SATURDAY, 15 MARCH

For us, the first half of Saturday is all about Q’s official SXSW party, the first time we have appeared in such a guise in Texas. The bash is scheduled to kick off at 4pm at the Driskill Hotel, the oldest building in Austin.

The Driskill is certainly an impressively grand venue. Upon entering through it wooden doors, you pass from the bright sunlight and heat of the city and into a cool, dark interior of marble floors, sweeping staircases and classical pillars. Up one such winding staircase is the opulent room that has been set a side for the Q party. The stage and brilliant red Q backdrop at one end and the fleet of games provided by our partners Guitar Hero 3 at the other are thoroughly incongruous; cucumber sandwiches, scones and tea served from bone china sets would be far more in keeping with the general tone.

That the room is also as long as a football pitch also gives pause for concern. It’s a big, big space to fill. What if no one comes? This thought at least prompts one to locate the toilet and in doing so get a more detailed feel for the place. Which, since I’ve arrived at 1.30pm, is one way of using up time that doesn’t involve gnawing my fingernails to the bone. The other is to sit and watch an odd assortment of folk drift through the room before it is – in US events organisation speak – locked down.

Among these is a full wedding party. The bride, resplendent in her white gown, opts to have her photograph taken on the stage in front of the Q logo. Which is odd. Other persons are drawn to the Guitar Hero 3 consoles as if they were magnetic. Hence, I listen to a succession of fantastical axe heroes as they widdle their way through the Scorpions’ Rock You Like Hurricane and Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot. For two hours. It’s faintly amusing the first time. Come the hundredth…

Happily, by the time the shadows are lengthening outside, a queue of people is snaking down and around the stairs, and out into the street. And soon enough, 600 music industry folk are rubbing shoulders, feasting upon canapes and serving up a rising hum of chatter that, being music industry folk, continues into and throughout the artists’ performances.

Our performers, though, are made of strong stuff and set about the task in hand with admirable fortitude. First up is Lightspeed Champion, aka Dev Hynes, who is pleasingly sporting his big fur hat even in 90 degrees heat. His acoustic vignettes are similarly engaging, ditto the humour with which they’re rendered. “This,” he notes archly at one point, “is a song about prostitution. Enjoy your food.”

He also throws in a couple of covers – The Vines (Outtatheway! if memory of the long gone Highly Evolved album serves) and Weezer (Perfect Situation) – to complete a finely judged opening turn.

Next up are These New Puritans, the dark, brooding presence to Dev’s summery demeanour. But they negotiate the angular turns and rhythmic rumble of their Beat Pyramid album like three men and a woman on a mission to smash those assembled into submission. It’s a short, somehow menacing, and by the end thrilling performance.

Most of those here, though, have come to see Kate Nash, who is here making her only appearance at SXSW. The space in front of the stage is full by the time the Londoner takes up her acoustic guitar. Kate Nash then proceeds to hold them gripped for the next 30 minutes. The likes of Birds and Dickhead are as wryly amusing as ever, but it’s a clutch of new songs and the confident aura that Kate projects in performing that suggest she is here for the long haul.

Of those new songs, I Hate Seagulls is the most striking initially, not just for its title, but also for the depth and craft with which it’s sung. She has, clearly, come a long way. Indeed, by the time she rolls out Foundations from behind an electric piano, accompanied on guitar by tour manager Henry, she may as well take a victory lap around the hotel.

The room noticeably thins out once Kate finishes. This would present some bands with a gruelling challenge, but not so the Pigeon Detectives for whom it is merely excuse to career through their allotted time with even greater wild abandon than is the norm. Key to this is singer Matt Bowman, a whirling dervish of curls and sweat, forever swinging his microphone about in increasingly terrifying arcs and exhorting a response out of his audience.

There is, of course, nothing at all complicated about the Pigeon Detectives, They are old school indie to their core, a fact that the several new songs they play only serves to re-enforce. But right here, the simple pleasures of I Found Out and I’m Not Sorry are precisely what was ordered. Indeed, theirs is the one set I’ve seen all week that has a sense of fun and a smile to it.

And then, after months of planning, we’re done. There is, it should be noted, much self-congratulatory back-slapping all round, and a commitment to come back next year and do it all again. For now, though, and if you’ll spare me a public service announcement, and I can only thank the makers of Guitar Hero 3, the good folk at PRS and xtaster, our resident DJ Akala and, especially, Mr Stuart Knight Esq for all their hard work on our behalf. Good on you folks, now go and have a stiff drink…

Up the road at Stubbs, our sister magazine Mojo have put their name to a bash which marks Duffy’s debut on Texan soil. We arrive just in time to see the Welsh songstress make her entrance. It’s immediately apparent that she’s not the same Duffy I saw a few months back supporting Magic Numbers at London’s Festival Hall. Then, she looked for all the world like a rabbit caught in the headlights of approaching fame, and was dressed down in jeans and jumper. Here, she sports a slinky black dress and stands before the curious – and sizeable – throng like a woman revelling in the moment.

The keepers between then and now are her voice, a splendid thing, and the clutch of insistent soul-pop tunes she has at her disposal. How sad, then, that when she’s crying out to be supported by a crack band, she is instead saddled with a crew of session musicians who invest as much emotion and passion into the task as they would posting a letter.

Following Duffy are Okkervil River, local boys, and purveyors of magisterial folk rock, superbly highlighted by last year’s The Stage Names album. I was thoroughly looking forward to them, but in the event quickly found my attention wandering, It could be that weariness is finally setting in, but I decide to skip the rest of their set and headliner Roky Erickson, and instead finish up my SXSW in a church.

St David’s Church, to be entirely accurate, which is hosting a solo show by My Morning Jacket man Jim James. It proves to be a good call. The church’s high wooden ceilings, large glass windows and vast pipe organ give James a perfect setting in which to play, and the place is packed to the rafters by the time he comes on (another thanks – this time to the band’s manager Matt for smuggling us in).

Forty minutes later, and having sung a succession of celestial acoustic songs, James continues where he left off the other night with his band at Austin’s Music Hall – en route to greatness. It is the perfect way to sign off…

…Or at least it would be were I not to run into an ebullient Billy Bragg in the lift back at the hotel. He tells me that following the special show he and KT Tunstall played for Q at the HMV shop on London’s Oxford Street last month, the pair were prompted to write a song together. “You’ll hear it soon,” says Billy, and then he’s gone with the wave of a hand and a broad smile. As, indeed, I must too.

See y’all.

Paul Rees, Editor, Q