I’m sure you know by now that Spoonfed had quite a presence at SXSW Interactive Festival this year, but to outdone, our intrepid Music Editor Dom Haley boozed and cruised his way around Texas to find the hottest new acts that will be shaking up the international music scene in 2010.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

Wednesday 17 March: Austin, Texas

The saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions never rings more true than at a festival. I had some big aims for my first proper day at SXSW; hang out with cute Texan girls,  eat a burrito and  maybe catch Thee Vicars, Lovvers, Abe Vigoda and Strange Boys. Needless to say I failed on all counts.

Waking up jet-lagged and later than I would of liked, I headed down town to get acquainted with the place, grab some free beer from the conference centre and generally see what’s up. With nothing due to start for a few hours, Alex and I headed over to Jamie’s Spanish Bar (pronounced Haimay’s) for what we had been told were the best margaritas in town. Grabbing a couple of $6 cocktails, we took a seat in the shady patio area to enjoy one of the more unique non-official showcases SXSW has to offer – The Beatles Ukulele project. Originally from the cool cafe-bars of Brooklyn, this mad-cap scheme is basically an attempt to play the whole of the Beatles back-catalogue over a 2-day period using a ukulele player, a cover band called ‘The Eggmen’ and a revolving draft of some of the festival’s many performers and famous faces. As an introduction to live music in Austin, it’ll take some beating.

After sinking a couple more margaritas, we’re starting to feel the pangs of hunger, so after saying our goodbyes, we head round the corner to Brush Park where our friends Canadian Blast are holding their 6th annual BBQ with free food, free beer for us press types and some of the best bands from the Northern frontier. Alas, we arrive a bit too late for the food, but we’re handed a couple of cans of Lonestar and a kick-ass view of You Say Party, We Say Die as they wrestle through a set of theatrical chamber pop.

It’s OK, but we’re still hungry. So sucking up our last ounces of strength we head down to the arse-end of 6th street to a place called Death Metal Pizza, with the idea that a place called Death Metal Pizza can’t fail to be awesome. Pitching up just in time to grab a couple of slices of $3 pizza from a bunch of stoners listening to Slayer, we head out to the garden-come-stage area to watch a band called Restavaunt play a set of ball busting blues rock. Featuring a guy from a David Lynch movie on guitar accompanied by a maniac banging license plates whilst wearing a Ke$ha t-shirt, they have to win the prize for weirdest band of the day.

After meeting up with the rest of the people we were staying with, it’s decided that now is the right time to hit the town proper. We visit The Beauty Bar first, where we spend a couple of hours drinking petron and watching Munch Munch and Jeremy Jay before stumbling through town to see Londoners Fake Blood and Annie Mac throw down glitchy electro with a bunch of drunken Americans doing this strange running on the spot dance. I swear to God, at one point I thought that I had been transported back to a Wednesday night chug-a-thon at Catch, but that might just have been the tequila talking.

Thursday 18 March: Austin, Texas

The Spider House bar is right down the street from the house we are staying, and like everything else in Austin it’s a weird place. One part coffee house, one part biker bar and one part art project, it’s hosting BrooklynVegan’s Day Party today, and seems like the perfect place to sip Mexican beer, nurse our hang-overs and watch bad-ass experimental psychedelia and indie bands. After watching sets from The Beets, Lovvers and Golden Triangle, we’re suitable warmed up for another day of mischief in Texas.

Since I didn’t get round to watching anybody I’d wanted to see yesterday, I decided it wasn’t really worth making any concrete plans and it was better to take things as they come. Cramming myself into Lovvers’ tour van, we head down to the centre of town and first stop was to catch a hardcore band called Total Abuse  make a noise that it somewhere between Born Against and Modern Life Is War at a local library based showcase. Next, we head back to Jamie’s Spanish Bar to watch Ben Kweller romp the Beatles Ukulele show home.

Emerging back onto Red River, I start to walk towards the conference centre for a free beer, but walk straight into an impromptu Fucked Up show outside of Beerland instead. I have to admit that Fucked Up have become something of a parody of themselves in recent times, with a knack of replacing the gut punching hardcore and shredding guitars I used to love with too many in-jokes and stupid covers, and they seem to have reached new lows by the looks of this shambles of a gig, with the guys not even completing one song with out someone messing up. But the whole novelty of seeing a hardcore band play to a bunch of people in a city street more than makes up for the shoddy performance, and by the time they’re fumbling through a cover of the Sex Pistol’s ‘Bodies’, I’m at the front singing along.

Lacking an official SXSW pass means that I’m pretty much stuck to unofficial showcases, which whilst usually being the most fun also normally mean the most travelling around. Hitching a ride with Posy who runs those awesome ‘I Heart’ nights at The Macbeth, we head up the road out of town to the Burger Record showcase at TrailerSpace records. Perched on a hill over-looking Austin and situated between a pizza joint and an liquor store, this place has to be seen to be believed – and we spend the next couple of hours drinking fizzy US beer in between watching amazing sets from Devon Williams, Ty Segall and Wild America and watching the spring sun sink slowly over Austin.

The band of the day has to be Audacity, who played one of the most energetic, craziest and down-right most exciting shows I’ve seen in a good long time. Starting off to the strains of a drunken man banging beer cans together whilst chanting ‘go back to Brooklyn’ to a depressed-looking band called White Wires who have just been kicked off the stage to make way for these guys, they proceed to play a set of fast loose garage rock to a room of flailing limbs and smiling faces. At one point one of the indie kids who had come to see White Wires tries to rush the stage, but it’s all laughed off in typical easy-going American style, and as one guy told the band after the show ‘ when that guy did that, it only made you guys seem better’.

To be continued…