Banned On The Run In China – The Dangerfield Diaries
Written by Matt Dangerfield
Sunday, 08 March 2015 03:00
UK punk rock legends The Boys arrived in Shanghai on January 13 to embark on a nine-date national tour to promote their new album ‘Punk Rock Menopause’ only to discover that the tour had been cancelled by the Chinese Ministry of Culture due to “crowd control and security issues”. Matt Dangerfield gave Uber Rock exclusive access to his diary throughout the band’s cultural and culinary tour of China as the band dodged the authorities to play three secret gigs, make a TV documentary, record two videos, do countless interviews and record a live album. So, sit back, relax and let Matt Dangerfield take you on a truly magical mystery tour…..
Wednesday January 14th 2015
I call them the Ninja Night Riders. They appear out of thin air. Clad in black, wearing a black balaclava or scarf covering their faces against the cold, they drive silent black electric mopeds with no lights through the dimly lit streets of night time Shanghai. And they try to kill you on pedestrian crossings.
In Shanghai’s hazy light of day you realise this is normal. Headlights, helmets, or indicators to show your intended trajectory seem to be optional extras. Motor vehicles randomly ignore red lights or pedestrian crossings and drive on pavements. The only safety feature employed enthusiastically by all is the horn and this seems to have just one meaning: “I’m coming through… and I’m not stopping”.
In fairness, pedestrians are equally unconcerned with safety. I stopped to watch a very old man shuffle slowly (and diagonally) over a busy crossroads paying no attention to the traffic whizzing around him from all directions. This is just the way it is. Nobody gets angry and I never saw any accidents or incidents of road rage.
The off-key cacophony of honks, toots and bleats is the anthem of this city. It’s strangely symphonic and so incessant that after a while you hardly notice it.
Shanghai is a chaotic city with a history to match. This is where China addicted the British to tea and the British returned the favour with opium. It is also where Chinese communism and the Cultural Revolution first flourished.
Today Victorian and Art Deco buildings sit amid futuristic skyscrapers. But at pavement level the Chinese do what they always did – buy and sell strange goods, cook and eat strange food and play and watch strange board games – all in a noisy but calm atmosphere. Shanghai may be home to around 23 million people but it’s an extremely safe city with very little crime.
There is a welcome surprise for me at our hotel in the shape of my old pal Mark Harrison. I’ve known Mark since 1978 when he was drummer with The Bernie Torme Band who supported us on our first UK headlining tour. It seems he was up to no good in Thailand when he saw that we would be touring China and decided to take a 4,000 mile round trip to surprise us.
We had the first of many Chinese dinners that evening with Chachy and Peter from Shanghai-based multinational punk band Round Eye, who set up the tour for us and would be supporting us on many of our nine Chinese dates. It was a fine meal memorable for three things: 1) The live frogs on display in the restaurant window that seemed to be attempting to have sex with each other – a bit like prisoners on Death Row, I suppose; 2) A dish called ‘Smashed Chicken’ which tasted great but was a whole chicken that you needed to pick the bones out of. It looked suspiciously like it had been sent to meet its maker with the help of a sledgehammer; 3) We were told that one of the dishes we had just enjoyed was frog.
Thursday January 15th 2015
Cas, John, Martin and myself had arrived yesterday so we’d had time to acclimatise, but our new bass player Kent Norberg arrived today after a marathon flight: Las Vegas – New York – Amsterdam – Dubai – Shanghai. We packed him off to bed hoping he’d be fit by early evening.
Today is the first gig of our nine-date tour. Added at the last minute it was intended to be a short acoustic warm-up gig we could play with or without Kent if necessary. It was at Live Bar, a small venue attached to the University. In the meantime however, the gig had grown in stature and we now had four support bands so we’d agreed to play a full electric set.
At 6pm we met in the hotel lobby as agreed to go to the gig. But then Chachy and Peter arrived to inform us that both the tonight’s gig and the main Shanghai gig at YYT had been cancelled by the Ministry of Culture for ‘crowd control and safety’ reasons in the wake of the recent New Year’s Eve stampede in Shanghai in which 36 people died.
Later we hear that Chachy has been summoned to a meeting with the Ministry of Culture so we won’t see him this evening. Or ever again? I wondered.
When in doubt, have a drink. Peter from Round Eye took us to the Shanghai Brewery, a trendy bar in the equally trendy part of town still known as the French Concession.
Friday January 16th 2015
This morning Chachy updates us on his meeting with the Ministry of Culture. “The good news is that nobody’s been arrested…yet”, he says. Although the two Shanghai gigs are cancelled there was no mention of the gigs outside Shanghai at the meeting so he believes we can do the rest of the tour. He also tells us that three extra buses have been hired to ferry disappointed Shanghai fans to tomorrow night’s gig in Nantong, a two-hour drive north.
Around midday Chachy gets a call from the Nantong venue to say that they’d received a letter from the Ministry of Culture as well as a visit from five government officials to warn them that the venue will be closed down with immediate effect if The Boys played there.
Okay, so we have another day off. Chachy and Pete offer to take us on a sightseeing tour of Shanghai. We visit the Bund, a riverside area that developed around China’s early international trade. This is also where the New Year stampede happened.
While we are sightseeing, Chachy gets one call after another from the venues on our tour with the same news: threatened with closure by the Ministry of Culture if we played there. So that’s Shanghai, Nantong, Hefei, Wuhan, Xinxiang, Zibo and Qingdao all gone with only the Beijing gig remaining. The news from Beijing is that they haven’t heard anything…yet.
Chachy suggests we play a secret gig in Shanghai tomorrow night. It would have to be in a rehearsal room. Every live venue in the city has been warned of severe consequences if The Boys played there, but the Ministry hadn’t contacted rehearsal studios. We think this a great idea. At least Kent, who’d never played with us before, would get a chance to do so.
That evening we took part in a meet and greet (aka piss up) at place called Bike Shop. I’d assumed it was just a trendy name for a bar but it was indeed a bike repair and spares shop opened by an American ex-pat cycling enthusiast. The place became so popular that people started hanging out there, so he opened a café in there by day and then opened it as a bar by night. It’s the first time I’ve got drunk surrounded by bicycle frames, inner tubes and brake blocks.
Saturday January 17th 2015
This evening we played a secret gig at Left Rock rehearsal studio. An underground gig in every sense of the word as it’s a former bomb shelter. Avoiding Chinese chatrooms and social media websites, which the Chinese authorities monitor, Chachy and his friends had invited disappointed Shanghai fans and friends that they knew and could trust to keep the gig secret.
It was a hugely enjoyable gig with a very appreciative audience. The room could barely hold around 50 people and us. There was little in the way of ventilation so we had to take a couple of breaks due to the heat. At last we’d played on Chinese soil.
Following the gig there was an after party arranged at Live Bar, where our first gig should have been, but no sooner had I got a glass of cold beer in my hands than the owner announced he’d been tipped off that the police were on their way and we had to leave.
We swiftly hopped in a handful of taxis and headed to Neo, a nearby bar we’d also been invited to. Most of our earlier audience had followed us there and once inside, a large neon sign proclaiming “Fuck Me I’m Famous” provided a popular backdrop for photo opportunities.
In the bar there was a stage so small that only the drum kit could stand on it along with a guitar amp and a bass amp. Having liberally plied us with drinks, the owner wondered if The Boys would like to play a few numbers. Why not? For around an hour, John, Martin and Kent played some Boys’ songs and some covers that they increasingly – as the drinks kept coming – didn’t rightly know how to play. Chachy sang a song and I sang ‘Brickfield Nights’. Soon after, when some band members, who shall remain nameless, started dancing John-Travolta-in-Pulp-Fiction style, it was clearly time to go.
Sunday January 18th 2015
More sightseeing etc., and in the evening when we meet up with Chachy it is little surprise to hear that our surviving gig in Beijing has been cancelled. At the same time, we’d been contacted by Beijing TV station LETV who want to record a couple of live songs on the coming Friday. In addition, on the Saturday, Beijing-based China Radio International also wants to video two songs. We agree to both but tell LETV that we want to play a full live set with a live audience and they happily agree to that.
Monday January 19th 2015
We decide to stay in Shanghai and travel directly to Beijing on Friday. Today we are told that The Boys hit the headlines with a Ministry of Culture spokesman delivering a statement on national TV. We have decided to make the best of our time in Shanghai and we’ve agreed that Chachy should look at arranging another secret gig before we head to Beijing.
Tuesday January 20th 2015
I did an email interview for Smart Beijing after breakfast, which in the preamble is enlightening about the official nervousness in Shanghai. You can read it here.
Went shopping with Cas and Kent in the afternoon. Just about everything in China is much cheaper than back home – it’s invariably made here after all – and even then you are expected to haggle the price down. The only thing holding you back is the limit to what you can squeeze into your suitcase.
Met up with Chachy etc. for dinner. He has fixed up another secret gig for tomorrow night. This time it’s in a recording studio/rehearsal room complex. We decide that as there’s studio there we should also record the gig.
Wednesday January 21st 2015
During the day Peter from Round Eye, took us to the Propaganda Museum, which displays hundreds of posters from the early days of the Cultural Revolution to the present. Highly recommended and a real eye-opener. I bought as many of the reproduction posters available as I hoped would fit in my suitcase.
Tonight’s gig is at Post Tape Studios, again about as underground as you can get – in a former bomb shelter underneath an old apartment block. In fact, it’s at sewer level, as your nose increasingly informs you walking down ramp after ramp and stepping over a grated open sewer to get to the studio.
Once you get past the door to the studio though, you leave all that behind you. At least until you need to use the studio toilet.
Before the gig we go for dinner during which Cas and myself do another interview while our interviewer introduces us to the joys of donkey meat (very tasty).
Another great gig. There’s something about playing underground in a confined space with an in-your-face enthusiastic audience that brings out something akin to the blitz spirit. It was also great to meet Tex Doughty from Transvision Vamp and X-Ray Spex who turned up.
Thursday January 22nd 2015
Popped back to the studio to listen to the live recording from yesterday, which sounds really good. We repaired a few minor mistakes, added a couple of overdubs and called it a wrap. We’ll release The Boys’ first ever live album later this year.
That evening John, Cas and myself went to a swanky club called The Apartment where Chachy’s friend Brian Offenther had organised a special screening of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle followed by a Q&A with the three of us.
As Chachy tells me: “Punk rock and rock culture in general are relatively new ideas in China – since the late eighties in fact – and Brian and I have always thought it to be a good idea to have a Q&A with bands visiting the mainland. To bring things into context, we put on movies relevant to the era or subject. It’s a nice way for the artists and the people to get to know each other on a one on one basis.”
More than a few drinks later on the lively dance floor level of the club and it was time for bed.
Friday January 23rd 2015
Catch the 10am fast train to Beijing and six hours later we’re in ridiculously polluted Beijing. Shanghai is bad enough, in our 10 days there and on the entire 700-mile train journey south I never saw a clear sky, but Beijing, fascinating city though it is, must be one of the unhealthiest places on the planet to draw breath. There’s a price to pay for all the cheap manufactured goods the rest of the world enjoys and the people who live in China arepaying it.
The studio performance for LETV has turns out to be our third live gig in China as so many invited guests have turned up to watch. We were interviewed afterwards and later hear that they intend to make a one-hour documentary for broadcast after we have left the country.
Afterwards we have been invited for drinks at School Bar, the venue where we would have played tomorrow night. The owners treated us like kings and we met loads of disappointed fans otherwise delighted to be able to drink and chat with us. We staggered out of there in the early hours of the morning.
Saturday January 24th 2015
Visit Tiananmen Square, which is vast – about the size of ten football pitches – and which these days you need to pass through security gates to enter. Most of us couldn’t resist buying Mao hats from one of the few vendors allowed to trade in the square.
In the afternoon we head to a studio to record a video for China Radio International. They wanted two numbers: ‘I’m a Believer’ and ‘Brickfield Nights’. This won’t take long, we thought. Wrongly. As they had no facility to record a live feed we had to perform each song five times so they could get all the camera angles and cutaway shots they needed to sync the footage to the songs’ recorded versions.
We had insisted that in Beijing we had to eat the local speciality we all know – Peking duck. It turned out to be easier said than done but we eventually found a restaurant that obliged.
After dinner in the emptied restaurant we did a video interview for China Radio International then headed to the Temple Bar for more drinks.
Sunday January 25th 2015
We catch the 4pm train back to Shanghai today but we couldn’t leave Beijing without seeing the Great Wall.
Although we took the cable car that takes you right up to the foot of the Wall, to get up to the ramparts requires struggling up 45 degree ramps and even steeper stairs newly covered in fresh snow and ice. Strenuous even without a hangover. We are grateful for an excuse to rest our legs while posing for selfies with the many Chinese sightseers who seemed to think us scruffy foreigners a better photo opportunity than their national monument.
Arrived back in Shanghai in time for a final dinner with Chachy and Co. and fond farewells all round.
All in all, China was a fantastic experience and a real adventure. Despite the tour being cancelled we still managed to do three secret gigs, make a TV documentary, record two videos, do countless interviews and record a live album.
We also had some fantastic food, met some wonderful people and we all loved China and the friendliness of the Chinese people.
OK it’s a Communist country but as one Chinese guy who spends a lot of time in the West told me: “In China we actually have more freedoms than you have in the West. The only freedom we don’t have is freedom of speech”. He could have a point.
Someone else told me, “In China you can do what you like until someone tells you to stop doing it”. That pretty much sums up our China experience. The Ministry of Culture told the venues to stop letting us play…but nobody told us to stop playing.
A heartfelt thanks goes out to Chachy, Pete, the other members of Round Eye and all their friends who rallied around to take care of us despite any possible risks to themselves.
All photographs by Rachel Gouk www.facebook.com/rachelgoukphotography
Photo Index:
Friday January 16: Meet ‘n’ Greet @ Factory Five aka “The Bike Shop”
Saturday January 17: “Secret Gig” @ Left Rock rehearsal studio
Wednesday January 21: “Secret gig” @ Post Tape recording studio (recorded live)
Thursday January 22: Matt, Cas & John give Question & Answer session after screening of “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” @ The Apartment
Friday January 23: The Boys live on LETV for a 55 minute Chinese TV documentary
Saturday January 24: Video shoot for China Radio International
Sunday January 25: The Boys with Chachy & Livio from Round Eye @ The Great Wall of China
Sunday January 25: Casino Steel & Honest John Plain @ The Great Wall of China