SXSW London: ‘A love letter to the capital I know’

Over the past four decades, South by Southwest (SXSW) has gone from a tiny annual showcase for new musical talent in Austin, Texas, to a sprawling behemoth that takes over the city for a week each March, encompassing film and technology as well as music.

Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran and Stormzy all made early appearances there, while the likes of Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg have taken part in its conference talks. Now, after branching out to Sydney in 2023, the festival is coming to London – from Monday through Saturday – and the entrance it’s making is not exactly modest.

“It's a huge event,” says Adem Holness, SXSW London’s head of music. “We've got over 500 artists performing this week, with 17 stages dedicated to performances and talks.” Rather than clustering inside a single fenced-off location, these stages will be spread out across the East End, and over six days industry execs and punters will be seen galloping between venues to catch the next hot act – headliners include Erykah Badu (appearing under her alias DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown), Alice Glass and the Grammy award-winning Nigerian artist Tems.

And that’s just the music strand. The broader festival will host speakers such as Idris Elba, Jane Goodall and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who’ll be fielding questions about AI and creativity. Eminem will premiere his documentary Stans, looking at the often fraught relationship between artists and superfans. There will be a visual art component, too, with work on show by Beeple and Denzil Forrester.

Holness is keen to stress that the event is not trying to muscle in on the UK’s music festival scene, but aims to provide an “additive” to it. “We see ourselves as the new, younger sibling in that space. We're a part of supporting and developing the ecology.” He adds: “Where else can you go and experience the future of technology and watch all kinds of exciting films as well as seeing a great band, all in one day? It's that intersection of creativity in its broadest sense, I think, that makes us unique.”

There’s another distinguishing factor. Whereas most festivals scramble to attract the biggest possible names to emblazon across their promotional material, SXSW London is focused more on emerging artists, some just at the start of their careers. “We want to present the cutting-edge, underground music scenes,” Holness says. “Really it's about discovery and running from venue to venue across Shoreditch and finding out what's new and what's next.”

Previously head of contemporary music at the Southbank centre, where he oversaw the Meltdown festival, Holness has a pretty good handle on what’s new. “Most of my career has been focused on working with independent artists, primarily from diverse backgrounds, to realise their ambitions,” he says. But gathering 500-plus artists from R&B to electronic to indie rock required a bit of outside help. “We have about 100 different co-curators who are shaping the stages and presenting music from their own perspectives. There’s also a jury of 100 or so music professionals from all over the world who helped shortlist our artists.”

One co-curator is DJ Ace, whose platform Everything R&B is taking over Shoreditch Town Hall on Thursday and Friday. “They've got a very specific ambition for how they want to reflect UK and international R&B, so they had artists they wanted to invite,” says Holness. “Some of those are artists that London audiences might never otherwise get the opportunity to see live.”

It's very much an international gathering – Holness is excited about collaborating with a community radio station he stumbled upon in Seoul a couple of years ago – but he says the festival is, from his perspective, “a little bit of a love letter to the London I know. I'm a Londoner, born and raised, the grandchild of immigrants on both sides, and I love that you can get off at any tube stop in London and find yourself in a distinct community. I really wanted our venues to have that feeling – that when you pop into Village Underground, or XOYO, they’ll feel like a gateway into a different music culture.”

Holness is excited about his mad dashes between venues in the coming days, but he’s also looking further ahead. “We've been thinking a lot about what next year looks like,” he says. “With any first-year festival, there's going to be so many learnings – what people want more of, or less of – and we want to use that to shape how it grows. I’m already getting artists pitching for year two, which is a great, great thing to have before the first festival has even begun.”