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Sitting in a jam-packed Mexican restaurant in down-town Austin, nursing their cheap Casio keyboards on their laps, are Neon Neon, “a super-group like, er, Crosby, Stills and Nash”, according to their laconic singer, Gruff Rhys, better known as the lead singer of Super Furry Animals.

The band are Rhys, the singer Cate Le Bon and the avant-hip-hop producer Boom Bip, aka Bryan Hollon. They are in Austin, along with 2,000 other bands (800 of them British), for the indie Valhalla that is the South by Southwest festival (SXSW). Over huge, daunting plates of sloppy breakfast tacos, the sun blazing outside, they are surprisingly bright-eyed considering that they have had less than six hours sleep over the past three days.

Rewind two days to 5am and you would have found them outside, on top of a six-storey garage (attached to the spanking-new AMLI luxury apartment block), welcoming an appropriately fuchsia dawn with their glossy, retro-futuristic fantasy pop, while a thousand screaming indie hipsters punched the air.

Revisit last night and you would have seen them at a country club called the Elks Lodge. That was, grins baby-faced Hollon, “a classic SXSW concert experience”. First, an elementary mistake, this, for a band of veterans – especially for ones whose new album, Stainless Style, is inspired by the life of the flamboyant sports-car engineer John DeLorean – they had no transport to take them to the venue. “I’m not sure how it happened but we were all outside the hotel, gear in hand, and somehow, someone had forgotten to arrange a van,” Hollon explains. “In the end we had to hitch a lift in the back of a stranger’s pickup. There was loads of shotgun shells on the floor. The guy had to breathe into a breathalyser before the car would start.

“We asked him if he couldn’t just get his friends to breathe in it if he fancied a drink. He just grunted: ‘If I had any sober friends.’ Priceless.”

Equally priceless was the gig venue, the Elks Lodge, a Masonic country club and home to the 115-year-old Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Austin’s unofficial motto is “Keep Austin Weird”– as long as places like this remain, that shouldn’t be a problem.

A fashion magazine had hired the venue, perched on the top of a forested hill, for their SXSW bash. A queue of skinny-jeaned, sunglass-wearing style kids snaked out the door. Inside, sitting underneath a mounted deer’s head, two friendly middle-aged club members took passport details and wished everyone a “good time, y’all”.

In the clubroom, bright orange hotdogs were lined up in rows on red-checked tablecloths and bemused lodge regulars sat around enjoying themselves, occasionally nodding as an outlandish haircut walked by. Outside, against a back-drop of the Austin skyline, party-goers whacked a fairground bell beside a glinting aquamarine pool. As the sun set and the lights of down-town’s skyscrapers came on, it was hard not to think you were in some kind of paradise. For the band, however, it was a different story.

“One of our keyboards broke,” explains Le Bon (no relation to Simon). “Then the strap snapped on the ‘git board’ [keytar] and we broke our only two bass strings.” With no time to sound-check, the band opened with Gruff announcing: “I’d like everyone to send a prayer to Tom, coming over the hill with a bass.” With half the world’s bands in Austin a spare bass had been located and was delivered halfway through the set by a panting Tom Campesinos! of their fellow Welsh indie rockers Los Campesinos!

“That’s SXSW,” Rhys sighs.

“It all goes wrong – yet it in the end it doesn’t matter.”

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