It’s not often that I’m moved to gush. Oh, alright, I’ll be honest. I am frequently moved to gush when it comes to music I love. It’s just that too often I couldn’t be arsed to actually do it.
This time round I am so blown away by the Parlotones’ new CD I have to have my say.
One of the panellists I listened to at SXSW put a slide up containing the world’s shortest sci-fi novel:
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”
(sidebar – this is actually pretty flawed as a novel, making the sexist assumption that the last man on earth is also the last person, but let’s not nitpick)
Perhaps in years to come, thanks to Twitter and Facebook, we’ll all have been reduced to beings with attention spans shorter than a metalhead at a Britney concert. Never mind – I’m not going to let a bandwagon pass me by, so here are some reviews of the bands I’ve seen at SXSW, Twitter-style. In no particular order. It’s important to note (or maybe it’s not, but I’ll note it anyway) that SXSW is a Festival of discovery and if you don’t recognise many of the names on the list don’t worry – nor had I until I stumbled into their shows on a word of mouth recommendation, because I liked the poster or I needed a beer and was passing by. I’ve left out a couple of bands I did see perform purely because I didn’t stick around for long or missed their names, which is, I guess, a review in itself.
(This is a piece I did for the M&G Podcast this week)
I’m in Austin, Texas. Well, that’s true but not absolutely true. I’m at South by Southwest – a week long orgy of a conference that spans the triple disciplines of interactive, film and music, and all the grey areas in between that they share. To say that South by (as we regulars call it) is big, is like saying that Table Mountain is pretty. It’s true, but it doesn’t begin to do the kind of justice to the statement that true hyperbole can. It’s frigging ginormous. So while I am in Austin, I’m in Austin during something so big and all consuming that the city becomes secondary. Like Edinburgh or Grahamstown during their festivals, or Mecca during the hajj. The cities are there, but they become secondary to the event which the city wears like a fresh skin. South by is as much the skin of Austin as it is the heart, lungs and quivering liver.
Trips like this are best reflected on, their true value only unfolding in the fullness of time. Asking me in the middle of the frenzy to offer any insight into its worth or impact is like turning to me in the middle of a movie and asking me what I thought. I can tell you I am enjoying it, but I can’t tell you why. So let me do this….
Being at the creative and technological hub of the world, and sharing that experience with those who shaped the world to begin with is enough, I think, to qualify me to offer up some observations and theories about trends.
Some time back I heard of a group of people on the internet who were spending their time creating graphs of songs titles and lyrics and posting them online – in fact there was a whole song chart pool on Flickr that was collecting them all. As a closet geek with a passion for music, the idea appealed to me hugely and I found myself laughing out loud at a couple. Some stood out for me particularly – here are two:
(if you don’t get them, then feel free to choose another exciting post on this blog to read, the rest won’t make that much sense to you!)
Anyway, at the time I thought it would be fun to create a couple, and I promised myself that when I had time I would give it a stab. That was a year ago, and I finally got round to doing it. So here are a couple of my own:
It is either slightly disconcerting or enormously flattering when you arrive at a hotel for the first time and the receptionist greets you by name. In the case of my arrival at the Rapid Waters Hotel (and I use all three of those words advisedly) 29km outside of Potchefstroom, it could only be the former. The whole place has an air of being somewhere that no one has stayed at for weeks. Getting there involves a slow crawl along a pockmarked, gravel road that winds through a trail of rusty farm debris and dilapidated houses. In anticipation of my arrival, the staff have probably been gazing at the sole entry in their booking register every morning, lovingly running a finger over the inked curves of my name, mouthing each syllable, tasting the delicious prospect of, well, a guest. And so it was, after a long and dusty drive from Johannesburg, that I stepped across the threshold. A flicker of relief across the lady’s face. I hadn’t let her down. “Anthony Lankester” she told me as I pushed open the jangly door, stepped over two mangy poodles and tried to decipher her outline from under a cloud of smoke (hers, not mine).
On Wednesday night I went to see Jethro Tull in concert. Not because I’m a fan, but because my wife is and one of my favourite things to do is go to live concerts. Another is to keep my wife happy, so this worked all round.
In fact, even saying I’m not a big fan of theirs is a bit disingenuous. I’m a complete non-fan who would have been hard pressed to hum a single Tull tune. I don’t actively dislike them; they have just never featured on my radar. I dimly recall my parents owning an album, and I think I saw a video of theirs on Pop Shop in the early 1980s, but that’s the extent of my contact with the band.
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