We took Norwegian rock to China

None of this was planned. It started because Rich from the English punk band Dogshit Sandwich, whom I had booked around Norway, was the man who set me on the track toward China and helped me a great deal along the way. When I brought SMZB from Wuhan over for a long European tour in 2005, their guitarist Wuwei wanted to do the same for me. Together with Kang Mao from the Beijing band SUBS, he pulled my band Jef over to China.

SUBS found me while I was touring SMZB around Norway, and in 2005 they played here for the first time, at Øyafestivalen and a handful of clubs I set up in a hurry. SMZB and SUBS are, to me, the two most important punk bands China has ever produced. They have hero status at home the way the Sex Pistols and The Clash do for us, and they were the ones who opened the door.

What I understood only later is how good our timing was. The rock scene in China was still young and untested in 2006, and we walked in at the most favourable moment imaginable. It was like handing in a ten-kroner lottery ticket and winning ten million on the first draw.

Since I was going over there anyway to lay my head on the regime chopping block, I figured I might as well do more damage than just something touching me and my own band. The idea for the Bergen Rock City compilations was born in a bright moment: we made deals with some of the biggest music magazines in China to tuck a free CD full of Norwegian bands from Bergen into their pages. Every disc came in 10,000 free copies. Bergen Rock City Vol. 1 and 2 went out through X Music Mag in February and March 2006, and the eight volumes together put 80,000 free CDs into Chinese hands.

When friends in bands from other parts of Norway felt left out, I called Kang Mao and we came up with Norwegian Wood Music For China, thirteen volumes from September 2007 to August 2010, distributed the same way through Not Only Music Magazine China. That was roughly another 130,000 discs. Thomas Eiene asked whether I could make a Stavanger Rock City Vol. 1, and of course I could, so in October 2007 Stavanger became the only city outside Bergen to get its own disc.

Count it up and it comes to 22 free compilations at 10,000 each, so 220,000 physical CDs of Norwegian rock spread across China, by my reckoning around 422 tracks in all. Some discs we handed out at stands, including at the MIDI festival, where October Party Records had a stand alongside the big Chinese magazines. This must have been the toughest launch campaign in Norwegian history, and we did all of it as volunteer work in our spare time.

Neither Kang Mao nor I were in this for ourselves, so I wanted to drag as many people from Norway as I could into the adventure. Between 2006 and 2011 we sent one band after another out to tour the best rock clubs in China, put out their albums, and got them onto local television and radio in a country that is supposed to be sealed shut to all of it. Every one of their first pressings ran to 3,000 copies over there, and it does not get tougher than that.

By my count that was sixteen band tours. Some got a real breakthrough, some just got the trip, but all of them were there, and they were the first to do it. Every one of them can hang that high on the wall at home today. One club our bands kept coming back to, the 4698 Bar in Changsha, takes its name from the date 4 June 1989, the day the authorities moved against the student protest on Tiananmen Square, and the young people who run it say that day must never be forgotten.

• Haggis 2006 Thirteen shows, one of the longer runs any Norwegian band has done in China.
• Good Time Charlie April-May 2007 Played the newcomer stage at MIDI for more than 2,500 people.
• Ninth March 2007 Television, newspapers and autographs the whole way through.
• Blind Stereo July 2007
• Team Blitzkrieg + Heidi Marie Vestrheim September 2007 NRK filed a report from Mao Live House that aired back home in prime time.
• Flare August-September 2007 Flew in via Moscow to Beatles-scale hysteria in some cities.
• Blitz Factory November 2007 The youngest Norwegian band ever to tour there, aged 17 to 20; their single reached around 20,000 people.
• Mindy Misty September 2008
• Supermonkey July 2009
• List September 2009 The Stord duo brought Peter Pogo from Jokke og Valentinerne on bass.
• Kalashnikov + Gustu August 2010 Toured right before the Peace Prize turned every opportunity upside down.
• Le Fant May-June 2011 The album was called Last Chance To Dance, and the title fit better than they knew.
• Steinar and the Ramshackles + Depui Summer 2011
• Chasm July 2011 The Tianjin date was cancelled after a Finnish band had run political appeals about Tibet at the club, so the authorities shut it down.
• Tripod 14-24 July 2011 The very last band we sent out before the Peace Prize put out the flame for good.
• Sassy Kraimspri Dates lost A very tough band; neither Kang Mao nor I could recover the tour list from our archives.

K-Jell was only ever meant to be one EP for myself, to prove I could make a record without a fixed band around me, and then I would retire to drink beer and smoke cigars. Instead, in 2007 we put the first single out at the MIDI festival in Beijing on 1 May, kept the cover anonymous so it would fly under the censors, and watched 15,000 copies disappear fast. Struggle And Break Through got played over the PA on every stage at MIDI that year, and it is probably the biggest hit I have ever had anywhere. We repeated the stunt in 2008 with a second single that reached 10,000, and the EP idea was quietly scrapped in favour of a full band and a full album.

Refreshing Power came out in March 2009 in 10,000 copies with a tour behind it, 1 to 20 April. On the road in Zhengzhou the Chinese immigration police turned up at our hotel with ten or twelve officers plus plain-clothes men who had been shadowing us all afternoon. I kept calm, answered every question, and let them drive me around town in an unmarked police car to confirm where we had played. In the end they decided the whole thing was a big misunderstanding, wished K-Jell good luck, and apologised. Imagine that: an apology from the police in China. I am fairly sure the Chinese police archives hold more photos of K-Jell than of any other band alive.

In 2010 came You Can't Kill Rock'n'Roll, around 6,500 copies, and a tour that an Icelandic volcano nearly sank before it began. Our luggage reached the Vox club in Wuhan twenty-five minutes before we were due on stage, and the audience never knew the drama that had run in the hours before. Eight days after that, on 2 May 2010, we played the main stage at MIDI in Beijing in front of thousands of people. We stopped mid-set and threw whole boxes of the new album out into the crowd. That was the top of our career, the thing we had worked toward and dreamed about for years.

A year later People Like Us In A Pretty Pink World went out in around 10,000 copies for the third China tour, in the summer of 2011. By then the ground had shifted under us completely.

This is the top of our career, this is what we had worked toward and dreamed about for all these years.

BOKEN OM MITT ROCK N ROLL LIV

In November 2010 the Nobel Peace Prize went to Liu Xiaobo, and the world changed for any Norwegian in China. We went from being deeply respected, since Norway was the first country to recognise the People's Republic, to being asked over and over why we had given the prize to a man the Chinese saw as a criminal. It was almost impossible to explain that it is not Norway that awards the Peace Prize but a Nobel committee that happens to sit in Norway. In the eyes of 1.4 billion people, Norway had given the prize, and we were talking to deaf ears.

Norwegian rock stood enormously strong in China between 2006 and 2011, far stronger than anyone in the industry back home will ever manage to grasp. It was Norwegian rock's one great chance, and it slipped through our fingers when the prize came and the support that could have carried it further never arrived. I stood in the middle of it from start to finish, so I know what I am talking about.

With the prize it did not just become hard to be Norwegian in China. It became impossible, and everything stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Had Norway not given the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, no one can guess how far this would have grown. But with the prize it did not just become hard to be Norwegian in China, it became impossible, and everything stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

BOKEN OM MITT ROCK N ROLL LIV

I do not let myself be stopped that easily. In 2013, right in the middle of the boycott, SUBS turned ten, and Kang Mao and I had one more bright idea: a tribute record of Norwegian bands covering SUBS songs, called Nice To Meet You. It flew in around 1,500 copies quietly under the radar, earned good reviews in the Chinese music magazines, and kept the Norwegian rock potato a little warmer than lukewarm. After that we both took October Party Records down to a resting pulse so low you cannot hear it.

There was a red K-Jell vinyl in 2016 that was meant for China once the timing was right, and it never went out there. We planned a proper return in 2020, and then COVID killed that too. Politics is not rock'n'roll, and we do rock'n'roll, so the door is not locked. It is only resting, and it is waiting for a green light from Kang Mao in Beijing.