We drove for most of the day, with a long break in a dirty village to do a photo shoot and watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics on TV. This was a place where people only spoke the local dialect, and when our bus driver asked a man the best way to get to the next city, Xi’an, he looked confused and repeated the word he thought he’d heard, which means “cigarette” to the villagers. Who knows how they pronounce Xi’an, if they have even heard of it?
The location for the shoot was an open expanse of marshes with a river in the background. The bands stood on top of the bus to get their pictures taken, and I haven’t mentioned this before, but for every photo shoot they have to wrap up warm in clothes from the winter collection, when on average it has been about 30°C here. P.K.14’s Johnny stood dangerously close to the edge of the roof, seemingly unconcerned about the snapped ligament in his foot that prevented him from drumming for a whole month not so long ago. There was some fear of the buses getting stuck in the mud on their journey into the marshes, though as it turned out we should have been worrying about getting locked in instead – the entrance gate had been closed on us, and we needed to ask for help to get out.
As it began to get dark, we headed over to an upsettingly grimy outdoor restaurant to eat and watch the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. This was not quite the team-building exercise we had hoped it would be, for when I went to sit with some of the Chinese crew at one of three round tables, I was asked to move to one on the other side of the screen. As my table got fuller, the reason for the request struck everyone as obvious. We were the only white or black members of the 30-strong group, and whoever was in charge of the documentary didn’t want us tourists appearing in the film. This racial segregation was mildly comical at first, if we chose to ignore the offensiveness of it all. However, we were then briskly told to change tables again after we had already started eating, this time to a table right at the back of the restaurant. Tour manager Nathaniel, who lives in China, and sound engineer Lee, pronounced this extremely rude and said they were going to refuse to move. I did the same.
This didn’t work, because our food was removed for us and put at the other table in the distance, from which we could barely see the TV. Our old seats were taken by the drivers and other more "authentic" crew members. Documentary-making here certainly doesn’t applaud realism. I was too hungry to go on hunger strike, but Nathaniel and Lee stormed off, leaving a sad pile of possibly raw pigs’ trotters and other more appetising food in front of us on the table. Watching the Olympics in close-up was more important to them than it was to most of the band members and Chinese crew in the seats with good visibility, demonstrated 20 minutes later by photographer Alex and drummer of QSBS Xiao Wu as they played Pro Evo Soccer on a TV to the right of the main screen during the ceremony.
The atmosphere lightened up a bit as the countdown started, and a few of us ignored instructions and went to sit with the bands in front of the cameras. Yang Haisong and I weren’t so impressed with the pomp, and instead chatted about Björk’s Tibet protest at her Shanghai show. He liked her even more after that, and denied QSBS’s claim that not many people in China liked Björk even before her remonstration. Some of the Wieden+Kennedy team then set off celebratory fireworks directly above us. Dangerous pieces started to rain down, and with only a few trees hanging above us for protection, we thought it best to run for cover beneath the restaurant building.
The crew started to behave more wildly than the bands, not for the first time during this trip. Some went to sit with a table of overweight, topless men who run a neighbourhood baijiu brewery. These rosy-cheeked beefcakes were very generous with their spirits, and in return, our team members were expected to hold their babies and to have mobile phone pictures taken while doing so. Art director Megan has an aversion to both babies and germs, and had already commented earlier in the evening on how filthy one particular naked infant was. To our satisfaction, that was the very one she was asked to hold. Once she got back on the bus, she frantically doused her T-shirt in disinfectant spray. Hilarious. Ukachi and Lee were off their heads by this point, shouting, “We thought this was meant to be a rock and roll tour,” as the bus lights were turned off at 9:20pm so that we would all shut up and go to sleep.
