Reflections on SXSW London

I’d bought a Platinum Pass (for entry to all activities) many months in advance, excited that the legendary event was coming to the UK for the first time. I wasn’t sure what it would actually be; I was sure I wanted to be there.

But I hadn’t really engaged with it since.

I had tried to download their app to explore the programme and access my QR code (needed to secure my lanyard) but received notification that my phone was too old. Hmmm, being too old was definitely a theme that followed me around for the week – I was usually the oldest person in every room.

Actually, full marks to their team. They replied very swiftly to my panicky email and made provision for me. Although maybe it wasn’t just me because, in the background, they rolled out an entire web-app version with all the same features. That seemed to go live on the first morning as I got on the train. Great late-night working, developers.

I did try to put together an itinerary for at least my first day, using that web-app, on the train there. It was all too overwhelming and I failed to do that… ‘I’ll get there and it’ll all fall into place. It’ll be fine’.

I got there and it was not fine. There was a queue around the block and well into the next block to retrieve lanyards. A sad, stuffed bear looked down on our plight. ‘oh, well, that’s the opening sessions missed’.

“Are you excited?” asked the person who approved my ID and checked I looked like the photo on my lanyard. They were. I’m not sure what emotion I was feeling – trepidation, confusion, befuddlement maybe.

Lanyard secured (and immediately stuffed into my pocket as I really don’t want to be the kind of person who walks around Shoreditch wearing a Platinum lanyard) I quick-walked to Rich Mix for… I wasn’t really sure but I vaguely remember the sessions being interesting there on the first day.

More through luck than judgement I found a session that I had previously noted: How Companies And Talent Are Evolving To Stay Ahead.

I very quickly realised it wasn’t for me. The speakers were interesting and knowledgable but I find it icky to refer to people as ‘talent’ or ‘creatives’, there to service ‘brands’. There was a lot of talk about talent needing to be multi-platform (that meant Tik-Tok + Twitch + Insta + Podcasts + some live events) to stay relevant enough to secure ‘co-labs’ from brands. It left me feeling cold. It was a chill that returned many times in the week.

I was desperate for some warmth. I found it at UK House which seemed to house events by Arts Council, British Council and maybe other QUANGOs. It became my go-to venue for a couple of days (it only seemed to be around for a couple of days). I saw lots of interesting talks there and plenty of great live music. Everything seemed to be geared around the actual creative arts and audiences rather than how best to leverage ‘talent’ to sell stuff.

Across the days, my favourites included:

• Hearing about new work from Jason Bruges. I met Jason around 20 years ago when he first set up his studio (we were at the same event, talking to sixth formers about careers). He has been consistently producing outstanding public art, intersecting with technology, ever since. And I’ve been lucky to work with him and exchange studio visits. Yes, most often the work is commercially driven, but his passion is for the innovation, the aesthetic and the impact on audiences (and the planet).
• Listing to the very slick Katie Derham interviewing a panel about large scale audience interaction, events and venues. The title was silly. Putting (You, Me, Bum) Bums on Seats, but the panel were excellent: Max Alexander (SXSW London and Secret Cinema), Simon Aldred (Broadwick Live), Elaine Bedell (Southbank Centre) and Jonathan Harper (Paraorchestra). It was genuinely refreshing and fascinating to hear them talk about the hard work and harsh realities (legal, planning, logistics, finance and more) of putting on events at scale. Always focused on their end goal – the joy and wonder of audiences.

It was a bit of a walk back to Brick Lane but by now I’d realised that the largest hub of events was there, in the Truman Brewery buildings.

I did try to engage with talks in there but there were always queues, often long queues for the talk after next. I had been sold on the idea that having an expensive Platinum Pass would get priority access. But now I realise that didn’t mean avoiding queues, and actually half the queue also seemed to have Platinum Passes.

There were emails and announcements telling us about the colour-band priorities for each queue but in reality the events seemed to either be so wildly over capacity that everyone queued for ages, or were relatively quiet and everyone could wander in.

I gave up and wandered back outside to see Wildes. That poor performer was on a stage, obscured by the sponsor’s car. Almost nobody was watching them play apart from photographers. They were great. I note that their latest single is called Wipe Away The Tears.

I was a bit lost as to what to do next. I tried Rich Mix again for TikTok to Tolstoy with Munya Chuwawa. The queue was already all the way down the street outside by the time I got there. I gave up and went for lunch.

I walked between venues and there seemed to be queues everywhere. But the most interesting one I spotted was outside Village Underground and a long way down Great Eastern Street. There were hundreds of very excited Asian faces. They looked more fun than the people outside the technology talks so I joined the SXSW entry queue for that gig, whatever it might be.

Henry Lau

It turned out to be Henry Lau, a Canadian-born actor, artist, restauranter and multi-instrumental musician, based in South Korea and China. I don’t remember ever being at a gig like that before – properly adoring fans, screaming, declaring their love and offering marriage proposals but all carefully calibrated within socially acceptable limits. Most remarkable was the almost total lack of applause between songs; perhaps that was because almost everyone had their hands full, recording every moment on their phones. Remarkable stuff.

Side note: the duty manager at Village Underground was exceptional, keeping everyone (especially the security staff) calm in the face of this unexpectedly sold-out lunchtime gig.

There were other talks and stuff. There was a lot of chatting about platforms (actually mostly about TikTok and Twitch) and finance and where the ‘big money’ is going next (wherever gullible people buy AI Tulip bulbs, or wherever governments remove taxation and internationally agreed standards).

But I was bored with queuing and not quite knowing what was going on where – none of the venues had running times posted on the doors, which would have really helped everyone.

So I went to JuJu’s bar to watch Cosmorat and then Emiline (both presented by Line of Best Fit) and scootched across the courtyard, in between, to catch Baby Said at Brick Lane Tap Room. They were all great.

By now the talks had all finished and the evening was given over to the bands. But I’d stupidly double-booked and instead headed to the Donmar to see Patrick Marber’s excellently depressing play, Dealer’s Choice.

My first day of the first SXSW London was over. And I’d learned a couple of lessons…

• The venues were all a bit too far away from each other to just take a punt on something.
• I’d much rather listen to a screeching guitar than queue to hear tech-bros chatting about market verticals.

The rest of the week was a blur. But I followed my instincts, stayed away from the queues and spent most of my time in dark music venues. Here are some highlights…

In the tiny basement of the stupidly named, Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes, I saw Thistle. It was so crowded that this (above) is the best photo I could manage. They were a wonderfully youthful, raw, wall of sound – like watching an early Ride. There were touches of Foo Fighters – but I’m sure they can address that and remove them in time.

I also really enjoyed the energetic performance of TaliaBle, spitting lyrics whilst bouncing between, and in the face of, a lacklustre audience, back in the JuJu Bar. Actually I thought all the performers did a great job of keeping up the energy and engagement in some challenging circumstances.

Most artists only got a half hour showcase. Cucamaras spent half of that time, having to hoist a SXSW banner*, behind the stage at Hoxton Hall. It was all the more remarkable that they delivered such a catchy set. Maybe the 15 minute limit contributed to their blistering, breakneck delivery.

* I noted that this banner had been swapped out by the next day so maybe this was a temporary, contractual obligation whilst waiting for the ‘real’ banner.

Sadly the bands I wanted to see didn’t all play in the same venue, consecutively. So I racked up upward of 20K steps each day, walking to a fro through the fashionable haircuts and men without socks, my lanyard tucked in my pocket.

But Hoxton Hall was definitely my go-to venue. I really enjoyed…

The youthful exuberance of The Kites; the Glasgow swagger and surprisingly poppy choruses of Shambollics (with their exceptionally hard working drummer); the queer-country sensibilities of Girl Band (and their effortlessly cool drummer); and the guitar feedback landscapes of Barcelona four-piece, Salvana, made all the more remarkable when they told us they were having to play on borrowed instruments (because – Brexit).

I also spent a lot of time upstairs in The Old Blue Last, which was a new venue to me.

I didn’t not like Hot Stamp (and their new single, Josephine is very catchy) but I found their self conscious delivery difficult to engage with. Tooth dressed and sang like a great college radio band, theirs was another exceptional dummer keeping them tightly timed for their half-hour of modern ‘punk’. But it was my last band of SXSW, Lovers Skit that most engaged me at that venue – lo-fi, breakbeat, delivered with a contrived in-your-face confidence.

I really did see a fair few talk too. Amongst my favourites were Lesley-Ann Daley, who spoke about the Ethical Design of Sensory Augmentation Technologies in ways that I found both hugely engaging and occasionally horrifying. And a panel discussing Where we belong: Reclaiming English identity and our collective story from the culture wars where each speaker (and the excellent moderator) brought a fresh perspective on how and why it is important to take back the narratives from the far right. Caroline Lucas was one of those panelists, so it was a privilege just to be in that room.

There was also some art. But not a lot, which surprised me.

The tagline of the event (don’t get me started on why everyone thinks they need a tagline) was Beautiful Collisions. But I really didn’t see that followed though. Some level of design/art/performance intervention would have seemed the logical way to do that.

LDN LAB, curated by (friend from Cog’s history) Alex Poots, took over Protein Studios with large scale Warhol videos, AI audio work and installations.

These included a three-way video conversation between curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Marina Abramovich, and her AI persona. To me that felt a little ‘cake and eat it’ by pompously pointing out the pomposity of the art world, but it was interesting and will feel very of-the-moment in a few months time.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed Beeple’s generative sculpture, The Tree of Knowledge: a constantly shifting, illuminated cube that spins out news articles and has a ‘chaos button’, activated by the audience. In the accompanying video essay, the artists talks about how we can choose our own reality – pick up our screen and have unfolding horror streamed into our brains, or put down the screen and avoid engagement with the wider world. Our choice.

There were also all sorts of talks, interviews and artist interventions, none of which I was aware of until I researched this article and found all new pages, linked within the SXSW website. Oh well.

It’s three weeks after my time at SXSW. Long enough to reflect.

My thoughts…

• Congrats to whoever coordinated the graphics all across Shoreditch, in and around every venue – you really couldn’t miss it and it was all consistently, brilliantly executed.
• London probably did have to be the first UK venue but it was far from ideal. It was too sprawling and too chaotic. It felt like something happening in and around an already busy place (there were at least two other major conferences happening concurrently in the same region, plus the theatres, galleries, shops and bars that were all there already). Maybe consider taking over a smaller city instead – somewhere the scale of Leeds would be ideal.
• Perhaps you can run a Music Festival, a Film Festival, and a Technology Conference alongside each other. But why, unless the music and film are purely a showcase for bookers, producers and talent scouts?
• You understand how it all fits together and how the pricing bands work, and when key moments are happening, and how early to arrive and why some days are focused on specific topics etc. But you really do need to communicate that to your audiences and reiterate it over and over again.
• Put the running order of each room, on the outside of each room. Not on a screen, three floors away.
• The queuing system does not work. Most people I spoke to missed most of the things they wanted to see. Get people to book in advance for at least 70% of the capacity of each room, and let others choose to queue if they haven’t booked.
• If it really is a conference about ideas, then curate the talks in a more meaningful way with clear themes and strands. And let people know that’s what you’re doing.
• Use more artists and creative people, especially performers to create activations and moments of wonder to elevate the experience beyond a selfie in front of a 3-D logo.

Most importantly, don’t take any notice of me. It was a near impossible challenge and you pulled it off, brilliantly. Everything ran to time, the tech worked brilliantly in every venue. You pulled off some great PR moments and provided opportunities for everyone to promote you whilst promoting themselves. SXSW London really was the place to be for those few days and London was all the better for your hard work.

See you next year? Maybe in Leeds?

I’ll be buying a music pass and sticking to the darkened rooms.

PS. On my way home, on my final day, Old Street Station was awash with ads that somehow seemed to summarise my feelings about the agenda behind lot of the tech talks I’d seen. Artisan promises a new world where employers won’t need to put up with the nonsense that comes with employing people – AI can do all their jobs instead.

I wonder how the ‘creative’ felt when they were working on client corrections and the final sign-off on these ads that proudly read – Stop Hiring Humans.