Refreshing Power: twenty days across China

Wednesday 1 April. Suitcases, guitars, cables, cymbals, passports and visas stand packed at Bergen airport, KLM via Amsterdam to Beijing. Kjell, Roar, Steinar and BT, three weeks of China ahead of us. Over there we have two singles circulating in about 25,000 copies, tracks on close to 100,000 compilation CDs, and Refreshing Power out since March in a first pressing of 10,000. The word overweight makes the heart pump a little extra, now that airlines hunt expensive Gibson guitars and Ludwig snares to stow under the plane instead of in the hat rack. In Bergen it all slides through without fuss. We should have known that was on credit.

The flight is long and boring, because when exactly did flying become fun? Kjell, BT and Steinar have toured China before, with Jef and Ninth. Roar sets his boots on Chinese soil for the first time. Our guide VV is of course delayed, and then turns up at the wrong terminal, in an airport where roughly nobody speaks English. It sorts itself out once we get Kang Mao, the boss of October Party Records in Beijing, on the phone. She clears up the whole mess in a minute.

Then the city hits Roar. Skyscrapers rising, traffic thickening, and it dawns on the first-timer that he has entered one of the biggest, most polluted, most crowded cities on earth, a place that makes London, Berlin and Paris look like medium-sized villages. We check into the Gloria Plaza, fifteen minutes on foot from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, three from the silk market. Two nights of luxury before the hotel standard drops like a stone, that is the theory. In hindsight it tasted a little bitter: there were fine hotels right down the street at half the pain. You live, you learn.

BT, marathon runner and sports junkie, does what they did during the Olympics: he runs Beijing round. The rest of us, trained to the level of a packet of fish balls, can only bow in the dust. We earn black belts in shopping at the silk market. Roar gets a real barber shave in a place that is surely meant to be fancy and looks to me like an eighties disco; he comes out declaring the barber trade badly underrated. We drop the Great Wall, because getting out there from the centre is a hell of a production. And we are all a little rough in the throat. We blame the smog. This is right before the swine flu hysteria, so nobody blames anything else.

Friday 3 April, first gig: 2Kolegas, together with SUBS, possibly the biggest and most important indie punk band in China. The club takes 250 to 300 people, which in this country must count as intimate, and it is a room you must have played to earn your rock status. From the outside it looks like a German punk squat, sitting in a park in the thick of Beijing, surrounded by bars dressed in neon: on the fences, in the trees. Disneyland. Inside, these people know what they are doing. Good PA, good backline, a sound man who knows his craft. The place has soul and it smells of rock n roll.

Still wrecked from travel and time zones, but when K-Jell stands on a stage we hit it with everything we have. The crowd answers with wild enthusiasm. Dinner at a local restaurant, beers before and after with SUBS, VV and friends. A lovely first night in Beijing.

Noe som heter big in America, vel da heter det Bigger in China.

They say big in America. Over here it goes bigger in China.

Reisebrev 2009

Next day, Tianjin. A good hour by taxi through the thick of Beijing to the new station where the bullet trains leave; there are umpteen stations in this city, and this one alone is the size of Gardermoen. The bullet trains are just fantastic. The Chinese built them in a couple of years for the Olympics: 330 kilometres an hour, no shaking, seats you sink into, legroom for days. At home we cannot manage a sensible train between Bergen and Oslo.

One of the club bosses meets us at the station. Onward means the hall under it: hundreds of taxis idling, zero ventilation, people working down there all day. Health and safety in China: what is that? We struggle to breathe at once. Tourists get taxis fast here; we suspect they want us out of places we should not see. The cabs are so small the luggage rides on our laps, no seatbelts, traffic mildly put completely insane. A Chinese taxi ride is extreme sport of the finest class. The hotel is cheap and good, though if it ever catches fire nobody is getting down from the umpteenth floor before turning into a golden roast. Dinner down the street is ridiculously cheap and unbelievably good. Chinese food knocks out traditional Norwegian food in the first round.

Nic Bar is brand new. It still smells of paint when we come down, which those of us with asthma notice at once. Then the other thing: no ventilation of any kind, and everybody smokes indoors, because everybody smokes in China. It is Garage or Hulen in Bergen twenty years ago, before the ventilation orders and the smoking law. Hell on earth. The club itself is very good; the gear is a challenge, as it will turn out to be in a lot of the newer rock towns, but we work on it until it sounds like a hammer anyway.

The support band are local heroes with a vocalist who could drink Shane MacGowan under the table. They rollick through their set exactly ragged enough to be great to watch. Then the K-Jell live train leaves the station and the whole room just goes. Tianjin was fantastic. Fans blogged afterwards that this was the best band ever to visit China. Buckets of autographs. Metres of photos.

Up before the birds fart, too tired for breakfast, one insane taxi ride to the station in Tianjin. In Qingdao the weather is glorious, and again we sit and wait to be picked up, because everything takes longer here than at home, everything except restaurant food, which arrives faster. The club boss turns out to be a big, heavy Chinese man around one metre ninety, so much for all Chinese being small. He has his own car, still unusual for an ordinary citizen, but we need taxis on top, and every taxi already carries a boot full of its own mysteries. The loading turns pure comedy.

Qingdao is a Chinese holiday paradise. Beaches, green streets, the sea, hardly any smog, sun. Roar and Steinar go off for massage to fix their touring backs; this the Chinese can do. We play tourists before soundcheck, and a free day after the gig buys us extra hours in town. It feels like being on holiday in Spain. The city is famous for its seafood, and the seafood deserves the fame.

Freedom Cuba Bar is a small club, and again the gear is not the best, but with some effort we make it sound like stars and grenades. The support vocalist has fallen ill, so tonight is K-Jell alone, and the room fills with people who turn out to be proper K-Jell fans. When Struggle and Break Through and Kiss Kiss Kiss crack off the stage, the crowd comes apart at the seams completely. Afterwards, beers and an informal night with musicians and fans, and BT and Roar join a local guitar hero for a jam session deep into the night that rattles windows and bar stools.

Then the bill for the holiday. On the way to the station we learn that Qingdao to Wuhu takes nineteen hours by train. Night train, luckily, so we can sleep, in the sense that the beds are hard as carpenter’s benches, the carriages hold far too many people, and nothing on board rises above class E. In need the devil eats flies. It is completely fine to drink a beer or five on a Chinese train, so we do. And here is the truth about this life: you rest when you can and you work when you must. Touring like this is no life for fine ladies, it is hard graft every single day. If you want results it costs sacrifice and will. So you swallow what you do not like, and you move on.

In Wuhu we are met by the boss of Live Bar, who is either the little brother of Don Johnson in Miami Vice or local mafia. The taxis drive like both car and petrol are stolen. We ride from the slum side of town into the established side, and end up at what turns out to be a giant amusement park, dinosaurs and all, with bars and everything else around it. The hotel is good, breakfast included this time, and the club is right next door, a small miracle after days of full throttle.

The gear at Live Bar is unfortunately third-rate, but by now this is routine: put in the hours and soundcheck goes off like bang, crash and wall-shake. Two local punk bands warm up, boys who live and breathe rock n roll. Then K-Jell delivers another concert that blows the hair back, and when Struggle and Break Through and Kiss Kiss Kiss land, the audience dissolves completely. Autographs until the cramp sets in. Photos with girls with stars in their eyes and hard-boiled rockers until the house lights come on.

Wuhu to Shanghai is four or five hours by bus, a ride I could have spared myself. The bullet train is first class; the bus is a seat in the last goods wagon. At one of Shanghai’s many roaring bus stations we wait for the boss of Yu Yin Tang, because in China the rule of the three Ts applies and you learn to live with it. After some long half-hours she arrives, apologises, and conjures a maxi taxi out of the chaos. If you think you have seen a big city, Shanghai would like a word. It is enormous in square kilometres and enormous straight up.

The hotel is middle of the tree, not horrible, not good. Fire safety is a foreign word; if it starts burning you are toast in nothing flat, and this too you learn to live with as you get into the China groove. Yu Yin Tang, on the other hand, is a super club, the level of the best rooms you get to play in Europe, with a lovely park behind it where you sit after soundcheck with a glass of wine or a couple of beers. The sea wind blows the smog out of Shanghai. We eat hot pot with the two people who run the club, and it is exquisite.

Two solid support bands deliver their goods. K-Jell opens to girl-screams and cheering, which is wildly fun, because in Asia they are truly devoted to the music. Great stage sound, great light, great crowd, great sound out front. We liked Yu Yin Tang a lot.

Day two, and Shanghai is so large we have to change hotels; the next venue is over an hour away by taxi and we are still in the heart of the city. The new hotel is of a better standard, meaning not good, but better. The club, Live Bar, was supposed to be close by. It was a long walk. We completed it, he he he. This one sits in a rougher district, gangster-film Chinatown, very cool and slightly scary, and the club is like a huge German punk club: dust, smoke, old beer and dirt in the nose, gear on the walls and ceiling, and the obligatory dog that lives at the club.

The rig is middle of the tree, the two Shanghai support bands are lovely to hang out with, and dinner at a shabby cafe is once again food of the first order; we gorge. A big crowd is promised, and a big crowd comes, and with K-Jell on stage there is dancing in the house. Encores, photos, autographs until the cramp takes hold again. Some press has turned up, and a few interviews get done before it is time to sleep and charge the batteries for Nanjing.

I Kina gjelder reglen for de 3 T-er: Ting Tar Tid.

China runs on the rule of the three Ts: Things Take Time.

Reisebrev 2009

Up ugly-early again, taxi to one of Shanghai’s stations, bullet train onward, dozing in those blessed seats. In Nanjing a friendly plug of an organiser meets us and we do the usual: luggage up over our ears, no seatbelts, hellish speed through the streets. At the hotel we discover a double booking. No rooms. This does not bode well. But the plug fixes it, and suddenly we are in a flophouse in the same street as the club: cheap, dirty, probably more flammable than a petrol bomb, and within walking distance of the stage, which you learn to price very highly out here.

Gubao Bar is a big basement disco smelling of that lovely blend of mould and damp we had at home in the eighties. The stage is about twenty-five centimetres above the floor, and when we arrive there is no gear at all. Damn, we think, this does not look good. Within the hour the plug proves he has control: most of it lands, quality somewhere in the middle, and by now we are professionals at this. Two very good local bands open. Nanjing has a name as a proper rock city, and both bands play like they mean to defend it, so it creaks in the walls.

By the time K-Jell goes on, the basement is properly full, including a crowd of Americans with ties to the universities and businesses in town. A short way into the set the audience catches full fire, and mic stands and other loose objects start travelling wall to wall. For a small moment we are afraid the whole thing will tip out of control. It does not. It just lifts, and turns into one of the best concert experiences of the entire tour. Afterwards the plug buys beer for us and our friends. Chinese beer comes recommended, it is fantastic to drink.

We had braced for nine or ten hours of old train to Wuhan, but a new bullet line from Nanjing has just opened, so it becomes a few civilised hours instead. Then a maxi taxi and over an hour on the motorway inside the city, because Wuhan is so sick-large that this is what crossing it costs. By now we have stopped stressing about traffic. We relax at 120 kilometres an hour with no seatbelts in an old worn Toyota HiAce. The hotel sits above Vox Bar, and it is the single worst hotel I have slept in in my life. Mould everywhere; you wonder what happens here if an earthquake comes. But a hotel next to the venue is worth its weight in gold, so we check in.

Vox itself is a big club with everything the clubs at home have, and a PA that can blow whatever you like to Kingdom Come. It rains, and it rains a lot. We meet Wuwei from SMZB, who books Vox and is one of the best-known punk musicians in Wuhan and in all of China. He is worried: rain keeps people home from concerts, and it is a Sunday. Imagine if that were true in Bergen. The whole nightlife industry could shut down on the spot.

We go out into the rain and eat well, because food in China is so cheap you stop caring what you order; it never comes to more than twenty or thirty kroner a head anyway. Then a visit to Wuhan Prison, a punk shop selling records, clothes and shoes, where a few hundred yuan stay behind and the suitcases gain some kilos. Wuwei turns out half right about the weather, but enough people come for a festive rock n roll night at Vox all the same. There are encores until K-Jell runs out of songs and out of ideas. Autographs, photos, beers, and a party that rounds off as the sun comes up.

The next day is a free day, put into the schedule to hang with Wuwei and company, old punk buddies you do not meet often. Tourist duties and more shopping get done, then we walk the streets around Vox, because here there is a lot of China and very little West to look at. At night we head for a back alley full of restaurants and market stalls, through a string of very dark, narrow lanes where prostitution and other murky trade runs openly. On the far side a whole row of central people from the Wuhan music scene is waiting. Great food, much laughter, a number of litres of beer. A fantastic slice of street life in Wuhan.

New day, stupid-early morning. Anyone still believe touring is a leisurely dance on roses? They are wrong. It is blood work. Into another taxi, onto another bullet train, this one to Changsha and 4698 Changsha Live House, one of the oldest rock clubs in China. The name is special. It stands for 4 June 1989; they had to twist the numbers around to stay out of trouble with the authorities. That is the date of the great student uprising on Tiananmen Square, which the authorities have wiped from the history books and everything else in China, and which the people refuse to forget. It is still a deeply inflamed subject here.

Changsha is in the south, and the south says welcome with 35 degrees and sunshine. This is when life is sweet to live. Then the usual drill: tiny taxis, luggage on laps, hog-wild driving until engine and tyres howl. Steinar and Kjell end up at the wrong hotel, until the club’s band handler locates the two missing links and walks them around the corner to the right one, two floors above the club. The entrance to the club is a lift. Cool, and surely a little impractical when three or four hundred people want in, but who cares about that in China. It is summer, the sun is out, and it is a Tuesday?

The club has good gear and pros at every post; everyone with any connection to the place is visibly proud of it. Two good local punk and metal bands warm up and show that Changsha grows its own future. K-Jell delivers a cracking concert to a seriously devoted rock crowd. Afterwards, metres of autographs and photos, a few beers, and a lot of blah blah blah. If you want to try yourself in China, Changsha is a city you play.

From Changsha, nearly a full day on another crazy night train, bumpety-bump, and suddenly we stand in Zhengzhou, booked at 7 Live House. Several people had advised us to drop this city altogether; it was supposed to be terrible in every direction. Whoever gave that advice must mean some other Zhengzhou. We get one of the best hotels of the whole tour, the town is pleasant, and the club is no downer either. It starts badly, gear trouble and monitors that are stone dead, but we decide to solve it, the mood infects the sound crew, and suddenly the chief sound man of the whole town shows up and things land on rails.

After soundcheck we wander the town, tourists that we are. There is no support band and the room is half full, which matters nothing when the people who are there respond the way this crowd does. At times it is Beatles conditions in front of the stage, crying girls and boys out of their minds. We sign until the ink sprays and take photos with everyone in the building.

Up before bird or fish is awake, and this morning the taxi drivers are not awake either; there is not a cab to be seen, and if anything can stress an otherwise pleasant young man like Roar it is running late for transport. Things work out for those who live with the three Ts. We make the train to Shijiazhuang. The venue is New Tvu Bar, known as the cowboy bar, a joint that resembles a backyard in a German squat district more than anything in China. Giant posters of bare-chested muscle men put us in mind of San Francisco and Village People; the row of big old motorcycles at the entrance says hometown MC club. The contrasts are many, confusing and clear.

We are eating another better-than-fantastic dinner when it bangs off right outside: full fight between two drivers, kicking and swinging, a woman trying to wedge herself between them. One tries to flee in his car; the other plants himself in front of it. We keep still and watch the chaos. Closer to an action film you do not get. When the police arrive to clean up, most of the crowd evaporates quietly.

The club’s gear is on the border of what you would bother rehearsing on at home, but again we solve it to the positive. The local support band is PUNK in capitals, covering Ramones and Sex Pistols so it cracks in the walls. No ventilation, the room packs out, everyone smokes; our lungs will file their protest in the morning. Then we go on to a rammed shack of ecstatic fans and it turns completely wild, heels in the ceiling and teeth in the wallpaper. The ceiling drips. Nobody will go home. After the show we cannot move a centimetre, so we take one fan at a time and give everyone what they came for.

Straight to Beijing after the show, we thought. Right before leaving we learn that whoever bought the tickets bought the ordinary night train, not the bullet, and we have no seats. That class of train sells tickets with no regard for whether there is room, and the trip that should take under an hour will now take about five. The conductor helps us because we are foreigners: he can find us space in the restaurant car, carriage 9. In the chaos Roar does not catch a word of it and gets swallowed into one of the last carriages together with a hundred thousand Chinese. The rest of us fight forward with suitcases, guitars and drums, over people lying on the floor, sitting on the floor, standing in the aisles, hanging on the walls. It is so full you would not believe it even while you are in it. This is way over the top.

Carriage 9 turns out to be full too. Then Kjell and BT snap and tell VV: ask the man running this carriage what it costs to buy two tables all the way to Beijing. She asks. For a few miserable yuan we have bought half the carriage, and people get shown the door. Raw and brutal, yes, but there and then it is about getting through this hell ride in one piece. Roar is still missing, so VV goes hunting; an hour or more later he appears with his bass, finished with the entire concept of trains. We have one bottle of spirits and one of wine, and both get opened to settle the nerves. Somewhere along the way we start laughing, because this is pure distilled madness from end to end, we have filmed most of it, and a train ride like this you will never, not with a chance in hell, get to experience in our part of the world.

In Beijing we are met at the station by VV’s father and uncle, come to drive us to the hotel. VV is dead sick of taxi trouble, and after the night on the crazy train this counts as a gift straight from heaven. At the hotel we sleep like stones until VV comes to wake us, and we pack the guitars for the last time this tour. Tonight is Yugong Yishan, Beijing’s answer to Rockefeller: a huge club with the latest of everything in sound and light. What they do not have here, you cannot get hold of in 2009. Just the soundcheck is a high of rare dimensions.

Dinner with the support bands and our Beijing friends. Then we learn why the night is not sold to the rafters: the concert could not be promoted hard, for fear it would be stopped. The local authorities have been shutting down concerts in Beijing lately, and SUBS have had their own gig the following weekend stopped because too many tickets were sold in advance. So we say it plainly: however many come, we squeeze the last drop out of K-Jell and give them a show to remember. The supports smash their sets so it hums in the walls, people do come, and K-Jell gives everything and then some. Beijing always draws a crowd from Europe and the USA, and this night ends in beers with, among others, staff from the Czech embassy and a few Germans.

Kjell and Steinar decide the night is young and head for bar street, where the pubs never close; Roar and BT say thank you and goodnight. Over the beers we talk through the weeks that have passed. The last day belongs to Kang Mao of SUBS and October Party Records. We visit her at home, where the offices are, and there stand the releases of Norwegian artists we know so well, row upon row, while she talks warmly about the bands. We get to see all the prizes SUBS have won as one of China’s leading rock bands. Dinner, and then we collect the shopping we have had stored with her along the way. Tomorrow at first light VV comes to take us to the airport and send us home.

Then the fun starts, because at the airport in Beijing the overweight ghost is back and this time there is no mercy: one kilo over, and you will kindly pay. BT and Kjell explode. The guitars are coming into the cabin as hand luggage; the woman behind the desk says no; we do not budge, and the discussion gets loud. At last KLM’s man in Beijing comes running with tags reading approved as cabin baggage, and asks why we cannot simply send the guitars and snare drum under the plane. Because the instruments are too expensive for that, we say. That is half the truth. The other half is that at 275 to 300 kroner a kilo, checking them would cost us thousands. After much back and forth we get it our way.

In Amsterdam we land fairly finished and plant ourselves in the bar for the layover beers. While we sit there, the Bergen band Syrach turns up, homebound from their own European tour, and it becomes a few more beers and some metres of shop talk. Syrach also have a record out on October Party Records in Beijing. On the last flight we sit worn out and deeply satisfied. This has been an experience for life, one that cannot be measured in money or in time. We have been part of writing a piece of rock history in both China and Norway, and we have seen sides of China no ordinary tourist will ever be shown. We have felt China on the pulse.

The accounts? We took a small hit, and it was worth it. We got no financial support from anyone at home in Norway. The people who sit in Oslo handing out the money are apparently of the view that a band from Bergen, on its way to breaking in the most populous country in the world, cannot possibly hold any value on their side of the mountains. If that is wrong, it is still the impression we are left with, and they are welcome to keep the whole support. Some money did come in the end, afterwards, and it came from Bergen municipality, who appreciate a Bergen band putting the city and Norway so clearly on the map in China. With that we crept close enough to break even to enjoy that part too.

And to every band that gets the chance to try itself in China: dive in, do not hesitate. This is an opportunity and an experience for life. China is the Klondike of our time in pop and rock, and it is happening now.

Grip dagen, grip sjansen og lev ut rock n roll drømmen deres nå.

Seize the day, take the chance, live out the rock n roll dream now.

Reisebrev 2009