Outdustry’s in-house net-label MicroMu is proud to present a special performance from it’s first international signing, Fink…..

As the first acoustic act on legendary electronic label Ninja Tune, Fink has carved a unique path as a singer-songwriter. With a background in downtempo beat production and top level remix work, his brand of acoustic music is distinctly modern while remaining deeply intimate as a live show; a formula which has seen him share the stage with the likes of Zero 7 and Massive Attack and earned him rave reviews around the world:

“Mean moody and magnificent. One of the most original singer-songwriters around.” – Clash

“…say hello to your new soundtrack.” – NME

“Surprises when you least expect it. Sort of Revolution refuses to succumb to the obvious.” - Mojo

Fink will be performing solo-acoustic for two small shows in Beijing (MAO Live on Nov 5th) and Shanghai (Yuyintang on Nov 6th), followed by a mainstage appearance at Clockenflap Festival in Hong Kong (Nov 8th).

Acoustic legend Wan Xiaoli will be supporting Fink in Beijing. Shanghai support to be announced…

Tickets 50RMB in advance, 60RMB on the door

http://micromu.com

http://douban.com/artist/finkmusic

http://myspace.com/finkmusic

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I was at the “Techno Papa” Juan Atkins’ show the other night, talking with top Hip-Hop critic Badbrain about this year’s live music market. We both felt that there’s nothing to say but “sigh”.

Back in 2007, however, this market was full of hope.

Crowds at Beijing Pop Festival ‘07

In 2005, I started to work for a magazine that covers western pop music. I had a lot of regret for leaving there in the end of 2007 because, as I predicted, that was the year live western pop music “took off” in China. Everything that happened before was just laying the groundwork, and pathetic jokes like the Suede in Beijing show happened too, but since that year I started to feel that there’s something going on in this market.

Suede’s Brett Anderson plays Beijing Pop Festival ‘07

The strongest evidence is the blooming of music festivals. 2007’s Beijing Pop Festival staged the best international lineup ever in China: Nine Inch Nails, New York Dolls, Brett Anderson, Public Enemy, and the drummer of Ramones. In the same year, Yeah Yeah Yeahs headlined Modern Sky Festival and Faithless appeared in Yue Festival.

Though there was still a sizeable gap between this lineup and what the fans dreamed of, the reaction in the market is pretty positive. There were rumours that two promotion companies backed by foreign funds were preparing for an even bigger festival, and one of them had already sent staff to Korea to take lessons from the promoters there. At that time, it seemed that they are going to do something never has been done in China.

At the same time, the organizers of Beijing Pop Festival, which had scored three successes in a row, were looking forward to 2008 too. Someone working for them told me that they were going to get a bigger lineup than 2007’s.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor plays Beijing Pop Festival ‘07

Other than those festivals, the who’s-who of acts performing here in 2007 included Roger Waters, Eric Clapton, Avril Lavigne, Sonic Youth, and Christina Aguilera. These things meant the market appeared to be flourishing. Unlike the fake flourishing which The Rolling Stones brought in 2006 – where 70% of the audience were foreign – the main consuming force in 2007 were Chinese people.

Mick Jagger + Cui Jian play Shanghai

October 4th, 2007 10pm, when I was standing in the muddy water under the pouring rain with thousands of audience of the Modern Sky Festival, and shouting for Yeah Yeah Yeahs together, I cannot help but felt a change is gonna come.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Modern Sky Festival ‘07

Then all of a sudden the market is almost totally ruined by the incident in Shanghai on March 2nd 2008.

Before the incident, the market was still going on well. Dream Theater and Nightwish made a good start of the year. Even shortly after the incident, the Maroon5 show in Shanghai (March 24th) was a huge success. My only regret is that Smashing Pumpkins cancelled their show that was almost confirmed.

As the aftermath of the incident surfaced, and the bumpy political situations at home and abroad, it has finally become the turning point of the market. The promoters and officials of relative departments got punished, and the procedures for examination and approval were getting harder.

The one direct responsible for the March 2nd incident is a company (Emma) backed by considerable foreign funds, and then had done the Rolling Stones, Avril Lavigne, Eric Clapton and Xtina before. Because of this “accident”, many gigs and festivals rumored to be organized by them vanished.

Many other shows were impacted too. As the Olympic issue became obvious and political risk and cost soar, Modern Sky Festival, which was said to have foreign star acts headlined, announced that they won’t invite them in, and Beijing Pop Festival cancelled as a whole, to name but a few.

Some minor shows went ahead: the British pop phenomenon James Blunt, renowned French singer Keren Ann and long-established electronic duo Air became the only ripples in the stagnant water. Even Air’s second show was almost cut in half.

Everyone was looking forward to the post-Olympic era, especially Linkin Park’s China tour. As the best selling band in 2007, Linkin Park would become the biggest contemporary band ever in the history of western popular music show in China. After the huge success of the film Transformers, in which they performed the theme song, Linkin Park’s popularity in China was brought up to a whole new level. Their tour in China could become a shot in the arm in the much-suffered market of 2008.

You have to expect the unexpected. The singer of Linkin Park broke his back and cancelled their whole Asian tour including the stops in China, another heavy blow in the performance market in the Mainland.

Maybe it was not that bad, at least Live Nation came in. As the biggest promoter in the world, Live Nation not only serves the top bands like Coldplay, they also signed the 360 degree contract with superstars like Madonna, U2, Jay-Z and Shakira. The Ge Hua Lai En promotion company that Ge Hua co-found with Live Nation, made a Chinese market – that had been longing for superstars like Coldplay, Madonna and U2 – finally see a light of hope. And the Kanye West and Kylie Minogue show, which Ge Hua Lai En organized, made the light even brighter.

This year the light keeps on shining. Shortly before the Spring Festival, the news that Oasis was coming over made the fans shocked and are telling one another about it. Brit-pop is the one of most accepted genre among Chinese rocks fans, and Oasis’ reputation here is only second to the Beatles. If this gig was carried out, it’s meaning could not be over-estimated. Of all the bands who have come over before, including Linkin Park, none of them has influenced this generaion of Chinese youth as much as Oasis. Their value was made clear when the promoters claimed one million RMB worth of tickets were sold in 8 days.

And then…

The impact of the”Oasis incident” might be even serious than the Bjork one. Because the almost forgotten Free Tibet gig has now been blown up, along with the bands involved with it, they might no longer be able to slip through as Sonic Youth did. The blacklist of bands is now considerably longer, including long expected bands like Radiohead, U2 and Blur. This put the promoters in a very awkward situation. The acts accepted by this market are mainly well-established ones, and because of the western culture and political environment, most of those bands are involved with “that” issue. (Oasis is famously not political).

Mainland Chinese fans after Oasis’ show at Hong Kong’s Asia Expo Centre, April 7th. Photo found here

As for the new bands, even Kings of Leon or Fall Out Boys would struggle to fulfill a 3000 seats venue, and their cost cannot be covered by the ticket sales of that kind of venue alone.

Of course we cannot come to the conclusion that the international acts’ live market in China has already crashed. Small indie or novelty groups still have enough room to breath. But for those fans who want big time parties, they might have to be patient. All the same, the market that was going to be a big cake, has been zhetenged into something like this, is not too far away from “crashed”. You see, the promoter (China West) that brought James Brown and Black Eyed Peas disappeared without a trace, they wanted to do music festival too. And there’s no sign of the Beijing Pop Festival will come back to life.

Pilos Chan

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Modern Sky boss Shen Lihui says that “compared with the enthusiasm of the Modern Sky Festival, the Strawberry Festival will have a warmer tone….the park will be your pleasure ground”.

Organisers also suggest it will be the “biggest music festival in Beijing during the May holidays” and that the Modern Sky main festival will go ahead in October as well.

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This unlikely event had taken band manager Simon Napier-Bell 18 months of negotiations to organise; a process documented in his 2005 book I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch.

The idea to play China came about following the bands insistence that they become the biggest act in the world within two years. Napier-Bell and co-manager Jazz Summers knew that this would be impossible following the conventional route – namely touring America continuously for years – so came up with the China tour as a globally-press-worthy publicity stunt. Napier-Bell flew to China and sat in hotel rooms calling whatever government phone numbers he could get his hands on, usually leaving the message: “Tell them Simon Napier-Bell called to take them to lunch”.

“It was two years of lunches – I fed the whole government, 143 people three times each.”

The resulting shows were captured in a Popumentary which itself was not short of difficulties behind the scenes.

The final version, Wham! In China : Foreign Skies, seems to be out of print but is available in it’s full glory on Chinese YouTube-a-like, Youku:

The film was shown to 70,000 Wham! fans at their 1986 Wembley concert, the largest audience ever for a premiere. It might not be an enduring classic – it is slow and fairly insubstantial – but the impossibly absurd sight of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, replete with bouffant hair and metre-wide shoulder pads, meeting the staid Chinese bureaucracy mano-a-mano is too good to miss. Choice quotes abound throughout:

“Where are all the screaming girls?” – George Michael at Beijing Airport

Beyond this, Careless Whisper has now been added to my list of “Secret Shames”. Fantastic song.

© Ed Peto 2008

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Now, despite an incredibly tough year for music in China (due to Government clampdowns surrounding the Olympics as well as the horribly misguided soap-boxing of a certain elfin Icelander), exactly a year later and the Beijing sound has come along leaps and bounds.

I thought it was about time I follow up on that year-old post, using the medium of budget video, to bring you up to speed a little:

• The Old-Guard: The older bands are still getting better (See SUBS, Re-TROS and Miserable Faith in the videos).
• Strength In Depth: The younger bands have come on from being self-conscious mimic-artists into snarling, full-blooded outfits of their own (See Snapline and Carsick Cars in the videos).
• Public Demand: A number of festival organisers still went ahead in seemingly impossible conditions with defiantly impressive results.

While 2007 will be the year the paper-trail leads back to in terms of the new Chinese bands really starting to find their own voices, 2008 is the year they perfected them. This video of Maybe Mars‘ artists Carsick Cars (taken last weekend) shows an increasingly confident band belting out their bona-fide indie anthem, ‘Zhong Nan Hai’. I really thought very little of them when I arrived in 2006 and it has been a pleasure having my initial assessment slowly being proven wrong:

Against all the odds both the Midi and Modern Sky Festivals went ahead in some form or other. Modern Sky resorted to a strange, half indoor, half outdoor, all-concrete affair just next to last year’s Haidian Park venue. There is no doubt that it lacked the grassy festival atmosphere but there was a pleasingly rough-around-the-edges industrial feel, made all the more so by the abysmal pollution which can be seen in the opening shots of this crudely put together festival video:

The daddy of Chinese music events, the Midi Festival, moved around it’s date and venue so many times that most news sources gave up reporting on it. For better or worse at the last minute they decided to host it back at the Midi School campus. This meant a huge scaling down and a number of sound issues. Combine this with some filthy weather and you would have thought it was a washout, but outstanding Saturday headliners and Midi School alumni Miserable Faith gaily skipped through the genres – ska, rap-metal, reggae, rock-ballads – to make my one trip up there totally worthwhile, as you can see from this next video. Their set closer, Life’s Most Perfect Day, is a hard-men-go-soft ballad that would play well anywhere. Also worth noting is the bemused crowd reaction to sugary Danish pop-mongers Summerhill: Two worlds collide with indifferent results:

So all things considered this place is shaping up nicely. If the post-Olympic landscape allows for more and more live music opportunities, then the crowds and the confidence will grow. The bands are certainly getting there. The night I filmed the Carsick Cars video also featured current buzz-band Ourselves Beside Me and The Gar, making a night of Chinese newcomers who would do themselves proud in any venue in the world.

© Ed Peto 2008

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Midi claim that they would be free to go ahead but that the venue would have to remain open to joe public, obligating Midi to pay 700,000RMB a day for the mandatory use of strict Olympic security barriers. Obviously a crippling financial burden.

Festival organisers are in discussion with Haidian park, the site of recent Midi festivals, for the re-scheduled event. They are waiting to hear back from local government on this. The issue with this new venue – which also relegated everything but the main stage of the Modern Sky Festival to an indoor site next door at Haidian Exhibition Hall – is that the park is currently being used by a battery of anti-aircraft guns which were in place as, once again, part of the Olympic security measures.

What this set-back means for Air’s performance at Midi remains to be seen, although I suspect this might kill any hopes a lot of the international bands have to play the festival.

© Ed Peto 2008

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The sad thing is that they have been forced to go head to head, time-wise, in most cases asking the limited pool of acts for exclusivity. They are also both largely taking place indoors – Modern Sky in Haidian Exhibition Hall and Midi in The Olympic Centre – making for an all the more surreal and stilted affair.

Modern Sky have already announced a full line up which is conspicuously free of foreign acts, as has been rumoured for some time now, namely :

While Midi, who have actually yet to officially receive a license (they said in a statement on Sept 12th that the government had ‘approved’ and that they would be getting their license on Sept 16th ie. Yesterday), have erred on the side of caution and gone for the more austere promotional flyer, without line-up, below:

This cautious, patient approach may have paid off as it looks like Midi have secured a license for their international bands this year. The obvious excitement here being the inclusion of downtempo-maestros Air in the line-up. The French duo already have two Yugong Yishan shows here in Beijing with the oft asked question being ‘why don’t they just stay on and play Midi’. Well, it looks like they are:

Here’s looking forward to what should be a really entertaining month of live music. Good luck to both festivals. Real lessons in persistence.

© Ed Peto 2008

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There’s no doubt as to who the hot new prospects are though. I put Hedgehog on for a show here in June after being impressed with a few D-22 gigs and they were outstanding.

They describe themselves as being ‘Noise Pop’ which actually isn’t far off the mark: The scuzzy side of guitar pop; catchy as hell without being disposable, with Cure basslines, plenty of invention and the best drummer in the world bar none. ‘Atom’, as she is called, may measure in at well under five foot and have the face of a cherub but she can’t half smack the crap out of a drum kit, in time, while singing backing vocals. In the words of so many tv talent searches, she has ‘the x-factor’. Here they are blowing away a mid-afternoon crowd at last week’s inaugural Modern Sky Festival. Atom broke a drum stick one minute into the first song and two more through the rest of the set:

International scrutiny might be wildly premature but while the rest of Beijing gears up for the Olympics in 2008 with all it’s obscene construction and flag waving, the indie rock scene is quietly developing into something pretty special. Don’t begin the hype yet as this scene is simply too fragile to deliver. With bands like these on the up though, there is an unquestionable optimism about town. For the moment, however, please take Beijing off your ‘cities to watch’ lists, talk about Sheffield for a while longer and come back in 2009.

© Ed Peto 2007

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The big question is where do those 20,000 indie music fans (and people like them) go for the rest of the year? Midi costs £3.50 per day, so is a cheap way for these fans to see pretty much every rock band in China in one sitting. Outside of the festival, a similar ticket price is essential if you really want to reach the ‘Midi crowd’. £3.50 obviously isn’t enough to pay for an international band to fly into China on ticket sales alone. Sponsorship is the only way to pick up the slack. Slowly you are starting to see brands become interested in the idea of forking out for an opportunity to market to this hip, new music crowd. Getting brands to bite for global names like The Rolling Stones, The Black Eyed Peas and Eric Clapton is a no-brainer but the idea of sponsoring emerging artists is fairly new and may take some time to develop.

The truth is that the domestic live scene is in a glorious shambles – Fragmented but bursting with potential. In any major western city worth its salt you can’t move for well promoted live nights, from pretty much any genre, making it easy to find a promoter with a ready-made, genre-specific crowd to work with. Not so in China. I was standing next to a Chinese girl at a gig in D-22, a Beijing underground rock venue. She was dressed as a goth, with crazy hair, blackened eyes, torn clothing and black finger nails. I asked her what sort of music she was in to. ‘Backstreet Boys’ was her immediate reply. Genre awareness is a real problem, leaving music marketers and promoters in a real pickle when it comes to introducing new international bands to anyone but the most well-versed of Chinese music fans.

Good mid-level acts have started to come over in recent months eg. Go! Team, Maximo Park, The Roots, Ziggy Marley, The Infadels. While all have been well received gigs, the crowds have predominantly been expats, with door prices ranging from £25 for The Roots, through to £5 for The Infadels (a ticket price that still did not guarantee a crowd). As with everything else in China it’s early days. None of these promoters are going to retire on their earnings any time soon and the dream of the West’s finest new bands playing to packed theatres of their chanting Chinese fans is still a fair way off. It’s all part of the slow education process. Western acts are generally way ahead of most of their Chinese counterparts in terms of performance discipline and showmanship so every international gig will be a small step in the right direction.

If you decide to pay for yourself to come over here, there are gigs to be had but do not expect to play to hordes of people who are just thrilled to have a western band playing. The Chinese are slightly harder to impress than that. Especially in Shanghai, which is predominantly a DJ city, boasting, as it does, roughly four decent small/mid-size rock music venues for a city of 18 million people.

Then there is the issue of performance permits. All performances require permits from the local cultural bureau as well as the national Ministry Of Culture. These permits have to be obtained by a government approved ‘performance company’ who will provide the application service for a fee. The permits themselves vary in price according to size of band and venue. Materials required include scanned passports, band biog (in English and Chinese), set list with lyrics and live show footage on DVD and the whole process tends to take 30 days. Nathaniel Davis from Spli-t Works says of the whole permitting nightmare that ‘foreign band shows promoted by the smaller, “underground” clubs are typically overlooked by the authorities. For bands performing at licensed live venues or government-owned performance venues, however, performance permits are a must. Once performance permits are received, the local foreign affairs bureau will issue a visa letter for the bands to take to their country’s respective China embassy to apply for official Z class work visas.’

So there you have it. You need a friend on the inside – ie. be invited to perform in China – if you want to be legit. In truth though, most small bands turn up here on tourist visas without too many problems.

© Ed Peto 2007

NOTE: This is an extract from ‘Access China’ report commissioned by UK Trade and Industry Department and British Underground.

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• Physical piracy runs at around 90%.
• The average gig ticket is £3 and charging anything over £7 for a concert will alienate the young Chinese music crowd.
• Publishing is a foreign idea to the Chinese and is therefore a tiny, unpredictable source of income.
• All media is government owned or heavily government monitored and, in most cases, requires ‘financial incentives’ in return for coverage.
• Despite a population of 1.3 billion people, the legitimate physical music market was only worth US$86million in 2006, making it the 20th biggest in world.
• All foreign companies must enter a joint venture in order to set up shop in China, handing over at least 51% of their company in the process.
• All music has to go through lengthy and seemingly arbitrary government censorship procedures.
• China is a black hole of statistics, quite often by design, making market research and due diligence incredibly difficult.

Kang Mao of legendary Beijing band SUBS, performing at ‘Hong Di’ : September 2007

As in most other markets in Asia, pop music has a real stranglehold over the mainstream – Mando-Pop, Canto-Pop, J-Pop, K-Pop – Glossy, inoffensive music that satisfies the censors as well as the ‘bland criteria’ necessary for across-the-board media coverage. Despite the diverse musical heritage of China, mainstream pop is almost entirely informed by western music, from the basic pop song format through to instrumentation and lyrical content, although general production quality is still very poor. The Chinese audience, therefore, are already well familiar with all of the stock traits of western music: Guitar solos, crap raps in the middle-eight of pop songs, warbly diva vocals, key changes at the end of ballads, pseudo-rock bands, pseudo-hip-hop bands etc. Your average western band, therefore, does not sound totally alien, its just that no-one is willing to spend money promoting an international (and therefore niche) act when the returns are currently so poor. It’s all about hitting the mass market straight out of the box ie. Not an easy climate for an indie to be operating in.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. China is a blank canvas for the music business. You just have to be VERY open minded, adventurous and, above all, patient to attempt to do business here. Please leave your pre-conceptions and western business models at the door as they will not serve you well. If you do come in this spirit then you will find a testing ground for the future of the global industry – a totally unique market where the rules are being made up on the hoof, all set in the most populous country on the planet.

© Ed Peto 2007

NOTE: This is an extract from the ‘Access China’ report commissioned by UK Trade and Industry Department and British Underground.

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