Even with their rigorous schedule of smoking and wearing sunglasses, Foals still find time to blog about playing SXSW.
With drinking, more drinking and an endless series of afternoon gigs attended by three men and a flea-infested dog, you'd be forgiven for confusing Austin's SXSW festival with a random page from Pete Doherty's tour diary. In fact, such is the air of chilled debauchery at the festival that it's a miracle most bands make it to their slots on time. And no wonder at all that said bands don't, when faced with the temptation of free-flowing margaritas, get around to blogging about their holiday work.
Luckily, thanks to the fact that mobile phones are eroding every last speck of privacy from our daily lives, these days any old groupie can be the next MTV, simply by grabbing the stars they bump into while stumbling pissed down 6th Street and yapping to them. Hence it's the posts on YouTube this week that gave you the juiciest goss:
"I wore these tiny Levis short shorts, like chicks wear now. Hotpants, basically, and a pair of moccasins. The crowd was not going wild for us and I got nervous. I don't know why but I started playing with one of Scott's broken drumsticks and was kinda making marks on my flesh, and little bits of blood were coming out."
Before you think Iggy Pop and the Stooges are back to their hell-raising best, relax. He's recalling anecdotes of the band's wilder days with intrepid US rock hack David Fricke at a SXSW press conference. He then goes on a rather odd tangent about how it was OK for Joe Cocker to be an "English white negro" but not OK for him to be "a member of the Stooges", before the guy filming it all gets busted and made to stop.
Not everyone's got such crazy tales to tell, though:
"I'm sick of playing acoustic sets to fucking rooms full of nobody.... I couldn't afford to get the band here for the whole thing. It's costing me four grand to get 'em here for one day!"
Poor Plan B who tells intrepid UK rock hack Dan Martin of his woes, which include nearly getting into a bar brawl. He also makes an open declaration of love for Amy Winehouse, inviting her to do a collaboration which would, almost certainly, be the best record of next year.
Talking of which, you can catch the Winehouse herself, revealing how she's become addicted to Texan hot sauce and explaining why her SXSW show was different to the ones she plays in the UK ("I wasn't drunk"). There's also quite peculiar papped footage of Wayne Coyne wandering down the main drag and - from what it looks like on the screen - interviewing a man's bottom.
One band who did have time to document it all in words were hotly-tipped math-rockers Foals, whose SXSW shows managed to bend the brain of all who caught them. In a lengthy MySpace post, they sum up the touring experience with a list of pros and cons. These include shaving a chunk out of their tour manager's hair, stealing other band's riders, losing £400 of equipment after a banging night at DURRR club, drinking pints of wine, deconstructing a Travelodge room and screaming "Fuck it, the label can pay!", eating chicken-frankfurter burgers from Wimpy, washing in "someone else's body fluids" and being so lonely you end up playing charades on Valentine's Day.
As for SXSW, the downside was the 10-hour flight, getting bullied by some US Marines and "the niggling feeling that I should really send someone a postcard". But on the plus side, they got to eat pancakes, wear denim jackets and listen to their driver sing Luther Vandross a cappella everyday. Brilliant. And to think that bands sometimes moan about journalists not focussing on the music!
