TANK Magazine (link)

Post-mortem

One week on, and I’m still not sure what to make of it all. TEETH in China was super fun, but the experience has left me with a whole bunch of questions about this country and my relationship with it.

Hosting friends from elsewhere always brings out the best in a city, and revisiting the picturesque riverside spots and food markets in a way I haven’t done since I got here was a good reminder to get out to them more often.

The highlight ended up being a gig at the flagship Apple store on Nanjing Lu - a pretty much entirely local audience, there for the shopping rather than the music, that totally got swept away in the fun of it all. Pretty sure mosh pits in Apple stores don’t happen often - as the band pointed out, it was kinda ‘on-brand’ rebellion; Apple must’ve been delighted.


Our own show was a wonderful microcosm of China and my experience of it thus far. Nothing worked, no-one had any interest in fixing anything and no-one with the power to do so really cared because they were making money anyway. The soundsystem was shocking, but luckily we were dealing with a band who could get a party started with an etch-a-sketch so it kinda worked out. The turnout was fantastic, including a good percentage of locals who we were most keen to get through to - the majority of music nights in Shanghai seem populated solely by the transient ex-pat community. Press coverage was also better than I’d dared hope - I guess there’s less of a fight for column inches than I’m used to as there aren’t so many events to get excited about. A memorable google translate of one of the Chinese articles read ‘for an underground famous music scene band to come to China is somewhat incredible’.

The fallout in the last week has been an assessment of my own values and how they fit with this place. I abhor incompetence and inefficiency, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they are an important part of accepting daily life here (a Communist state, it’s surprisingly easy to forget). Acceptance is something I find difficult without at least aspiration for better - I’ve worked jobs at the most comically dysfunctional organisations so can tolerate plenty, but always on the proviso that *next* time will be a improvement. (Of course, next time rarely is an improvement, so one could argue that at least things are honest here). That desire doesn’t seem prevalent in China - the venue owner will count the receipts from Saturday and call it a successful night, despite everyone involved having their evening compromised by shoddy sound not befitting a live music venue. On a wider scale, there’s continual repetition of ‘that’s just the way things are’ - amazingly, the country that must have changed more in the last generation than I can possibly comprehend seems resigned to that desire for change not being strong enough to shape the future.

Most importantly - and just to assure all concerned that I haven’t lost *all* sense of perspective - China has bigger things to worry about right now than a fucking music scene. I found myself debating the merits of ‘evolution vs revolution’ earlier, when of course the latter word has slightly more gravitas when not employed by some twat talking about music counter-culture.

Friends are preaching patience and time - understand the people, the processes, the mentality; only *then* can you influence. To that I would say: the whole world over, the general public rarely seem to know what they want until you show it to them. Back to that Apple store once again - who would have claimed an iPad-sized hole in their lives before laying eyes on one?


Anyway, this all reads a lot more seriously than it should. We had fun, the crowds had fun, someone somewhere will have realised live music is more fun than they thought it was. Onwards and upwards.

Involvement

A long time ago in Manchester, England, I went to a night called Akoustik Anarkhy (aA). It was probably something to do with a band called The Longcut, who were playing some of their first gigs around the city. Through repeated attendance at that club night I discovered some of the best live bands I’ve ever seen, and that’s coming from a man who’s spent most of his life taking in live music.

Their tagline at the time was ‘get involved’, which whilst throwaway had an underlying meaning - the nights were about more than a one-way interaction between band and audience; the stage invasions and shambolic crowd-led encores were a regular feature. The Longcut, in particular, seemed to look up from their own shoes for the first time at the bedlam in front of them and realise how fucking *good* they were - I honestly believe they might not be the band they are today without that awakening. A night I’ll remember for as long as I live saw crowdsurfing in the back room of a hotel that was barely tall enough to stand up in - through the right pair of eyes it appeared a Lynchian dream of bodies emerging from the walls and crawling across the ceiling.


I took this all very much to heart and preached to anyone that would listen - friend after friend followed me into that back room and came out understanding what live music was capable of. I became friends with the people that made the night happen, and when I moved south I became ‘London-branch’ - putting on shows in the infamous Windmill tavern in Brixton, where Manchester’s finest would come down and show how it was meant to be done.

That eventually morphed into me starting my own night, ‘Late in the Evening’ - rather appropriately named after a song penned by one of the aA collective, Autokat. (Who also wrote a song ‘White Shoes’, which became my nickname after sporting a pair myself). It moved from hosting Manchester jaunts down south to being the best I could find in my new home, and once again bore host to some remarkable artists that otherwise struggled to find an audience. I guess my motivator has been ‘need’ - I became a DJ at 18 because no-one else was playing music the way I wanted it to be played; I hosted my own club night because no-one else was putting on the bands I thought deserved to be heard.

Sometime in 2009, a group of us were attending Camden Crawl. A friend more organised than myself looked at the listings and brought up myspace accounts for ‘the bands with the most interesting names’. He played about 30 seconds of incoherent noise from someone called TEETH, and I declared them my new favourite band. They were due on at 12:30 that night, and we were trudging around Camden looking for pubs that were open from 10:30 in the morning. By the time the end of the night came around, they were playing in the pub closest to my house, and no-one really knew where they were anymore. What happened next is not entirely clear, but I’m fairly certain it involved a laptop player tripping over himself and destroying the drumkit mid-set, and a band as shambolic as they were awesome.


I promoted a whole load of shows in London, and the last one I did involved that very band, on the brink of releasing their debut album through the widely-respected Moshi Moshi records. Today, in 2012, I’m helping bring them to Shanghai, and I’m remembering the journey that took me here. A night in a pub in Manchester cemented my passion for live music, and I’m hoping that someone in this city on the other side of the world has a similar experience on Saturday. This place is a wasteland for interesting music, so I can understand why no-one cares right now - but give them a Lesser Free Trade Hall moment of their own and maybe they will. Or maybe I’m yet another delusional, idealistic lao wai.

Roll on Saturday.
 

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