Day Four - Converse LoveNoise China Tour

Yesterday, Ellis and I were originally going to go with Queen Sea Big Shark to the Lei Feng Pagoda in Hangzhou, but because Converse are filming a documentary about this road trip with a strong focus on the bands, we’d have had to have kept out of shot for most of the afternoon. We decided to stay in a restaurant to finish our giant bowl of soup with whole boiled duck floating in the liquid. Halfway through our ensuing overnight bus ride, we were planning on finding somewhere by the side of the road to stop, pull out all of the two bands’ instruments and amps, watch them perform, and then cook a barbecue. In the end, the organisers set this up in the car park of a service station in the middle of nowhere. The woman running the café there commented that it was the busiest night of her life.

P.K.14 got kitted out in ripped Converse, the sky was dark above a large expanse of concrete, and the graffiti-ed bus squatted behind the band as the equipment van edged in on the stage to point its headlights at the action. Remarkably, a group of service station staff came to watch the band disturb the peace, as did a stray praying mantis. Praying mantises have been known to kill small birds, said Queen Sea Big Shark guitarist Wang Jing Han, as he held one between his fingers. (A brief aside: we asked the Chinese Converse blogger Lua why graffiti in her country often contains numbers. She told us that it’s not graffiti, these numbers are hasty adverts for lines to call if you’re after some sort of forged document.)

I can safely say that I never imagined myself appearing in a Chinese ad campaign, until Converse said they needed an audience for their outdoor performance film. I was drafted in as an extra and dressed in the brand’s top and trainers, kindly muddied for me on the spot by Ukachi. The other five audience members were much better than I was at dancing in front of the cameras, confirmed by Lua who bashed into my arm, and chastised me for behaving like a typical motionless Londoner. Photographs of the event were taken with the intention of using them for billboard posters around the country, though I’m not sure that any of them would have come out well enough to use.

Back on our two buses of musicians and roadies, sleeping pills were swallowed by the sensible, and morning soon came around. Outside our current hotel in Changsha today, we found out that five people had suffered from food poisoning during the night, most probably as a result of eating fish from a street stall the night before. Sick and injured tally now up to ten. MySpace and Facebook are both blocked today. Ellis is devastated.

Click here for more about the Converse LoveNoise China Tour.