Our final week in China was spent curiously observing the sports fans in Beijing, and trying to arrange last-minute interviews for the magazine. Ellis wanted to go and stand outside the Bird’s Nest to take pictures of dim-witted tourists, but when everyone told him he’d be stopped by the police within minutes, he decided against it. Our trip to Tiananmen Square was a visual feast of floating pastel-coloured umbrellas (the women here carry them for sun protection) and Olympic ‘One World, One Dream’ flower displays, making it hard to imagine the bloodshed 19 years ago. A lot of the artists and designers that we wanted to interview this week had actually left town for a fortnight to evade the temporary city restrictions that had been introduced during the games.
Even though I am not at all a creature of habit, we spent three consecutive nights in a venue called D-22, owned by an American named Michael who used to work on Wall Street. He now runs independent record label Maybe Mars, the same one that P.K.14 are signed to, and let us use his office for an interview with the all-girl rock trio Ourself Beside Me. They can’t speak much English. We got by with four pints each and a lot of improvised sign language. They chain-smoked cigarettes and passed round a joint, the first and last one that we tasted in China. One of them told us about the time that she went to prison for ten days for getting caught smoking weed in her own home. The only way to get out was to hand over 20,000 yuan, which is about £1,600. Ourself Beside Me are also signed to Maybe Mars, and like quite a few of the bands here, don’t have a MySpace yet.
On our last day, P.K.14’s Jonney (I’ve been spelling his name wrong all this time) and his girlfriend took us to their local restaurant, showed us the inside of the lovely flat they live in, and pointed at the outside of another flat that they desperately want to move into. They liked the balcony and building so much that they broke in twice to look round (it was lying empty) and stole a phone bill so that they could track down the owner. After getting through to the old woman’s grandson, they found out the place was for sale. Unfortunately, the flats were built in the ‘50s, and they can only get a mortgage in China if the building was built in 1974 or later. I can’t remember the exact reason for this. Jonney’s bandmate Yang Haisong told me later on that it’s in an area that saw a lot of suicides during the Cultural Revolution, making it a place he would want to avoid. Just in case ghosts do exist.
We had a bit of spare time before the show on the Friday night, and spent it vintage clothes shopping, yet again. Unexpectedly, we found QSBS’s drummer Xiao Wu sitting behind a laptop in the back of his friend’s shop nearby. He always grins and shouts ‘Fuck you!’ whenever he sees me or Ellis. We don’t really know why he does it, but we make sure to shout it back even louder. He hadn’t seen the blogs on DazedDigital before, and was extremely disappointed when we brought the website up on his laptop and he couldn’t find a single picture of himself on blogs one to nine. “These people are ugly!” he yelled, and repeated the question, “Where am I?” until we left the shop. Just up the road, Queen Sea Big Shark and P.K.14 played to an audience of Converse employees and invited guests. At the end of the night, goodie bags were handed to us along with posters encased in metre and a half long cardboard tubes. It wasn’t the wisest decision to dish these out to drunken crew members who were still recovering from the stress of being cooped up on a bus for ten days. A few minutes later, the tubes were being used as cricket bats to smash beer bottles onto the street outside. Naming no names, Kei.
For the final show on Saturday night, all of the support bands from Nanjing, Hangzhou, Changsha, Wuhan and Xi’an flew in to play, and tickets were free. It was too hot to sit inside Mao, even though he’s frozen*, so we gave up on a few of the first bands and crouched on the steps outside to people watch. Two girls from Beijing fashion magazine P1 stood next to us. After choosing some of the worst dressed people and ignoring some of the best for their street style feature, they asked Ellis and me to pose. Instead of letting us stand comfortably, they tried to link Ellis’s right arm with my left. We weren’t looking particularly fashionable that night, but that was the icing on the badly decorated cake. They also singled out “Fuck you!”, who was wearing a blue women’s satin shirt, and another girl whose burning fag was plucked from her fingers and held for her while she struck a pose. Inside Mao Live House, I spent ten minutes with new Beijing friend Queenie who went through every fashion designer she could think of to check that her pronunciation was correct. Christian Lacroix got the biggest laugh from both of us.
After Queen Sea Big Shark had performed their final song, we left with P.K.14 and headed for D-22, where we watched the band Carsick Cars along with an assortment of Americans in pale blue shirts, and somebody from CNN. The final picture taken was of me wearing Yang Haisong’s famous glasses, which he may or may not have worn since he was a teenager, and we rounded the night off with a burger in McDonald’s. I am quite ashamed of my actions, but Ellis likes to buy a new camera and sample a McDonald’s in every country he goes to, and who am I to stop him. He had taken close to 100 rolls of film by the time we flew home, which we split between both of our cases and hand luggage. Nobody looked at us suspiciously, not even with Ellis wearing his last remaining clean T-shirt: one that said ‘noise’ in ten-inch Chinese characters. This means it is now fully possible for us to produce the future issue of Dazed's China section, containing some of the 30 or so interviews I did while on the road. Though if you’re reading this, you probably never buy the magazine. Fuck you!
*The final venue in Beijing was called Mao Live House. The actual corpse of Mao is frozen and housed in Beijing’s Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. It is. It is mechanically raised from a freezer every morning to face the crowds from behind a crystal coffin. We didn’t get to see it.