DAY TWO - CONVERSE LOVENOISE CHINA TOUR

Posted on: 5th August 2008 | Posted by: Sarah Fakray

 

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 "Monkey fucker!" 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 to see more of Ellis Scott's photos. Click here for more about the Converse LoveNoise China Tour.


Have Your Say

Comments are those of the visitors to DazedDigital.com and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the publishers.
 


Posted:
Tags:


 


contributors
Latest Contributors
How To Contribute
Sarah Fakray
Sarah is Dazed’s Books Editor, general last-minute arts features writer, and China correspondent for three...
Freire Barnes
Freire Barnes is Arts Editor of Bon Magazine and a practicing artist based in London. She also contributes...
Latest Contributors
How To Contribute
Dazed Digital is an ideas sharing network - we want to hear from you. If you think you can help us build the internet's most essential destination for new fashion, culture and ideas, then there are three ways to contribute:

  1. Submit to INCOMING
    Our blog is updated every day with the latest on fashion, music, art, design, film, and more. A new story should be up to 500 words long, plus a picture. Email us at incoming@DazedDigital.com.

  2. Upload your work to RISE
    If you're a creator of photography, illustration, fashion or music, then you can set up an account and get your own URL on DazedDigita.com where anyone can see your work, including our monthly gues judges.

  3. Join in with one of our PROJECTS
    Every three months we will be launching a major creative undertaking founded on contributions from thousands of Dazed Digital's readers.

Receive weekly updates on the best of Dazed Digital.




More music news
Day Six - Converse LoveNoise China Tour
Day Six - Converse LoveNoise China Tour
08 August 2008 Searching for Changsha's illegal flea markets under an artificial rain.

Day Two - Converse LoveNoise China Tour
Day Two - Converse LoveNoise China Tour
05 August 2008 Trapped in an episode of Hangzhou's Next Top Toilet Attendant.

Day One  - Converse LoveNoise China Tour
Day One - Converse LoveNoise China Tour
04 August 2008 Menaced by storks and psychobilly.

Boys in a Band Do 24 Gigs in 24 Hours
Boys in a Band Do 24 Gigs in 24 Hours
01 August 2008 A new Faroese band invade their homeland.

G! Festival 2008
G! Festival 2008
31 July 2008 A fundraiser for the Faroe Islands' bankrupt music event.