Huck's SXSW gig was a sweat-soaked rager

For the final night of SXSW London, Huck – the festival’s official co-curator – closed things out with an old-fashioned good time, curating a showcase that escalated from hazy to full-blown sweatbox. Fans reading ​“Huck it’s so hot” fluttered amongst the crowd in a packed Village Underground. 

Dutch quintet Honey I’m Home opened the evening: Fronted by Thom Schotanus and Sofia Ooteman, the band eased the room in gently, their blend of shoegaze, lo-fi indie and ​’90s alt-rock washing over Village Underground – an understatedly cool hit of nostalgia setting up the night. 

• Read next: Master Peace: ​“A Black guy making indie still makes people look at you sideways”

Next came Cactus For Breakfast. Setting the tone with a kitsch inflatable cactus planted centre-stage, the Berlin-based outfit delivered a gleeful set of surfy guitar with blues, psychedelia and twang of the American deep-south. At one point the band launched into a dance move that can only be described as ​“the cactus” – fingers boogying up and down in school-disco unison. ​“Eat a lil cactus, eat a lil cactus,” they chanted, getting the crowd flicking their hips before an unexpectedly ripping harmonica solo brought the whole thing home.

With the crowd fully primed for a rager, Master Peace wasted no time in blowing the roof off. ​“At school I was that kid that teachers didn’t really know what to do with,” the British artist told Huck in a recent interview. He’s found somewhere to channel that energy now. For 30 minutes, he seemed to exist in several places at once: prancing across the stage, five foot in the air, scaling the speaker stack at the back of the stage, before scrambling over the barricade and getting swallowed by the crowd. This kind of sticky, beer-sloshing togetherness feels lifted from another era. By the beat drop of his summer anthem ​“Home”, the whole floor was bouncing as one and there’s no doubt left in the room: indie sleaze is back.

Riding the wave of energy before it could wane, shame took over.

“Here we go, motherfuckaaas,” frontman Charlie Steen announced, looking unassuming in a business-casual red shirt that stayed on for about five minutes. It’s hard to watch shame and remain remotely composed. From the moment the band walked onstage, the floor entered a pre-mosh pit state. Immediately clear is Steen’s special knack for commanding his audience: he spent much of the set perched on barricades, hanging over the audience while the front row fanned him with ​“Huck it’s so hot” fans.

• Read next: In a Cutthroat world, shame are embracing the power of fun

“We’re not supposed to be the cool kids, we’re supposed to be the losers,” Steen recently told Huck in an interview. The result is a set that feels completely unselfconscious. There is no distance between band and crowd: At one point Steen wielded his microphone stand like a conductor’s baton, lurching it towards a crowd that had become a single heaving mass.

The room were then treated to a final half hour of near-constant chaos. Thrashing around, sweating off everything that mattered. ​“Being in shame was something I actually felt comfortable doing, and I wanted to embrace that,” Steen says. ​“I hope we create an environment where people feel comfortable too.”

Judging by the state of the room by the end – mission accomplished. Huck’s Ella Glossop was there to capture the action. 

Ella Glossop is Huck’s social editor. Follow her on Bluesky.

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