Third time to China

22 June 2011. K-Jell is going out on its third full China tour in three years. K-Jell this year is Kjell on lead vocals and guitar, Tronna on bass and vocals, Steinar on guitar and vocals, and BT on drums. Tronna is the new man, and this is his first trip. We meet at Flesland for the first trial by fire: is the luggage overweight, and do the guitars come into the cabin with us?

The guitars are coming on the plane. On that point we are very determined, with 2010 fresh in mind. Last year we sat on the flight to Beijing while every piece of our luggage stood in Copenhagen. It cost us about 4,000 kroner in phone calls to SAS from China to untangle the mess SAS themselves had cooked up, plus days of shuttling between hotels and airports before everything finally turned up.

So we stand at the check-in and watch bag after bag glide through. Not one question about the guitars. Tronna’s bass is a touch too long and goes as extra baggage. A quick 350 kroner, thank you very much, says SAS.

Everything is sent, and the boys slide through the metal detector and into the bar, where a half litre of tour pils waits for each of us. We are absurdly lucky people, getting to do this again and again.

Skål, vi er på vei til Kina igjen for å spille og oppleve nye eventyr.

Cheers. We are on our way to China again, to play and to find new adventures.

Tour letter, 22 June 2011

23 June 2011. We land in Beijing after a long flight, and it hurts here, there and everywhere. That flying is comfortable is a myth. Possibly true in first class, but for us mortals it is mostly pain and very little joy. The fog hangs low over the city as we descend. Or is it smog? Honestly hard to say. This is one of the most polluted cities in the world.

This year even our luggage lands on the same plane as us, almost too good to be true. Then we reach the taxi exit. Oh my fucking god. The taxi queue is as long as the morning rush from Fana into Bergen city centre. It feels like 500 degrees, as if somebody emptied 6,000 litres of water onto baking concrete. It takes about seven and a half minutes to go from bone dry to soaked through, and that is standing still, under a roof, not lifting a finger.

The queue crawls forward centimetre by centimetre. We are jet-lagged and about ready to resign when one of the guards on the taxi rank spots us. He sees guitars, tattoos and a gang of rockers, does his maths fast, waves us out of the line, walks us past the whole queue and puts us in a van taxi with room for everyone and everything. Suddenly we are rolling towards central Beijing. Completely wonderful.

For Tronna all of this is new. He sits taking it in as one of the biggest cities in the world grows up around him. The rest of us mostly watch that the driver does not kill us with idiot driving. Traffic in China cannot be described, only experienced. We check in and are about to go out to eat when the heavens open. Tropical rain, by the bucket. Lightning and thunder over the skyscrapers, and rivers running in the streets. Rivers, not brooks. We know rain, we are from Bergen after all.

The weather is so bad that Kang Mao cannot get across town to meet us. On a normal day it takes her a couple of hours from her district to ours by the Silk Market. Tonight she throws in the towel. Beijing is simply that enormous. Dear little Bergen counts as a village at this scale, maybe a road junction. We tell her it is fine. We need to sleep off the jet lag anyway.

24 June 2011. We wake to a very damp Beijing. All the water that fell yesterday is going to steam back up today, in 35 degrees and more smog than Danmarksplass produces in a year. Like living inside a big polluted sponge. Tonight we play 13 Club, a joint that has worked well for us before, but the signals say otherwise. The clubs in Beijing have turned into business, all of them, with very few exceptions. You now put up a minimum guarantee of 3,000 yuan to use the club and the gear, and Kang Mao more than hints that the local mafia squeezes the scene for cash. On top of that the authorities are on the warpath against rock bands this summer, and the club has not been able to market the concert to our fans. We seriously consider dropping the whole thing.

We take the chance, odds or no odds. We have not travelled this far to sit in a hotel room. First some shopping at the Silk Market, a proper Chinese lunch, and yes, Starbucks. Three out of four in K-Jell more or less run on coffee, and coffee is still not a normal drink in China. Tea is what counts. Then sound check, quickly done. Kang Mao says straight out that she thinks the night will end in the ditch. We tell her we have come too far to turn around, and if it goes to hell, it goes to hell. Either way it becomes a good story at home.

Some people come. Not the three or four hundred there should have been, but more than none, and on a day like this that counts. We take a financial hit, a couple of hundred kroner each, nothing to cry about. What the fuck, this is part of the game of playing in a band. It is supposed to go off the rails from time to time, and the stories from nights like this always improve with age. The ones who did show up have their best night out in a long while. It gets intimate, and afterwards we take all the time in the world for talk, pictures and autographs. A strange and memorable night in its own odd little way, one rock experience richer and a few hundred yuan poorer.

Hele jævla himmelen faller i hode på oss.

The whole damn sky falls on our heads. We are from Bergen, and this still takes the cake.

Tour letter, 23 June 2011

25 June 2011. We leave Beijing by high-speed train, and talk about a luxurious way to travel. It does 330 kilometres an hour and rides like it is running on clouds. You do have to ask what they are waiting for at home. Five hundred and thirty kilometres of rail between Bergen and Oslo, how hard can that be? The Chinese lay thousands of kilometres of this every year, over just as many mountains and valleys as we have. The trip takes four hours and we sleep through most of it.

Xin Xiang is a properly Chinese city, no tourists here whatsoever, and people look at us as if we are a freak show on loan from a travelling tivoli. The station looks like it was last painted 150 years ago, and it smells, no, it stinks. Kjell was here with JEF in 2006, when JEF became the first international band ever to play this little town of a mere 2.5 million people. Bergen and Oslo are marked as cities on our part of the planet. Over here they would pass for two large road junctions.

Some of the boys from the club meet us on the platform with a little happening arranged: we are riding moped taxis the fifteen minutes to the club. With Chinese traffic in mind we set off with mixed feelings, and wild it is. So wild, and so hysterically funny, that we nearly laugh ourselves to death. Three or four near-accidents on a multi-lane road through the middle of town does something to your mood. Better to laugh. With a little bad luck this becomes the last anyone ever hears from us. The ride goes fine, and it was honestly great fun. The heat lands the moment we stop moving, a steady 35 degrees with the humidity turned all the way up.

The hotel scores its usual minus 7.5 stars, properly filthy and wonderful. But what won’t we sacrifice for our rock and roll. No mould on the walls, no cockroaches in sight, the shower works, and they have even set aside one whole roll of toilet paper. You have to make a fuss of visiting rock stars. The hotel sits a minute and a half from the club, and it costs about two kroner fifty and a gumball to live and eat in Xin Xiang. We can hardly complain.

Because Xin Xiang is small, the stress level of the local authorities is much lower, and the club has marketed the concert with all the noise it deserves. The club is called ARK. Tronna renames it Askøy Rock Klubb within the hour. Great stage, good gear, and the world’s friendliest Chinese rockers running it, and they even insist on paying for our food and hotel, the kind of thing that simply does not happen in China. At the bar we meet a father, a mother and a son of about ten with a mohawk, out together for a beer and a game of pool. Children both smoke and drink in China. We are just as shocked every time, but we have learned to let it slide past. We would be chanceless trying to missionary any attitudes here. The culture gap between this part of the world and ours is so vast that Mount Everest counts as a pebble in comparison.

Three local bands play with us, and meeting the local rock bands is always one of the best parts of touring China. They soak up everything we can share. A good crowd turns up, and the concert runs blow for blow. The people at ARK take the mood up through the ceiling and along the walls, over and over. The ten-year-old from the bar is with us the whole way, and at the end he gets Kjell’s Ramones T-shirt. He is deadly proud, and every fan in the room is deadly jealous of the kid. Everyone gets their signatures, wherever they want them. Then cold beers and a late meal out in the sauna the city insists on being.

The hotel key cards are on timers and never work after we have left the rooms, so our guide Ray has a busy night getting us in and out. The girls at the desk nearly faint every time we ask them anything. We give them a CD each, and they get so flustered they cannot account for themselves at all. A little Beatles atmosphere over the whole thing. Next morning we eat an American junk food breakfast on the hotel steps while the town studies the closing number of the K-Jell freak show: four Norwegians on a staircase, waiting for their moped taxis.

The station is even hotter, packed, and without air conditioning. But we are boys who have been on tour before, and most Chinese stations keep a VIP room for rich business people and Norwegian punks with too many yuan in their pockets. Five yuan a head, about four kroner fifty. The guide thinks it is money out the window. We would happily have paid twenty times that. The VIP room looks like a shut-down factory in Poland with a pile of dirty furniture left behind, but it has air conditioning, LOTS of air conditioning, and right there and then that outshines everything else. Then the news: no bullet train today. We are going out on one of the really old oompah trains, three hundred people or more to a carriage, seven yuan a ticket. Everyone should try one once. We feel we collected all their attractions on earlier occasions, but the choice stands between this train and staying in Xin Xiang. So we take a running start and plough our way aboard, us and far too many Chinese in the same carriage, on a train any technical museum would love to own. TUTU!!!

Alt med denne type tog suger elg.

Everything about this kind of train sucks moose. But it is this train or staying in Xin Xiang.

Tour letter, 25 June 2011

26 June 2011. We roll into Zhengzhou, and the temperature keeps climbing toward the boiling point for Nordic pale-faces like us. Sun, heavy humidity and smog, the standard package at this time of year.

Then Kang Mao calls with news. A band from Finland has laid the great golden Easter egg of the season in China. They delivered a political appeal from several of the stages they played, including 7 Live House, where we play tonight, and not just any appeal: they went straight at the Tibet question. The authorities had sent along a representative who reads English to sit through their concerts, so the arrangement worked perfectly. Eight of the ten clubs these clever Finns played are now shut down for at least a month. Official reason: the clubs are running illegal political activity.

You can wonder what these Finns hoped to achieve with their sermon. In China there is an entirely different view of the Tibet question than the one we carry in the west. What they very clearly did achieve was to wreck a young rock scene in city after city, a scene that fights hard for its right to exist and keeps its distance from politics precisely so it can survive. One of the rockers we met put it best: we work so hard to build a scene here, why do these clowns come and tear it down? We never got hold of the band’s name. But they are from Finland, and they proved that very little is buzzing between their ears. They will likely never play China again. If the authorities do not stop them, a whole country’s concert scene will boycott them.

The fallout keeps landing on us. Our biggest concert of the tour, at 13 Club in Tianjin, is cancelled, because the Finns played there too and the club must close for a month. That one stings. Tianjin has a superb K-Jell audience, and it is one of the cities that actually brings money in. We are told more concerts can go down the drain, and Kang Mao works day and night to hold the rest of the tour together while we keep moving. Later we hear that club owners from all over China have travelled to Beijing to negotiate with the authorities. Maybe something good grows out of the mess in the long run. It shows how important it is to think before you speak on a stage in China. Statements that sound harmless at home can have consequences you cannot imagine out here.

The concert at 7 Live House goes ahead on the evening of the 26th. People find their way in, the dedicated kind, grateful and loud. The club owner is pleased, Kang Mao is proud of her Norwegians, and we leave the stage soaked and happy.

The hotel is actually a good hotel for once, three minutes from the club. We shop in a street full of proper brand stores where everything costs next to nothing compared to home, and the bags fill up with presents for the people waiting there. We eat well and cheaply. Our train tomorrow does not leave until 22:30 and there is no concert to play, so we plan a lazy day in Zhengzhou.

Kjell goes to bed first. The rest of the boys head for the market outside the hotel, because in many Chinese cities the market opens when the shops close. Fresh out of the shower, the hotel phone rings and a woman talks away in Chinese. Nothing to do but hang up. Kjell crawls under the duvet and kills the light, and there is a knock on the door. Outside stands a young Chinese woman with a note. Sex with her costs 400 yuan. Her and her friend, a full 600. Offered straight at the hotel room door, no discretion whatsoever. The offer is politely declined. You want no conflict with the local mafia. But these girls could sell snow and ice to eskimos, and once they have a foot inside the door they push on. New offers land and are declined, politely, one by one, until there is nothing to do but push the door shut and lock it. A text warning goes out to the rest of the boys. Too late. They have already been hailed in the hotel lift. Everyone finds his own room in the end, alone.

Anyone who claims prostitution does not exist in China has not travelled China the way we have. It is far from the first time this happens at our hotels. The girls turn out to have their base in the room straight across the corridor, and business runs briskly through the night, easy to hear through walls that were never built for privacy. They leave us pale-faces alone. At other hotels the girls do not knock, they slide business cards under the door while you are out. Our record is ten or twelve cards inside one door. Our guide says this is normal all over China, a job that lifts many girls from poverty into the middle class, quietly accepted as a way up and never spoken of, because officially prostitution does not exist here. We have learned this much by now: the culture gap is so wide that we do not have to understand or agree with everything. China does as China wants.

27 June 2011. We spend the day drifting around Zhengzhou. The station that evening is hot, humid and airless as always, so we buy ourselves into the VIP room here too. The night train to Hefei is a sleeper, a middle-aged train, not the worst and not the best. The air conditioning is weak and it is warm, but we sleep. Eight hours to Hefei.

28 June 2011. We land in Hefei early in the morning, and it is probably unnecessary to report that it is hot as a baker’s oven here too. From the station it is a 45 minute taxi ride on the motorway through the middle of town, all of 150 yuan, about 140 kroner. Affordable, you would have to say.

The hotel is good, only two minutes from the club, On The Way, in the middle of a district full of students. Of course we have arrived in the middle of exam season, and the summer holidays start this week. We will see. The club is good and the gear is good. Sound check is dispatched, and we eat a proper dinner at a joint on the floor below the club, about 20 kroner each for a full meal with drinks. Then the wait. We are prepared for the worst and hoping for the best.

As the hour approaches, people start streaming in, and we get it exactly right: a properly fun night, and it finally feels like we are back on track. There are dedicated fans here who saw us at the MIDI festival in Beijing in 2010, and they are overwhelmed at getting to meet us after the show. You do not experience that at home.

On The Way gets a dice roll of five from us. We are happy, the fans are happy, and the club owner is so happy he stands us a crate of beer, again the kind of thing that more or less never happens in China. A night the way nights on tour in China are supposed to be. Late food at a night street kitchen, then bed. Tomorrow, Nanjing.

29 June 2011. Next stop Nanjing, by high-speed train again, finally. Hefei to Nanjing in about an hour. The thermometer there shows no less than 40 degrees, with rain hanging in the air. Wonderful, considering the humidity already has us feeling like we are in the shower around the clock. We are getting used to walking around in half-wet, clammy clothes. It is a lifestyle now.

The hotel is of OK standard, ten minutes from the club, 61 House, a new club for us in this city. We all shower, to wash the city’s moisture off with our own moisture, which sounds insane and is entirely necessary, and meet in the reception in partly dry clothes. We step out to find food, and that is when it detonates. The whole sky falls into the streets of Nanjing, an enormous crash of a storm, thunder and lightning, weather with a capital W. Rivers run down the streets. Then it is over as fast as it began, the sun breaks through, and the eternal sauna insult returns. Forty degrees, and thousands of litres of water on streets with no drainage worth the name, all of it heading back up into the air.

We go on expedition anyway and find a small, friendly street restaurant, lots of good food for little money. After dinner there is even time for a rest, for once, and we take it.

At four we head for the club. It is drizzling and there is not a taxi to be found, so we walk the ten minutes with the cases held high. At the club we are very pleasantly surprised. 61 House has everything in order and is far better than the dive we played last time in Nanjing: better stage, better gear, better everything. The rain worries the owner, though. Rain keeps people home in China, she says, even if it is only drizzle. The Chinese are simply not waterproof, as far as we can tell.

Sound check lands nicely, and boys and girls with clear Nirvana and Sex Pistols references start appearing at the door. Little by little the room fills to a decent level. Not full, but good people, and after everything this tour has thrown at us we accept what we get with gratitude. K-Jell plays up for a dance and the crowd swings its dancing foot and then some in front of the stage. It could have been more people. It could also have been a lot fewer. All in all a good and well-executed night in Nanjing.

Afterwards two girls from a local punk band come over, and we take some beers with them and answer everything they ask and dig into. YoYo, as one of them calls herself, speaks more or less fluent English, still not common in China, and she has since joined the guide team October Party Records uses in Beijing for touring bands. The two of them left the concert freshly converted and plan to make K-Jell bigger in Nanjing. Playing for people like that is worth almost the entire tour on its own.

It is late and we have an early train. Back at the hotel the floor inside our doors is covered in business cards from the working girls of Nanjing. A never ending story.

Gitarbagger og trommekasser er ypperlige paraplyer.

Guitar bags and drum cases make excellent umbrellas.

Tour letter, 29 June 2011

30 June 2011. Nanjing station, morning. The train to Shanghai stops for exactly ten minutes, and people are expected to get off and on fast. Today it turns into complete chaos, because the train is full of Russian tourists dragging enormous amounts of luggage, behaving as if they have all the time in the world, which is precisely what you do not have on a Chinese train. Normally the loading and unloading of humans here is an impressively oiled machine. Today it seizes up, and the real danger is that the train leaves before the rest of us get on. The knot unties itself at last, and the train rolls the second the final man plants his foot inside the door.

Shanghai is enormous, and always exciting to come back to. The owner of 696 Live House meets us at the station, a young man of barely twenty-something. Running a rock club in China at that age is tough work, and we are quietly impressed. He drives us through rain-clean streets to a hotel a couple of blocks from the club. It is very hot, very humid and very wet today, so we drop the sightseeing and stay in the dry, where clothes and bodies can attempt the impossible and dry out. Only BT goes out, to run. He runs in more or less every city we visit, weather be damned. There is a reason the man is on the Norwegian national team in ultrarunning. The man is mad.

696 Live House is a highly respected club, and a lot of bands have played it since it opened. It also turns out to be the smallest club we have ever played, anywhere. Our rehearsal room at Os Rockeklubb is a third bigger than this joint. One of the world’s largest cities, one of the world’s smallest clubs. A funny twist, and it proves a point: a concert room does not have to be huge to count among the best in a country. A small thought for every village and small town in Norway. You can run your own scene in a room that holds a hundred people.

The owner tells us the recent events have reached them too, and that everyone must be more careful now. He has no idea how the night will go, and the weather is not exactly on our side either. It is no secret how it ends: this concert sets our all-time record for lowest turnout. It can hardly get thinner than a handful of people in a city of sixteen million. We deliver the full package anyway, and the ones who came get full value for their tickets. A strange, small night, and nobody in K-Jell complains. We got to play. That has not been a given on this tour.

1 July 2011. We head out to one of the giant stations outside Shanghai at the usual insane taxi speed. Today we ride the brand new super express that runs Shanghai to Beijing in a good five hours, a distance in the neighbourhood of Bergen to Stockholm. The line opened officially one day before our trip. We are fairly sure we are the first western band in history to travel on this train, possibly the first Norwegians at all. Naturally we asked for the best tickets on it, because if we are doing this we want all of it.

Then the disappointment: the man who arranged the tickets kindly saved us some cash and bought second class instead of first. The difference is about 100 yuan a head, and the train is sold out, so there is no swapping anything. The sulking lasts as far as the platform. Second class turns out to be completely wild too. The train pulls away and just keeps accelerating, and the fantastic part is the silence. No noise, no rattle, like riding on a cloud. A simple question to whoever runs infrastructure at home: what exactly are you waiting for? Bergen to Oslo, Oslo to Trondheim. Dice roll six for this way of travelling. Suddenly, five hours and a little more later, we are in Beijing.

The finale was supposed to happen in Tianjin, a big night at 13 Club, but that club is one of the ones shut down after the Finnish band’s antics, and it still irritates us plenty. Kang Mao has instead got us onto a party night at the rock club 2Kolegas in Beijing, confirmed just hours ago. With that kind of notice the news will never reach the bulk of the Beijing fans, but it is far better than nothing, and we say yes and thank you.

Outside the hotel we run into Chasm, a band from Møre that Kjell and October Party Records have helped get started in China. Their own tour begins on 2 July, and tonight they join us for a shared dinner with Kang Mao and her band SUBS. Then 2Kolegas, lined up for a party with a pile of bands. We play the braids off the audience and give it everything the reins and straps can hold, and the people there let themselves be swept up, dancing in front of the stage. A fine frame around the close of this China visit. Bloggers turn up wanting to write about K-Jell and everything this tour has thrown at us, so we tell them all of it. Afterwards there is a small farewell party in the garden outside 2Kolegas with Kang Mao and friends. It gets properly late. Saying goodbye to friends this good always stings a little.

2 July 2011. The last breakfast in Beijing, a final quick raid on the Silk Market, and then the taxi to the airport and the SAS plane home. At check-in we have overweight, and Tronna’s bass is once again too big for the cabin. So we repack, right there on the counter, until every man has exactly 23 kilos in his suitcase and the rest in seriously overfilled hand luggage. The guitars come into the cabin with us. The bass flies below deck for 400 yuan. It could have been worse.

At the airport we meet two girls from Sogn og Fjordane, backpackers six months on the road and finally heading home. They get some K-Jell CDs and our best wishes. The approach into Copenhagen goes straight through a thunderstorm, and once we are down nobody is especially tempted to fly anywhere for a while. The sky over the airport keeps lighting up. The girls from Beijing turn up again, connection delayed, bus from Gardermoen already lost, and they conclude that a few more hours of travel will not kill them now either. Then the Bergen plane. It takes off into the weather and climbs out of it, and watching a plane fly out of a storm and up into the blue turns a scary start into a properly cool experience. Below us it rages. Above us the sky is blue.

We land at Flesland, and we are home. No customs officer finds us interesting, so we slide straight through there too. A few kroner poorer than we usually are after a tour, and a good deal richer in experiences and stories, so it probably balances out. The last concert is played, the gear is home, and the China tour of 2011 is over.