If queues aren’t your thing, then Austin, Texas, was not the place to be last weekend. The most common complaint about the city’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is that you can make all the plans you like, but just try getting in to see one of the bands on your list.

The queues seemed longer than ever - a situation you expect at the evening shows, but not one that is welcome during the day, which, in past years, was the spontaneous counterweight to the endless fractious lines snaking round corners come dusk.

Yet complaining about a five-day music event held in March, in average temperatures of 27C, in a city noted for its easy-going inhabitants and good-time vibe, seems churlish, if not perverse. To survive the experience - and it’s hardly an ordeal, despite what many bloggers would have you believe - requires calm acceptance that you’ll miss as much as you’ll see.

Austin’s crow-like grackles have it about right, either hovering imperviously above the fray or swooping to steal choice morsels from the bars, clubs and open-air barbecues below. Some festivalgoers, on the other hand, had a harder time of it. All around were people anxiously punching messages into their mobiles or reading a text telling them they were missing the gig of a lifetime three blocks away. They were succumbing to The Fear, a surrender accelerated by alcohol (much of it free), which was everywhere.

So, not surprisingly, was music – booming out of every door and window, an infernal cacophony that was impossible to escape. A fair portion of the 2,000-plus bands made you realise why you hate music occasionally, but an awful lot did that magical thing of lifting you out of yourself into a place of almost childlike delight and incomprehension.

As if her dominance of the UK charts were not enough, Duffy was unavoidable in Austin. A limp performance of songs from her No 1 album on Friday afternoon delighted much of the audience, but left me more baffled than ever by the appeal of her precise but crease-free retro soul.

Better by far were shows by three other female singers. Jesca Hoop played the opening set in a Wednesday showcase hosted by Nic Harcourt, the hugely influential LA-based British DJ. A former nanny to Tom Waits’s children, Hoop is a thrillingly eccentric performer, part Californian singer-songwriter, part Björkian experimentalist. She doesn’t have a record deal in Britain, but expect that to change within weeks. The same evening, Martha Wainwright took to the Club de Ville stage at midnight to thrill fans with a set dominated by songs from her forthcoming second album, I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too. Her first gig with her new band ended with her thanking the audience for serving as guinea pigs. They didn’t look as if they had minded. On Friday night, Laura Marling, the 18-year-old singer from Berkshire, silenced a tightly packed crowd with a spellbinding performance that encouraged the American man next to me to exclaim in my ear: “It’s the best thing I’ve seen. I may as well leave Austin now.”

Current buzz bands came trailing high expectations, among them MGMT, who lived up to the hype, and Vampire Weekend, who didn’t. MGMT’s show on Thursday night was my SXSW highlight: it’s a long time since I have been at a gig that has so transported and unified an audience. Vampire Weekend’s songs and sound seem to grow thinner and less complex by the day. Here, they seemed more than ever the Noughties’ answer to Men at Work.

Falling somewhere between affirmation and disappointment were the Ting Tings and Santogold. The former stretch their play-dumb, screamy electro-rock a little too thin for comfort, though Katie White has “star” written all over her. Santogold has an armoury of viciously good electro-rap to draw on, but not enough stage presence, as yet, to do it justice – a learning process that may be slowed by the safety-net deployment of two compelling but distracting backing singer/ dancers.

Each year at the festival, there is an unofficial competition to find the weirdest band name, the winner in 2006 being I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. Hopes were briefly raised this year by Pubic Pelt, but they turned out to be apocryphal.

High points included Neil Finn’s son Liam; the Red Romance, who are born from the ashes of the much-missed Ambulance Ltd; and the Lemonheads, running through their classic 1992 album It’s a Shame About Ray. Noah and the Whale wowed a sunny afternoon barbecue with 5 Years Time – a Come on Eileen-like global hit in the making? – and Ice Cube dug deep into the NWA vaults for a thunderous Auditorium Shores set on Saturday night.

Best discoveries? Three: the Brooklyn band Team Robespierre, whose performance to about 15 people on Friday evening made the case for their bizarre, shouty mash-up of synth-punk and Beastie Boys; A Place to Bury Strangers, also from Brooklyn, who meld the Jesus and Mary Chain and New Order to explosive and thrilling effect; and Mr Brown & Dubkids, who played dub reggae-meets-Steely Dan at a wee-small-hours house party in the Austin suburbs on the final night, and stole my heart.

Queues: too many. Complaints: none. How could there be?

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