Major festival beckons for Chichester/Brighton band Dutch Criminal Record

The band, which grew out of Chichester’s Bishop Luffa School and have recently moved to Brighton, will be playing SXSW (South by Southwest) in Texas this March. SXSW Conference & Festivals runs from March 10-19. Dutch Criminal Record will be playing on a couple of different stages on Friday, March 17: “But we are picking around for other stages that we can play as well,” says drummer Joe Frampton, “though we know we're definitely playing two on that night.” Potentially the whole thing could be massive for the band: “It is a huge taste-maker festival. Any band that gets anywhere will play South by Southwest somewhere on its trajectory. Any tiny or medium band that becomes a big band will have passed through this festival. It will be somewhere there on their metric on their way to becoming huge.

“We have been applying every year to take part for six years now and it costs about $50 to apply but for every band it's the dream. You just apply. You can't win the lottery without buying a ticket and so we apply. Our management called us on a Sunday and I remember our manager saying to me that he should really get all of us together to tell us the news and I said ‘No, I can't wait! Tell me now!’ and he told me that we had been accepted. To get into it, I think you've just got to be on the radar somewhere. I think it's just general application telling them what you do and who you are and maybe a video but I do think you've just got to have a presence in America and be somehow a bit known to them. You have to show that you're worth shipping out to America for their festival.”

It takes place in Austin: “And the festival takes over the whole city. There are all sorts of stages. There are stages run by the record labels but if you've got a bit of car parking space or garage then you're going to be putting up a stage and running one there. People are running stages all over the place but we're fortunate enough to be playing a couple of official stages. But the whole thing is just massive in the city. There is music reverberating throughout the whole city for the whole week.

“I would say that we are primarily there to make memories and that's our primary hope, to have a really great week over there.” But who knows where else it could lead: “America is actually our biggest market if you look at Spotify. In the UK we have about 20,000 listeners but America is much, much bigger for us. We have about 100,000 to 120,000 listeners in the US. I think that's because of TikTok. We just blew up on TikTok. It was just really resonating with people in America what we were doing – though we do take a lot of our influences from the 1960s Beach Boys California sound. If you look at the city that's the biggest for us, it’s LA, and if you look at the state that’s the biggest for us, it's California.”