Panel sessions and punk music: SXSW comes to London
In the first week of June, the world’s largest tech, business and arts festival, SXSW, will make its European debut in Shoreditch. Ali Lyon asks its its chief executive, Max Alexander, why London, and why now?
Of the many aspirations Max Alexander has for next month’s inaugural South by Southwest London, there is one which the man in charge of the business and culture jamboree lists that immediately stands out.
Alongside routine desires for people to “stay long enough to really get a sense of the festival” and “learn something new, and maybe even useful”, it is another sight, he says, that will confirm beyond doubt that London outpost has been a triumph.
“I want to get [science minister] Peter Kyle to go and see some turbo goth music,” Alexander, the festival’s chief executive, tells City AM.
There is, admittedly, an unorthodox kind of logic behind this outlandish aspiration. One which the former boss of immersive-experience-trailblazer Secret Cinema says gets to the kernel of what South by Southwest (SXSW) is all about.
“What we try to do with SXSW is to be both broad and deep,” he says. “To recognise… that patterns in a particular context can spark ideas, or make sense, to people in different areas of expertise, or different disciplines.”
SXSW’s unusual formula
It is an unusual approach for what ultimately, for all the slick branding and big name guests, is a business conference. But the formula has been an unadulterated success at both the international festival’s original location, Austin, and its two-year-old international spin-off in Sydney.
In the four decades since its first Texan knees up, SXSW has gone on to encapsulate and, Alexander argues not unreasonably, help define Austin’s reputation as one of the world’s most creative and innovative cities.
Hollywood A-listers like Matthew McConaughey, Austin-dwelling Elon Musk and even former Royalty in the shape of Meghan Markle have all become mainstays at what The Guardian calls, “the festival that likes to predict the future.”
And that same breadth, depth and dissonance for which the Texas and Australia instalments have become renowned will not be hard to come by when the festival-cum-conference comes to Shoreditch in June for its first foray into Europe; regardless of whether the Rt. Hon. Peter Kyle MP chooses to attend a goth band’s late-night punk set.
Titans from UK plc and politics, including Sadiq Khan, WPP’s Mark Read and Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall, will find themselves cheek by jowl – perhaps uncomfortably at times – with bona fide A-listers like Idris Elba and Ian Wright. And even they are likely to feel veritably strait-laced when rubbing shoulders with the phalanx of underground music acts who, almost to a number, sport haircuts that are intimidatingly spiky, luminously dyed, or both.
Topics on the agenda are as diverse as the names on it. Talks in the business conference alone will range from profiling the UK’s ‘deep tech’ scene, to women in sport’s influence on luxury fashion, to the post-Adolescence question of the day: what it means to be a man in modern times.
“It’s our first year and we’ve gone very broad,” Alexander says. “We’ve got 700-plus speakers on 500 different panels. And I hope people will want to encounter and be exposed to stuff that’s a bit testing.”
A tension at its heart
Testing for the audience, maybe, but is there a danger that same breadth of the technicolour roster of speakers and performers could throw up a few issues, too?
Alexander is an avuncular, free-wheeling interviewee. When serenading your reporter on his love of London, he gushes that he wanted to “kiss the pavements” on his return from a two-year stint in California. And later, he answers a question on the kind of atmosphere he wants to cultivate at SXSW London with a two-minute paean about his adoration for charity ‘chuggers’: “They’re amazing; so charismatic and so optimistic”.
But asked about the evident tension between curating the sponsor-draped business conference and its more uninhibited, music festival counterpart, and the amiable CEO falls back into the kind of safe, orthodox answer that many of his peers would give.
“It’s not been zero, but there’s not been much,” he says. “I think so much of the friction is generated by people not taking care to listen properly to competing views. And we are very much an apolitical platform.”
Would he, hypothetically, “listen properly” were one of SXSW’s more radical speakers to take issue with a sponsor’s human rights record? Or, indeed, if Mark Read’s panel was interrupted by one of the festival’s punk bands taking against WPP’s track record of working with fossil fuel giants?
“We have to take every question that’s raised by the community seriously,” he answers, with similarly uncharacteristic guardedness. “And we have, on at least two occasions, reflected on some of our choices and said, for practical reasons, we should think again about that curatorial decision. But for the most part, people accept our stated position as a platform.”
There is a not unreasonable argument that it was precisely London’s ability to produce such a smorgasbord of different speakers that earned it the enviable title of SXSW’s European debut.
There was, Alexander says, a not-that-short shortlist of new locations that spanned cities across Europe and the Middle East; some of which engaged in “considerable advocacy” campaigns to bolster their chances. But the UK capital’s heterodox cocktail of business, nightlife and arts – not to mention its world-leading tech, innovation and life sciences scenes – meant it narrowly pipped its more eager competition to the post.
‘Reports of London’s death have been greatly exaggerated’
Alexander, himself, is a proud Scot. But for him, London is the perfect European launchpad, which promises to complement – not imitate – the festival’s two older siblings.
“I’m with Dr Johnson,” he says.” When you’re bored of London, you’re bored of life.”
And so the city became the “inevitable” choice because in Alexander’s eyes, it reflects the randomness and dissonance of the festival itself.
“London as a city is almost accidental,” he says. “It’s full of beautiful collisions, and people recognise the importance of being inspired by adjacencies, rather than being a monoculture.”
Sandwiched between the City and east London, and home to the so-called ‘Silicon Roundabout’ tech cluster, Alexander adds that Shoreditch, which the festival will all but take over next week, presented the perfect microcosm of those collisions: “Not everything in life has to be sui generis, or start from ground zero. In everything, we can learn from others. London feels like this. Shoreditch feels like this.”
The effusive tone in which Alexander talks about his adopted hometown is strikingly different from the declinist narrative has set in around the capital.
As has so often been reported, London’s house prices and rents are among the most expensive in the developed world, and have been branded “unaffordable” even for high earners by the UK’s own official statistics agency. Culturally, the capital has also been rocked by the closure of high-profile nightclubs and venues. And even Alexander’s naturally boosterish outlook is punctured when he concedes he “deeply regrets” the fact an increasing number of the city’s richest residents feel inclined to relocate away from the city.
But he is, by and large, resolute. “London remains this extraordinary, ebullient, kind of Brownian motion solution,” he says, “and I think the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Or so he – and indeed London’s Mayor, and SXSW speaker, Sadiq Khan – will hope. Half of the festival’s ticket holders are international, presenting London – and by extension the UK – with a rare opportunity to burnish its soft power: be that its trendy venture capitalists, cutting edge science or rich arts industry.
And with complete access across the conference, festival and film screenings setting you back £1,300, those ticket holders’ expectations will undoubtedly be set intimidatingly high.
No higher, though, than those Alexander has set for himself. Towards the end of the interview, your reporter deigns to ask what – in addition to the sight of our polished science minister pogoing to punk – would count as a triumphant first year. At which point, somewhat unnervingly, the salt-and-pepper bearded exec duly walks out of the room.
He returns with a board containing a list of things that would make him proud come the end of the festival. Something, he says, he does before every big job.
He starts reading: “Thousands of delegates come to Shoreditch to attend a business conference, but find themselves unable to resist the allure of the arts, the film, the music. They become a little familiar with east London.”
“Brands [also] resolve to be back, but with bigger budgets and a cooler creative,” he continues, breaking out into a smile. “The PM wants to speak in 2026 – we politely turn him down.”