Local color...
A few snippets of, erm, local colour from the past couple of days. On Wednesday, online boss Clare and I had a bit of trouble finding the venue on our first evening out, in search of the Tap Room, where Trash Fashion were playing...
It soon becomes clear that the hardest part is co-ordinating times and places on any given evening...
It beats me how Huw and Lammo - in fact the whole Introducing gang - manage to get around so many gigs in such a wide area in such a short time. My first idea was to locate some key venues via Google Maps, then mark up the print-out by hand with bands and times... 
That theory broke down on the second evening. Half the shows proved impossible to get into, and as described in my earlier post I ended up simply wandering from bar to bar and queue to queue, drinking in the atmosphere of the warm southern evening.
Next day I headed to the SxSW headquarters at the Austin Convention Center to try and get Official Permission to use my little camcorder at Official Events. The response was an absolute and stone-cold "no". So my next stop - the Music Trade Fair immediately behind the press office - had to be recorded with still photos, using my mobile phone. But take a look - it struck me as a fascinating reminder of the infrastructure musicians have to deal with behind the scenes just to get their work heard in the first place. Music is much more central to US culture (and Texan culture in particular) than it is in Britain. As a result there's a huge sector of support services for bands and songwriters that musicians back home can only dream of...
