TUESDAY, 11 MARCH

Welcome to Texas. Or, more precisely, welcome to the state capital Austin, a pert little city located amongst vast tracts of flat scrubland. It is here that the SXSW Music Conference takes place annually, and here where we’ll be (for this is Q’s debut at the event) for the next five days.

Getting and then, as one must, registering here is a strangely disorientating experience. For starters you have to come via Houston, which entails passing through an airport named after George Bush the elder. It is, too, home to a restaurant called Bubba’s and an emporium dealing in what appear to be buckets of ginger beer. So far so conforming to stereotype.

Austin is but an hour’s flight from Houston. Pleasingly, our hotel, the Hilton, is located a stone’s thrown from Sixth Avenue, the mile or so long drag upon which most of the SXSW action takes place. For those unfamiliar with the SXSW concept it is a simple one: hundred upon hundred of bands and artists play shows at every bar, club and room that can squeeze from noon till the early hours for five days. Which patently is no bad thing. To put this into context, tomorrow the official brochure lists more than 70 venues, each hosting four to five shows throughout the day – ranging from R.E.M. at Stubbs to Pterodactyl at Habana Calle 6 (no, me neither).

Patently, you can’t see everyone, or even most of them. Hence selective organisation is called for; and to have that one must get hold of the aforementioned official brochure, and to do so one must officially register for the event. Which is an odd process involving a walk across the road from the hotel to the SXSW Convention Centre, a bland concrete edifice of many floors. Here one is thrust into a world of queues and grinning young women in yellow T-shirts whose job it appears to be to direct you to the next queue (staple greeting: “And how are you today? I’m so pleased to hear that!”) and many, many men with beards that would put ZZ Top to shame.

Once through this system of standing and waiting, and going up and down escalators, and awaiting delivery of your official SXSW from within the green waiting zone (so called because it is a green rectangle of carpet with Waiting Zone emblazoned across it), you are dispatched to the Big Bag Collection Point (again, a point from which one collects a big bag). Said Big Bag is full of a rainforest’s worth of paper – free magazines, stickers, CDs, flyers and – oh yes – chewing gum, all pertaining to something or other to do with SXSW. Most of it, of course, immediately finds its way to the bin. What doesn’t is the official brochure.

Thanks to this highly useful artefact I now know – or, more precisely, now hope – that I will be watching Texan country great Joe Ely at 10pm on Thursday and Daniel Lanois, evidently on a busman’s holiday from producing the next U2 album, at 8pm on Friday. And much more besides – including, I am oddly giddy to note, the Official Q Party, at the Driskill Hotel from 4pm on Saturday and featuring the none-too-shabby line-up of Pigeon Detectives, Kate Nash, Lightspeed Champion and These New Puritans.

But all of that’s for later. First there are two further SXSW initiations to go the through. Beginning with the dawning realisation that you will run into/hear from great numbers of people from the UK, and all of them will excitingly suggest that “we meet”, as if you have arrived from another planet after a galactic journey lasting decades. And ending with the rather blurry and jet-lag tinged knowledge that the grandly titled Director’s Launch Party (to which you are – ta-da – an official guest) is, in fact, nothing more than a few people having a drink in a bar. That all of them by the end of the night appear to have ZZ Top beards perhaps says more about what’s coming up than anything else.

Paul Rees, Editor, Q