We had a night off from gigging last
night, which we began in one of Hangzhou's oldest restaurants on its
160th birthday, no less. Alex, one of the Chinese photographers on the
trip, was determined to take us to some of the city's nightclubs.
P.K.14's drummer, who is Chinese with Swedish parents, came along too.
The clubs here are stuffed full of tables, with the dance floor taking
up maybe only a tenth of the floor space. An odd idea, we thought.
Between
visiting two of these vast clubs, we peeked into a few of the "strip
clubs" that lined the periphery of an even bigger sports stadium.
Producer Ukachi became increasingly irate as we realised that all of
the strippers – beautiful as they were – were just glorified club
dancers wearing outfits that a professional ice-skater or a mail order
bride might be proud of. The costumes remained firmly in place, so we
headed for nightclub number two, SOS, where a slightly different set of
dancers gyrated in pseudo-cyber punk and goth outfits.
Alas, the
club was policed by a swarm of attendants who scolded me for taking a
picture of this spectacle, and they hovered nearby to ensure that I
didn't re-offend. By the end of the night, we weren't even allowed to
photograph each other. We danced round our table, which held up several
£55 bottles of vodka (yes, they really were that expensive), with the
occasional trip to the loo. Is this blogging material, you may ask? If
you're male, the answer is yes: the club employed further staff to grab
the shoulders of urinating punters and give them a quick urinal-time
massage. Our boys were freaked out and waited for the cubicles, until
they saw a ménage-a-trois of the scary attendants emerging from behind
one toilet door. I am at this moment sitting in my hotel room with
Ellis recounting the night, and he is threatening to put pictures of
Alex and me doing "the worm" outside the club at 5am on this very blog.
We shall see.
Today we spent some time interviewing P.K.14 and we began by
discussing the night before, a varied evening for the band, who mainly
spent the time playing online games, translating a poem for me to put
on this blog, emailing friends, or coming out with us and flailing
around to Baby D's "Let Me Be Your Fantasy". About half way through the
interview, bassist Shi Xudong fell asleep. I refuse to accept that this
was down to my appalling interviewing skills, I think he just didn't
understand much of what the rest of us were chatting about in English.
During
sound check, our Aussie sound technician got a fairly intense electric
shock from the unearthed electrical system after touching one of his
cases. This makes our tour injury tally a meaty five-so-far (torn foot
ligament, sprained ankle, camera girl almost blinded in one eye by
reckless bus driving, breakdancing disaster). Safety first! He quite
rightly refused to touch anything else until the venue had been earthed
by a hired company who dug a hole in the floor and led cables out of
windows.
All of this meant that the first act, Hangzhou shoegaze band Self Party,
were so late on that they spent most of their set sound-checking. We
did a quick interview with them, but they really lived up to their
musical genre and didn't give us more than a few words at a time. Queen
Sea Big Shark got an incredible response. I'm not sure that this term
has been used much since the '70s, but the pogo was the dance of the
day, especially to the rhythmic chants of "Buttfucker!" from QSBS's Fu
Han. Lots of talk of fucking from this band, in fact. The drummer told
Ellis he was deeply saddened when he realised no friends driven down to
watch, meaning he had nobody in the busy room to play to. He balanced
this sensitive statement with a complaint about how women talk too
much. He "just wants to fuck", which he claims is difficult in a
country where girls normally giggle in refusal if you invite them home
for coffee.
P.K.14 brought the nautically themed house down at
the end, with four crowd-surfers if you include bassist Shi Xudong, and
a hilarious heavy shower of free Converse T-shirts from above that I
first mistook for underwear. We desperately want to see this band play
London.
Click
here for more about the Converse LoveNoise China
Tour.
