The old story about London sitting at the centre of British culture is no longer convincing. It was always too easy, but now it feels especially thin.

Manchester has been carrying major music moments of its own. Sheffield and Newcastle have both hosted the MOBO Awards in recent years. Leeds is preparing for the National Poetry Centre. The point is not that the North is suddenly asking London for permission. It is that it no longer needs to.

So the better question is not whether London still matters. It is what London can still do that other cities do differently.

For Adem Holness, Head of Music at SXSW London, the answer is not size, status or the old capital-city reflex. His London is more local than that. It is Brixton, Ladbroke Grove, Edmonton, Palmer’s Green, Leyton, Shoreditch; a city of separate energies that somehow still share a transport map.

Holness studied in Manchester and remembers friends who were intimidated by London’s scale. He was not. For him, London was never one block of power. It was “lots of little villages.” That phrase matters because it cuts through the usual flattening of the city. London is not a sound. It is a system of crossings.

That is also the test for SXSW London. The original South by Southwest was born in Austin, Texas, as a way for artists outside New York and Los Angeles to make contact with the industry. Holness respects that mission, but he is clear that London cannot simply import Austin’s mythology.

SXSW London, then, has to prove something different. Not that London can host another festival. It can. Not that Shoreditch can become a campus. It can. The more interesting test is whether a festival can become a conduit: a way for global underground scenes, local promoters, grassroots platforms, bookers, delegates, tastemakers and audiences to meet in real life, outside the logic of the feed.

Across the conversation, Holness moves between scenes and names: Seoul Community Radio, Fabric, Caribbean Music House, Sega Bodega, Tiwa Savage, Adrian Utley, Erykah Badu, Ezra Collective, Beyoncé. It would be easy to treat the names as the point. They are not. What matters is the movement between them: scenes travelling, artists needing rooms, audiences carrying memory, and live music doing something a platform can point to but not quite reproduce.

For Litro’s Future Archives, that is where the conversation becomes larger than a festival preview. We are interested in what gets remembered and what disappears. Holness gives the most direct answer of the interview when he talks about live music as memory: no phones, no images, no official archive, just the people who were there.

“We are the archives,” he says.

SXSW London and the Austin inheritance

Eric Akoto: SXSW began in Austin, Texas, with a very particular history. For the London version, what does the music programme need to prove?

Adem Holness: The festival started in Austin, Texas, 40 years ago as a place for artists who weren’t based in New York or LA to be able to make inroads into industry. When we started creating our version, I wanted to stay really true to that core mission: for it to be a genuinely useful platform for artists to realise their own ambitions.

But it’s 40 years on and this ain’t Texas. We’re not in America. I wanted it to make sense for London.

I’m born and raised in London, and the thing I really love about London is that you can step out of any Tube stop and find yourself in a really distinct community. Brixton feels totally different from Edmonton, or Palmer’s Green, or Leyton, or wherever. Being a multi-venue festival across Shoreditch, I wanted each of the venues to have that same feeling.

For me, it is less about the individual artists on their own without context. It is about the scenes, the context and the communities they are part of being showcased as well, in the way London showcases the rest of the world through its communities and cultures.

What we had to prove is that music scenes now are being shaped in real life by real-life communities and cultures. What we can provide is a platform for those exciting music scenes, wherever they are in the world, to make inroads into industry and move into more mainstream consciousness by turning up and showcasing with us.

London as gateway, not showcase

Eric Akoto: London already has a dense music ecosystem: venues, labels, collectives, club culture, radio histories, diasporic sounds. How do you programme that without flattening it into one easy idea of a “London sound”?

Adem Holness: I don’t think we’re a showcase of London. I think London is a gateway into the industry.

We’re bringing global music scenes and cultures to the showcase festival to connect with delegates who are based in London but also internationally. About 50 percent of our delegates are international, and the rest come from the UK, with a huge number based in London.

What I’m interested in is how we put these artists and music scenes in front of tastemakers and decision-makers. In a conventional showcase festival, that includes festival bookers from across Europe. But this year we’ve also done a lot of work around grassroots DIY platform-builders and tastemakers, whether they’re based in London or further afield, who can collaborate with and provide artists with opportunities.

We’ve got the Association of Independent Festivals coming this year, so a bunch of independent festivals. London has so many amazing club nights and grassroots venues. I’m excited that a number of those are turning up to discover artists.

We can bring a really exciting scene like the underground electronic music scene from Seoul, Korea, with Seoul Community Radio, to London, and get them in front of the people who book Fabric. We had an artist from that showcase last year who got playlisted on the BBC dance show.

So what we are is the conduit. We are plugging those things into each other.

What makes an artist right for SXSW London?

Eric Akoto: What are you listening for when choosing artists? Is it momentum, originality, live energy, local relevance, international potential?

Adem Holness: International potential is definitely important. For me, getting the balance right means being global without it feeling like what people might perceive as “world music.” There are amazing festivals who do that really well. For us, it is about global scenes that have the potential to plug into the music ecology that exists in London and beyond, and to move into the mainstream.

Sonically, I’m looking for music that might have traditional elements from the culture it comes from, but also has a sound that can resonate with a broader audience. This year, for example, we have created a Caribbean Music House, because we know that music has the potential to move out of its immediate context.

I also have a personal philosophy that I would never book an artist without having seen them live. Obviously that is not always practical in person, but we ask all artists who apply to play the festival to give us a live link. Sometimes that is just a video of them rehearsing in a bedroom or rehearsal studio. I want to make sure the energy we love in the music can translate into a showcase environment.

We also ask artists what they want to achieve by coming to SXSW. Do we feel confident we can deliver on that? If they want to get more into sync, do we have the right music supervisors? If they want festival opportunities, do we have the right festivals coming along?

It is not just booking an act because they sound good. It is asking whether this platform can actually be useful to them.

What platforms cannot do

Eric Akoto: SXSW has always been tied to discovery. In 2026, discovery is shaped by streaming platforms, TikTok, data, recommendation systems and AI. What can a live festival still do that platforms cannot?

Adem Holness: I love those platforms and use them daily, as you can imagine. But I think we are doing something the algorithm can’t.

It is a chance for independently minded people to come away from their screens and get a deep dive into global underground music cultures as presented by the people who are driving them in their own contexts. That is not something I think the algorithm can surface in the same way.

The best thing about having 40 co-curators is that you get such a deep and authentic take on those music scenes. It is not me in London thinking: what is the most exciting artist in Afrobeats right now? It is the platform that is developing and working with those artists bringing them over, so people can experience that music scene.

As much as I love new technology and what streaming platforms can offer, I don’t think the algorithm can quite beat being able to walk around Shoreditch and get this deep experience of some of the most exciting new music scenes from across the world.

Against the traditional festival hierarchy

Eric Akoto: There is always a tension between showcasing what is already breaking and taking a risk on what people have not caught up with yet. How do you balance that?

Adem Holness: That is the fun part for me: getting that right.

The guiding principle for SXSW London’s music programme is that everything needs to have a new element. We have some amazing established acts showing up in the festival, but they are all bringing something new.

We have Sega Bodega, who is obviously a very established electronic music artist, but he has recently released an ambient album and is presenting that for the first time live, in the round, with immersive 360 audio. He is doing that alongside other artists working with similar technology, including Adrian Utley from Portishead, who is doing a demonstration of some of the work he has been doing.

Alongside that, we have really emerging artists too. We have Tiwa Savage, who has new music dropping around now, on a bill with other brilliant emerging artists in a way that makes sense.

One of the funny things is that we do not do a traditional pyramid-style bill, where you have emerging artists and then a headliner every night. If we did that, all the headliners and special guests would be on at the same time across the festival.

Part of the fun and tension has been talking that through with agents. They’ll say: “What do you mean my emerging artist is going on after the headliner?” But that can be amazing. Your artist gets to go on after whoever it might be, to a full room. It is about discovery, not the traditional festival hierarchy.

Live memory and the archive

Eric Akoto: For Litro’s Future Archives strand, we are interested in what gets remembered and what disappears. How do festivals become part of the archive of a city’s music culture?

Adem Holness: There is something about live experiences and memory that is as important as a physical or digital archive.

Last year we held a series of private listening sessions with Erykah Badu, with some of her unreleased music. She was there, hiding in the corner, guiding people through a blindfolded experience. We did that with no phones, no pictures. People got to hear this music and then it stayed with them. They remembered it.

A few months later, I saw her at the Royal Albert Hall and she played some of that music. Anyone else who had experienced those listening sessions was able to connect with it. That only exists in the memory of the people who came.

By coming and showing up to a festival in real life, you become the archive. Your stories and your memories of it become part of it.

Beyoncé said something, jokingly I think, when people were asking where the visuals were for Renaissance. She said: “You are the visuals.” I think the same thing. We are the archives.

Of course, we do our best to capture and record these amazing music scenes, and talking to you and being able to tell those stories in publications is amazing. Capturing things digitally so people have a record of these scenes as they develop is really important.

But one of my most iconic memories of South By was being on Sixth Street and seeing the queue outside for Ezra Collective. I cannot remember which year it was, but it was when they were there to showcase. I remember feeling: oh my God, Black British jazz is happening.

I’m sure there are amazing pictures and records of that performance, but for me the moment was seeing the queue in the street outside. If we can have those kinds of impacts on people, so it lives with them, that is the ultimate archive for me.

London as multiplicity

Eric Akoto: When people look back at this year’s SXSW London music programme, what would you want them to say it captured about London at this moment?

Adem Holness: This might be a bit of a cop-out, but I hope it does not capture any one thing.

I went to university in Manchester, and I remember friends of mine who were not from London being intimidated by the idea of London and its scale. I always found that difficult to reckon with, because for me London is not this one thing. Even in its geography, it is like lots of little villages, and that is the same thing we are trying to recreate across the campus.

In its communities, throughout the day, being in Shoreditch at ten o’clock at night is a very different energy to being there at two o’clock at lunchtime. There are different people moving through the space and engaging with the landscape in a different way.

I hope that is what we capture. Through the different strands of programming, the different times of day in the schedule, the different formats — conference sessions, group chats, meetups, and different ways of engaging with the industry — the sheer variety of content and formats speaks to London’s multiplicity.

For me, London is not one thing. That is what I am probably most proud of.

The city that refuses one sound

There is a temptation, with any festival arriving in a city, to ask whether it has captured the place. The better question for SXSW London may be whether it has resisted the easy capture.

London does not need another event simply announcing its diversity. The harder work is making difference audible without flattening it into branding. Can it let Seoul Community Radio sit beside Caribbean Music House? Can it give an emerging artist a full room after a better-known name? Can it use Shoreditch not as a backdrop, but as a temporary system of routes, rooms and encounters?

The old cultural map is shifting. Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle and Leeds are proving that London is not the only place where national culture is made. Good. That is healthier for everyone.

But London, at its best, still does something strange. It makes proximity out of difference. It lets one person’s local scene become another person’s discovery. It turns the city into a crossing point.

That is the real subject of Adem Holness’s SXSW London: not the sound of London, but the impossibility of reducing London to one sound.

And if he is right, the archive will not only be in the footage, the posters, the playlists or the press images. It will be in the people who walked into a room not knowing what they were about to hear, and left carrying it.