gets expensive, you can still have a great night.

If you’re a little canny, of course, you can do even more. Besides the official evening showcases, and free popup gigs at places like Homeslice Pizza, there are tons of day parties, most of which you can get into for free if you RSVP. Most of these provide free beer and food and, sometimes, toys and T-shirts as an attempt to drag your attention away from everything going on around you.

Added to that, most bands will play more than once. Vic and I, for example, were heading to that Secretly Canadian showcase with the intention of seeing Suuns, but having failed to get in there, we ended up catching them later in the night, quite by accident, at a half-full Planet Quebec showcase.

But Rainey Street itself, where we ended up, is an interesting indicator of how, even now, this festival is growing at a frightening pace. Even four years ago when I first went, most of the action centred on the blocks around the intersection of 6th St and Red River. Now that area is jammed full of frat boys and rap posses.

These days the hip guitar music with which the festival used to be most associated tends to be out in East Austin, which used to be a rather sketchy neighbourhood, while the hip-hop, metal, electronic and commercial R&B contingents have also exploded. Rainey Street used to be lost area of low-rent housing and drug dens in the shadow of the freeway, but a rezoning law allowing commercial use has all but driven that out of there. Last year it was where a friend took me for a quiet drink. This year that same two blocks housed 20 bars and a dozen venues.

Among all this kerfuffle I am starting to query the wisdom of Scottish bands spending so much money to fly out there to compete in this giant, brilliant mess. It costs a lot to transport and house a full band, not to mention their equipment and the tedious visa application process, and even though some are supported by matched funding from Creative Scotland, it is still a hugely expensive undertaking.

I run a fairly well established if not well known record label and I honestly just go as a fan – I would have no idea how to really “work the festival” given our profile and budget. The conventional wisdom, to which I also subscribe, is that a band needs to have some stuff in place before it makes sense: a decent release to promote, the ability to book showcases beyond the official Showcasing Scotland nights, some idea of who they want to meet out in the US and why, and hopefully some semblance of a US audience.

Of this year’s crop, bands like Frightened Rabbit have just signed to Atlantic after three albums on Fatcat Records. They are on their tenth US tour, so that’s an easy one. Edinburgh hip-hop band Young Fathers may not exactly be huge over here, but they’ve just signed with Anticon Records in Los Angeles, who are one of the coolest and most credible independent labels around, so it also made perfect sense for them; with those credentials they could end up being bigger in the US than in the UK.

Bands where it’s more touch-and-go are the ones like Kid Canaveral, who travelled last year, and Glasgow newcomers Holy Esque who went this time. I am a fan of both bands, but I am not sure either are likely to take advantage of SXSW, unlike others with a bit more infrastructure. Nevertheless, there’s always that tantalising “what if” and provided you don’t get stung for money, it must be brilliant fun to play.

Oddly enough, Kid Canaveral found, as might Holy Esque, that their jaunt to Austin actually did them a lot of good back home. It’s odd, but sometimes you have to travel half way around the world just to show people back home that you’re serious. This can be a quirk of fans’ behaviour too: travelling out to Austin to end up seeing loads of bands you already know. One of the best ways to be surprised is to put yourself in the hands of your friends and see what they recommend.

My label actually grew from a music blog which I started in 2004. One of the first commenters went by the name of Campfires and Battlefields, and after three years of commenting on my site, and occasionally writing for it, we actually met for the first time at a Broken Records gig at my first SXSW.

That’s a cute story, but there are plenty of people I’ve met for the first time by travelling to these music festivals, be they SXSW or the smaller local versions like The Great Escape in Brighton or GoNorth in Inverness. The music industry is a pretty widely distributed community, and this kind of festival is essential for maintaining the kind of friendships on which we all depend to avoid going out of our minds.

So I still have no idea how we would try to make any kind of an impact on a festival of the size and scope of SXSW. The Great Escape or GoNorth, maybe, but not here. Nevertheless, between the friends I go out there with, the friends from elsewhere who go regularly and the friends who might just turn up for the first time, I’ve ended up with an odd, rag-tag group of pals who make this kind of festival special, beyond the music and the parties.

It’s utterly overwhelming, and it is a carnival of mental chaos which just grows bigger every year, but bloody hell it’s also incredible, exhausting fun. Oh, and am I allowed to mention the massive tattoo I got on my arm this year, with a dagger and a rose and my wife’s name on it – or is this a family newspaper?

• Matthew Young runs Edinburgh-based indie label Song, By Toad (songbytoadrecords.com). To read his daily music blog, and listen to podcasts and live band sessions, songbytoad.com