The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

A year living in Beijing, and my strongest memory of its music scene is a wasted tenner’s cab ride. It was October and a typical evening. My friend Tim and I were sat in an awful noodle shop working our way through some chicken chuans and several bottles of Yanjing - Beijing’s local brew and the cheap man’s drink of choice. It’s a beer that leaves you with such nasty hangovers, the rumour it’s got more formaldehyde in it than yeast is entirely plausible.

But that night, I was excited as well as half-drunk. We were heading off to the Midi Festival - the city’s only one at the time, and the country’s longest-running. Back then, in 2003, it had been going for all of three years.

The bill was great, full of metal bands with names like Twisted Machine and brilliant punks like the hilarious all-girl group, Hang On The Box (sample lyric: “Limp dick motherfucker, get off off my face”). I figured if I was going to witness any revelatory music in the city - or kids throwing bottles of piss at bands - it was going to be there, and I wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity.

The festival had been badly advertised, but I’d been in touch with its organisers and got the address - a farmer’s field near the mountains to the west of the city. I’d even printed it out in Chinese and pinyin (the Roman script) for the cab driver and drawn a shoddy map. Half an hour later, I realised I shouldn’t have bothered. There we were - two bespectacled Westerners standing in an empty car park, halfway up a hill, without a drunken teenager in sight (let alone a music festival), telling the cab driver to turn his engine off just in case it was stopping us from hearing the crowd noise. No dice - all we got was a local trying to sell us dinner. “Traditional Chinese meal in Chinese person’s house!” he kept saying, lucky that one of us could speak Mandarin to understand. He had beer, and he had baijiu (‘white spirit’ in taste and translation). It was a winning sales pitch.

The reason this incident sticks in my mind more than any gig I actually saw over there is because it seems so typical of the scene. In Beijing, I met some of the most wonderfully enthusiastic people who just wanted to put on gigs, write songs and talk bands. But they were all just as likely to fuck everything up - type in an address wrongly (as happened with Midi), not print up enough copies of a CD, or book a foreign tour then forget to arrange visas. They also seemed to suffer from an incredible lack of self-confidence - any foreign band, even the most derivative shite, was treated with more respect than good local groups. Oh, and then there was the inter-regional racism which meant people didn’t pay any attention to bands from outside the city because they… they come from the south, ALRIGHT?

I arrived in Beijing because I’d been offered a job on the country’s English-language newspaper. The other foreigners on the staff hadn’t bothered investigating the punk scene. Dwight Daniels, a ginger, 40-something American wasn’t typical, but to give you an idea of the type of people there, he spent his lunch hour hovering around the grounds of the university opposite looking lost. He insisted it was “the easiest way to pick up girls”.

Fortunately, the scene wasn’t hard to get into. A quick scan of the city’s listing magazines told you the handful of venues to go to and, even better, the handful of bands that dominated them. It was centred on Wudaokou, the university district in the northwest of the city, and places like 13 Club. Further east, there was also the great Nameless Highland. There you could check out all the city’s main bands in a fortnight, no problem. Once you’d seen Hang On The Box, the scream-heavy Subs, a post punk group called P.K. 14 and the drunken antics of Joyside (pictured), you’d seen the best. By then you’d also have got used to the fact that kids in China didn’t seem to know how to react to the music. Lots of people sat down for gigs - even the punk ones - and when there was a mosh, it was always cut self-consciously short as if everyone suddenly thought they might be doing it wrong.

Why was the scene so small? Not because of any of the fuck-ups I started this piece with, but simply because only a handful of Beijingers were actually interested in the music. Flip through the average teenager’s record collection and you’ll find the Titanic soundtrack and a load of Taiwanese and Korean pop stars. I don’t blame them for that either, especially as each pop star seemed to come with a preposterous back-story attached that could appeal to everyone from the most popular kid at school to the loner.

At the time, the biggest star was a guy called Jay Chou - a handsome man in his twenties whose albums were full of piano ballads about his mother as well as occasional forays into social problems (a song ‘Coward’ was his less than subtle comment on drug addicts). All credit to him: he surrounded such sentimental pap with great pop music - tunes based around the rhythms of ping pong games or mobile phone tones, and brilliant attempts to meld rap, rock and opera (both the Chinese and Italian varieties).

But when we wrote about him for our newspaper, there wasn’t one mention of his songs, just the kid-overcomes-adversity nature of his life story. At school his parents divorced, which caused him to retreat into music and grow up with friends. Furthermore, he suffered from a type of spinal arthritis called Ankylosing Spondylitis, which damaged his early career (presumably because he couldn’t do any dance routines). And then there was his horrid first manager who thought he was too ugly and shy to make it. In spite of the ridiculousness of it all (Jay was rumoured to be a draft dodger and he got through women as quickly as he could record a duet with them), the message was clear to every kid reading: if you just keep studying hard, you could be Jay Chou too. And in a country where everyone’s striving for success, they lapped it up. Why would anyone listen to the local rock musician when they had the same status as street kids?

The fact no one paid attention to bands also showed up the typical Westerner’s belief that kids in leathers were about to bring down the government. I was one of those dickheads for the first few months out there. I’d read about Cui Jian, the so-called ‘father of Chinese rock’, whose song ‘Nothing To My Name’ had been the anthem of the Tiananmen Square protests, and presumed he’d have a legacy of some sort. Stupid mistake. I brought up the topic for the first time when interviewing Wang Yue, at the time the red-haired lead singer of Hang On The Box. “Why would I sing about politics?” she said angrily. “That anti-government, anti-society attitude is part of history. It’s idiotic elaborating on such things now. It’s out of date. Why can’t I just sing about things I care about: boys, love, sex?”

Good point, ma’am, I said, and I suddenly realised I’d have got the same response if I’d asked any other musician in the city.

A few weeks later, a press release arrived in my inbox saying the band had been refused visas by the government to tour England because songs like ‘For Some Stupid Cunts at BBS’ were deemed “not representative of Chinese culture”. Biggest. Bullshit. Ever. They just didn’t have enough cash for flights.

But all this is just my opinion and I probably spent less time checking out bands while I was there than I did trying to join in the mass ballroom dancing down the road. If you want to know what the Chinese perspective is, you should go and buy a great DVD that’s just come out on Plexi Film called Wasted Orient. It’s a documentary on the band Joyside, a sweet bunch of punk kids led by Bian Yuan - a man who seems to have modelled himself entirely on New York Doll David Johansen - alongside bass player Liu Hao, drummer Fan Bo and the very funny, but appalling player, Yang Yang on guitar.

It starts off following them on a trip to the public toilet of the “dog and cat market” where the band live and drink (four bottles of Yanjing and two bottles of gin appear in the first few minutes). “My parent’s really disagree with my lifestyle,” says Liu Hao. “They think it’s fucking strange. They don’t understand why anyone would document our lives. They just know that I drink everyday and play in a band.”

That first 15 minutes are as good an introduction to Chinese life as you can get if you realise the people involved - unlike most of the population - don’t mind losing face. But the meat of the film actually takes place round the country following Joyside’s first-ever tour. It’s complete with 55-hour ‘soft seat’ train rides, much pissing around to relieve boredom (shaping sausages into cocks, that sort of thing), some casual racism (Liu Hao’s forensic demolition of Guangzhou’s food, beer and people is brilliant) and even the occasional gig.

The tour starts really well with a show in Guangzhou in south China. Hardly anyone turns up and most of those who do leave after someone gets glassed, but the reaction from the fans who stay makes you realise why the band do it. “I love JOYSIDE!” a girl screams. “It’s the first time - THE FIRST TIME - I didn’t go home [early] and it’s because of them.”

There’s also a blinding show in Kunming in the southwest where the place is packed and everyone goes bonkers. One of the band even gets propositioned afterwards.

But once they leave there, things get rapidly worse. Dali - a historical city in the southwest where people largely go because it’s the easiest place in China to get dope - is a shit-hole. The band end up playing in the middle of a restaurant in front of a fake garden, complete with path, and about five ‘punks’ falling over each other in front.

In Chongqing, Fan Bo ends up in the toilet, drunk and depressed, saying things like, “Alcohol allows me… to speak to God. However, he never talks back to me and I don’t know why.”

By the end, when a psychotic called Xin Shuang has replaced Yang Yang on guitar, it’s some surprise they’re still going.

It’s a great film, although it does lack concert footage. For some idiotic reason, the filmmaker - Kevin Fritz, an American - uses gigs as an opportunity to experiment with his montage skills rather than show anyone playing. But given the guy never impinges on the documentary, you can let him off with that.

Fritz, it turns out via email, decided to make the film back in 2003. He’d studied in Beijing before and went back after SARS broke out to work on a documentary about orphans, giving up a lucrative career as a carpet cleaner. “I couldn’t have cared less about getting sick because I needed to escape and do something radically different than de-poopifying rich people’s rugs,” he says.

He first saw the band with a friend at the very same Midi festival I couldn’t find. “We impersonated security staff and shovelled through people’s bags at the gates just to be assholes,” he says. “I wasn’t a fan of the Chinese music scene - I just went because there was nothing else to do.”

There he saw Joyside and quickly realised they’d be great subjects for a film he’d wanted to make for years: an “analysis of China’s youth” told from the Chinese point of view. He met the band the next day at 7pm, bought them a lot of beer and by 8pm they’d agreed to do a ‘test shoot’. The following weekend they went to Nanjing, where they had wrestling matches in the middle of some hole-in-the-wall restaurant (“as long as we paid the bill the restaurant owner was fine with it all”) and the band agreed to do the documentary.

It turns out Fritz cut an awful lot out from the film, especially the living conditions the band had to put up with. “We slept in dorms, or people’s homes or what was called a home,” he says. “There was honestly really no fucking money whatsoever. In Wuhan, we stayed in this place where there were two beds and already eight people living there. I guess they slept in shifts. Add us six to the equation and there were a lot of disgusting assholes sleeping together.”

They also had to put up with dysentery, equipment failing and being chased around one city by “20 locals wielding bamboo sticks” who thought they’d been filming “an old woman digging through trash”.

Ask Fritz why he settled on the title Wasted Orient, though, and a more sombre, less exciting picture emerges. “Wasted is for ‘drunk’, but it’s also for ‘untapped talent’,” he says. “China doesn’t necessarily need to care about music, but it would help for them to try something new. I’m sick of riding my bike past restaurants, shops, malls, anywhere in China, and hearing one of the following: Michael Jackson, Backstreet Boys, Bee Gees or some local pop sensation like Dao Long. Back in my hometown in Pennsylvania we have stupid activities like punk rock, goat racing and cow plops that made no money but, unless China can make a buck on it these days they don’t seem to care about such things. They should, because it’s these stupid activities that keep us all from running into traffic.”

Unsurprisingly, a more optimistic picture emerges from Bian Yuan himself. Since the film was made, he says, the band have split up, reformed, recruited a new guitarist and drummer and dropped punk music for their “own rock’n’roll, whatever that is”. They even toured China again, and had a much better time doing so. “More girls have become our fans,” he informs me.

Ultimately, Bian Yuan believes it could be five years before the rock scene takes off in Beijing properly. But the signs of change are there. “Rock’n’roll is never a sweet dream anywhere,” he explains. “When the film was made I just thought the music was ignored so much here. But now it’s getting better. New live bars and clubs are opening like D-22 and 2kolegas and new bands are coming out.” He starts to list them all - “Queen Sea Big Shark, The Scoff, Carsick Cars, Casino Demon…” - but gives up mid-sentence, and signs off. “COME BACK TO BEIJING. THEY WILL SHOCK YOU!”

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