MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE
For starters, the band’s name is of British descent. Band member Mikey Way, during his time working at a Barnes & Noble, stumbled upon a book by Scottish author Irvine Welsh titled Ecstacy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance. The name stuck, and for a time, so did the band. Much of the band’s catalog is cloaked in American punk roots, but The Black Parade – a classic concept album – is basically Gerard Way auditioning to be the new lead singer of Queen.


THE RAMONES
Listen to that fake British accent from Queens native Joey Ramone! The only Americans who tried harder than him to perfect a British accent were Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow.


SPOON
Britt Daniel, front man of Austin’s own Spoon, lists the Ramones – who weren’t British but sure as hell sounded like it – as one of his first musical influences. As much is evident in Spoon’s catalog, which isn’t really Brit-punk in tone but borrows the genre’s minimalist approach. It’s worked wonders; Spoon’s three most recent albums have debuted inside the Billboard Top 10.


VAMPIRE WEEKEND
If you didn’t know that Vampire Weekend’s members met while enrolled at Columbia in the mid-2000s, you might certainly mistake the New York outfit for a Jamaican band or, at the very least, a college band with some major island undertones. Vampire Weekend knew what it was doing with its sound, however; its self-titled debut was a refreshing change of pace from the mid-2000s indie boom, and the band's emergence at South by Southwest 2008 actually felt earned, unlike a number of other “it” bands of SXSW years past.