Eight shows across a country that was not supposed to have punk rock

I flew out a few days before Pez and Katy, alone with a suitcase and a guitar, and my return ticket stamped 16 April. Whatever happened now, I was stuck in China for a while. At passport control I could feel my heart working. In New York the year before, the man in the booth had screamed WHAT IS YOUR BUSINESS IN AMERICA at me. Here the officer looked at my passport, looked at me, and smiled. Welcome to China, enjoy your stay. I had prepared for an interrogation and got a smile, and it would not be the last time China turned me into one big question mark.

Kang Mao from SUBS had written me a note in Chinese before I left: which taxi firms to use, where the hotel was, ignore every friendly gentleman offering rides inside the terminal. I walked past a million of them, prices dropping with every step, out to the official queue, where a man in an actual top hat read my note, smiled, and waved up a taxi from a better line than the tourists got. Then the driver did 150 to 170 into Beijing, taking the gravel shoulder round four or five cars while a yellow and blue IKEA building flew past in the corner of my eye. My fingerprints are in that dashboard still.

I did my tourist day on foot. Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Silk Market, the lot. Outside the Forbidden City a group of kids stopped me for pictures, they had read about me in a music magazine. Alone on the other side of the planet, recognised in the street. In the evening Kang Mao and SUBS took me to dinner, and I asked the question I had saved up: what are we allowed to say from the stage? She laughed. Say what you want, people mostly do not care at all. If the police turn up, say something nice about China and they are happy. Then she gave me a crash course in chopsticks while the whole table laughed at the amateur from Norway.

Pez and Katy landed, and on 7 April we played 13 Club, one of the three rock clubs in Beijing that really counted. Support was Joyside and Reflector, then up-and-coming, today some of the biggest rock bands in China. The club was close to full, the CDs grew legs, Kang Mao joined us on stage for a song, and afterwards we signed and posed like we had done it every day of our lives. And Wuwei from SMZB arrived to travel with us as our guide through the whole country. We read no Chinese and spoke no Chinese. Without him we were, as I put it then, completely lost in the Chinese pancake.

Kineserne har to fartsenheter på bilene sine, den ene er av, og den andre er på.

Two speed settings on every car in China. Off, and on.

Rockedrømmen, chapter 15

Wuwei had warned us: up at 06.00 sharp, because crossing Beijing in morning traffic is its own expedition. At the station he more or less ran, and we ran after him. Then we learned why. The platforms have starting gates like a horse track, and when they open you RUN, up and over and down to your train, then press yourself into the carriage and claim your seat. It is hot, it is packed, and the toilet is a hole in the floor with the sleepers rushing past underneath. You get very good at holding it on a Chinese train.

The club, Bifengtang, sat on the second floor of a big, handsome restaurant. They had sorted everything we needed, with two footnotes: every amp knob was labelled in Chinese characters, and Pez’s drum stool was a restaurant chair. Fine. That is what we had, so that is what we used. Wuwei translated knobs and fixed everything else, the man was simply fantastic to have on the road.

Down in the cellar under the restaurant was an internet cafe, and in one corner a few boys sat watching porn on a big screen. Nobody reacted. I went over and asked, is that not illegal here, and blocked too? Oh yes, said the one who spoke English, we just hack past the censorship and do what we want, easy as that. So much for my mental map of China. People simply did not care about the ones who ruled them.

The concert was completely sold out, and we were told we were the first non-Chinese band ever to play the city. Ever. I have never seen so many people photograph and film us at once. The room took off, kids screaming I WANNA ROCK with the light pouring out of them. Afterwards it was autographs and photos until nobody was left. Rock stars on our own little first China tour. Who would have believed that.

The train to Wuhan was honest hell. Two hundred and fifty people in a carriage built for a hundred, hour after hour. We put Wuwei on the case, and he fixed it the Chinese way: a couple hundred yuan extra each, and suddenly everyone had a bunk. From hell to heaven for the price of a round of beers at home. That is how the whole trip worked. You learn as you go, and in China nearly everything can be arranged.

Wuhan is Wuwei’s home town, and Kang Mao’s too. The two of them played in the same band back when punk in China was brand new. His club, Vox Bar, is the Rockefeller of Wuhan: proper gear, years of concerts, just about everything except foreign bands, because so far almost none had come. We were told, more than once, that JEF knocked a few barriers over on this tour and showed that long-noses, which is what they cheerfully called us, could actually travel the country and play.

The show itself was magic and the crowd completely out of its mind. Honesty requires me to say that SMZB were already big at home, so a good share of the room had come for them and got us on the ticket. Suited us fine. It was one of the last nights in the old Vox before it moved across the street, so we got to close a small piece of Wuhan rock history. The hotel was above the club: seventh floor, pitch-dark corridors, and a clear instruction not to open if anyone knocked. No windows, no escape routes. If it starts burning, we are toast on every level. We slept fine anyway.

In Changsha we played 4698 Bar with Last Choice, and the club’s name is the best thing I can tell you about China in 2006. The digits are shuffled just enough to stay out of trouble, but they spell a date: 4 June 1989, the day the tanks went into Tiananmen Square. The kids running the club said that day must never be forgotten, whatever gets erased from the history books. Tough people. Our battles at home are footnotes next to what these kids took on every single day.

The concert was sold out and the room was a pressure cooker. Thirty degrees outside, zero air conditioning inside, plenty of people and no oxygen. Sweat rock’n’roll. And once again we were closing a room: like Vox, 4698 was moving to bigger premises as rock grew everywhere in China. We started to feel like a demolition crew with guitars.

In Changsha we also met the people behind one of the biggest music magazines in China. They had shipped our Bergen Rock City compilation CDs as free covermounts, a smash, and they wanted more, preferably much more. So there we sat, a punk trio from Bergen, on top of the world in southern China. After the show it was food and beer with the whole club, and from here on every train ticket was the upgraded kind, about a hundred yuan a trip, with bunks. Some lessons you only learn once.

Shuanle Bar sat on the second floor up the world’s narrowest and steepest staircase, in a building clad entirely in bamboo. A fire bomb de luxe, in a town pushing thirty degrees. Guilin is split in two by a river with crystal-clear water and those karst peaks you see on postcards from Thailand. Our side of the river was one hundred percent China. The other side had a Hilton, American business and triple prices. A six yuan taxi ride apart, two different planets.

A taxi driver "cheated" me by taking the long way round, so I paid ten yuan instead of six and got a sightseeing tour of the whole town. I do not know who fooled whom. Win-win. Dinner was a garage with wooden tables and a small kitchen. The lady had no cold beer, every fridge she owned held food, so she sprinted down the street and arranged cold bottles from another shop. Mid-meal the sky went black and dumped rain for ten minutes, then the sun steamed it all dry again. When the bill came, our hosts wanted to split it. Pez clocked that the boys had almost nothing and the bill was barely fifty yuan, so he just said, this one is mine, and that was that.

At the hotel we got a briefing I have never received anywhere else: sleep with the window shut and the toilet door closed, because the rats walk the power lines between the houses and can come up through the drain. Right outside the entrance, on cue, the shabbiest giant rat we had ever seen crossed in front of us, the size of a small dog. We reversed thirty metres as one man. Our local friend walked over and kicked it back where it came from. That rat scream is stored on my hard disk to this day.

The crowd barrier in front of the stage was a row of bamboo chairs. Good thought, effect roughly zero. Banana Peel and Bad Lucky King delivered the goods, and the night ended wet, sweaty and completely worth it. The next day was our only day off on the whole tour. Pez and Katy went with one of the local rockers to a resort town nearby. I could not be bothered. I slept in, fixed my guitar, and spent the day at the pub down the street with a beer or five. Everyone got exactly the day off they wanted.

Shanghai, 13 April, Yuyingtang, and yes, this club was also moving to new premises after our concert. By now we took it personally. The bill was us, Sonic Bastards from Austria, and Angry Jerks, who must be China’s toughest rockabilly-punk outfit. Sold out. Everyone smokes indoors everywhere in China, and my asthma, which never otherwise says a word, started filing complaints. It did not matter. The night was raw and wild from first chord to last cymbal crash, and we sat up late with both bands afterwards. We stayed in touch for years.

If you think you keep your hotel when you play two nights in Shanghai, you are wrong. Shanghai is enormous and then a bit more, so to reach the next club you tour inside the city. We packed everything and drove a genuinely long way to a new hotel in a new district, the way you move between towns in Europe. Same city, next stop.

On 14 April we played Shufle Bar with Load Speaker and Happy Sky, two more Chinese bands that gave absolutely everything. The place filled up, and it hit me mid-set that we had never had this much fun on tour, ever. The three of us had found the formula and it sparked off the stage. Then, into the club, walks Reinhardt Østrem from Os with company. Hometown people at a JEF gig in one of the biggest cities on the planet. I was starting to suspect Os is the true centre of the earth. We took a round of bars with them afterwards. How often do you run into each other in Shanghai.

For the last leg we flew. Nobody had the appetite for one more marathon train ride before a show, and the ticket cost next to nothing. We landed back where it all started, in a hotel a hundred metres down the street from the first one, just as nice at a third of the price. From then on I let our Chinese friends book everything. The finale was Yugongyishan Bar, one of the three clubs that mattered in Beijing along with 13 Club and Mao Live House, and naturally it was moving to new premises after our concert. On the bill: Kang Mao’s SUBS, rock solid, and Café In, a China-Japan band whose small young singer from Japan charmed the entire room flat.

We played, and it was the perfect ending. Tired, happy, and finished with something nobody had really believed was possible. Carved in stone now, as I like to say. For the record: the tour lists say the show was 15 April, the dates on our own photos say the 16th, then keep going through the 18th in Beijing. After two weeks of Chinese trains I will not referee that one.

What none of us knew on that stage: this was the last concert JEF ever played. Not because anything happened. Nothing was decided and nothing was announced, we simply never called another rehearsal. I got busy with my solo project, Pez with Bombers, Katy with her art. The band was never dissolved, it just stopped, at the exact right moment, on the far side of the world, with our friends. Nobody has looked back with a single regret.

One more thing for the protocol: we had zero trouble with police or authorities the entire tour. The experts at home who promised us disaster were wrong about everything, again. On the last morning we came out to a Beijing coated in red desert sand after a night storm. Pez said to the taxi driver, there is a lot of fog today. The driver answered, no, this is not fog, it is the Tuesday smog. Then we flew home. Only later did I get the full picture: we had been band number three or four in the world to tour China like that, and years afterwards I stood in Chinese rock clubs reading a wall newspaper of the scene’s big moments, with JEF printed in the middle of it, described as punk pioneers from the West. Not world famous. Noted down. That is more than good enough for me in this life.

Vi var sprøe, men smarte også, for vi lyktes med det vi gjorde der alle andre sa at det ikke ville gå.

Crazy, yes, but smart with it. We pulled off the thing everyone said would never work.

Rockedrømmen, chapter 15