South by Southwest started out in 1987 as a way of getting a few local Austin bands on the map. Now it has become the equivalent of a world’s fair, taking over the city for a week and covering everything from politics to music, film and whatever crazy technology is about to transform our lives. Conversations about AI, outer space and the political future of America dominated this year, while the stars turned out — Ben Stiller, Jenna Ortega, Nicole Kidman and Paul Rudd all put in appearances — and countless showcases of mostly unknown new acts served as a reminder of the festival’s original purpose. Amid it all, British bands were pleasingly prominent.
Elsewhere John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival used his set at the outdoor barbecue Stubbs to celebrate winning back the rights to his songs after five decades of trying. Fogerty was still a teenager when he signed to the music mogul Saul Zaentz’s Fantasy Records in the mid-1960s. The deal meant that Fantasy owned the master recordings to CCR classics including Proud Mary and Fortunate Son, and that Fogerty lost millions in unpaid royalties. The label was sold to Concord in 2004 and only in 2023 did Fogerty get ownership of them. “I own my songs and I’m going to play every damn one,” he said. And he did.
Here is a rundown of what I learnt, rushing from talk to showcase to interactive experience, punctuated by the odd shrimp taco break.
Albums will become experiences
How do you get a listener to lose themselves to your album in the age of the eight-second attention span? If you’re Tim DeLaughter of the cult choral rock band the Polyphonic Spree, you team up with the film-maker Scott Berman and create an immersive listening experience inside a dome. For Resolution: A Cinephonic Rhapsody for the Soul, participants reclined in deckchairs and listened to the ecstatic psychedelic pop of the Texan band’s 2017 album Salvage Enterprise, accompanied by projections of Berman’s whimsy, touching scenes from everyday life and cosmic journeying.
“There are planetariums all over the US and Europe and our idea is to infiltrate them,” DeLaughter said. “Pink Floyd first presented Dark Side of the Moon to the public in a planetarium and we’re returning to that.”
Berman added: “The album is about deep emotions, understanding how we’re all going through the same thing in different ways. This lets you feel that message immediately.” Expect more of the immersive album experience soon.
British bands rule
New British acts have traditionally triumphed at SXSW, although it is conquering the rest of America afterwards that proves the challenge. The unpleasantly named Freak Slug, aka Manchester’s Xenya Genovese, make deceptively laid-back dream-pop interspersed with blasts of grungy rage and went down a storm, as did the St Vincent-like art rock of Dilettante. Honeyglaze, a three-piece from south London fronted by a virtuoso guitarist called Anouska Sokolow, combined words about love, loneliness, confrontation and other familiar subjects, delivered in a rather formal fashion, with the jazz-meets-Sixties rock complexity of the New York cult heroes Television. Then there was the Edinburgh-based Jacob Alon, who has a voice like Jeff Buckley and a willingness to expose deep intimacies in a way that proved, in a grimy little club called the Palm Door, remarkably affecting.
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Music documentaries are going through a boom period
A raft of films about musicians famous and obscure proved that there is a hunger for digging deeper into an artist’s story. The Makings of Curtis Mayfield is the directorial debut of the Grammy-winning soul singer/guitarist HER and although she managed to make it as much about HER as him, enthusing over Mayfield’s music with various legends while showcasing his famous guitar riffs, it was great to soak in the magic of the sweet-voiced genius behind Move on Up, Super Fly and other funky Seventies favourites.
With Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, Richard O’Brien’s son Linus took a personal route to exploring how his dad’s fringe play about a glam-rock mad scientist became the biggest cult film of all time, while Tom Stern’s Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt lived up to its name by exposing the wild, druggy, unhygienic world of Austin’s own outrageous Eighties psychedelic punks.
Folk is back
A quieter highlight of SXSW was a showcase by Broadside Hacks, a collective run by Campbell Baum, who is shaping up as a young answer to the Sixties folk impresario Joe Boyd. Then there’s Milkweed, a banjo-toting trio who take folkloric tales of life, death and mystery and apply them to screamingly intense songs that jump about all over the place, rather like a tormented version of those freak-folk originals the Incredible String Band. John Francis Flynn, from Dublin, captivated the crowd at the Velveeta Room dive bar with something not heard in these parts too often: a penny whistle solo. And Spitzer Space Telescope, aka the Michigan-born, London-based Dan MacDonald, sang old ballads in the boisterous fashion of the Clancy Brothers and Dave Van Ronk, cameo figures in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. In the hands of people under 30, this essentially ancient music sounded like it belonged to the modern age.
Extended reality gets emotional
Arts Council England and the British Council got behind a series of initiatives at SXSW’s XR Experience that showed how technology in art is most effectively used when serving human expression. Best of all was the special jury award-winning Proof as If Proof Were Needed, from the Brighton-based interactive arts group Blast Theory. A large screen showed a film of a couple’s messy flat in Taiwan: as visitors moved through a floorplan of the house the film shifted to the corresponding room. This project, by the Taiwanese artist Ting-Tong Chang, captured a sad portrait of a couple breaking up in which the visitor finds themselves both following and shaping the narrative by moving through the rooms and uncovering the story of domesticity collapsing.
Space is the place
Nasa is feeling the pain of Elon Musk’s attempts to slash government spending. So the space agency was all over SXSW, showing what it does in a bid to garner support. There were talks on growing crystals in space to battle cancer, using space technology to tackle water and food issues on Earth, and exploring the “dark universe”, not to mention a packed-out one on the next mission to circle the moon in Artemis II, the first crewed craft into deep space in more than half a century.
Democrats assemble
Leading Democrats used SXSW 2025 to herald a fresh start, although nobody cited a probable new leader. Most engaging was Tim Walz, who stated in a keynote speech that no matter what happens his party must not resort to the kind of tricks that helped the Republicans win the election. Elsewhere Michelle Obama held a talk with her brother, the podcast host Craig Robinson, while the Massachusetts governor, Elizabeth Warren, didn’t hold back. “Donald and Elon are bullies,” she declared before 3,500 people at the Austin Convention Center. “They think calling people names or waving a chainsaw makes them look manly.” The audience, ensconced in the liberal bubble of SXSW, cheered accordingly.
Unicorns are not just for children
The big hit of the film festival was Death of a Unicorn, a horror-comedy from A24 in which those cute staples of children’s fairytales turn out to be extremely vengeful. When the lawyer Elliot (played by Paul Rudd) runs over and kills a baby unicorn on a road trip with his daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), he stuffs it in the trunk and drives to his billionaire boss’s home rather than doing the right thing and alerting the authorities. So begins a morality fable on nature, greed and the pharmaceutical industry, with Richard E Grant’s industrialist billionaire seeing money-making potential in the dead creature’s blood and bones, angering the unicorn community accordingly. “We give you that magical, pure unicorn,” the director Alex Scharfman said, “but it’s not what you expect it to be.” You can say that again.
