Lately we had the pleasure of a tour around the most widely circulated and influential newspaper in China, the People’s Daily. Established by Mao in the early 1950s the newspaper has remained the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China ever since.  More than 3,000 staff produce the newspaper and most live on site in a massive compound right in the heart of Beijing’s business district. There’s a hospital, a barber shop, two restaurants, a post office and a school. There's even a park with cute pagodas and pavillions.

 

We got a tour of the older offices but were not allowed into the nerve centre, a shiny new building opened a few years ago houses the main production centre. There’s a fancy drive up and a musical fountain for whenever Party top brass such as Hu Jintao come to visit. The other modern building on site is the only place foreigners are allowed to work here, subediting the online edition of the paper, which is published daily in English and several other foreign languages. 

There’s nothing fancy or imposing about the offices we saw. Rather a threadbare East bloc kind of offices with bare concrete corridors and bare, fetid bathrooms. There are however shiny new computers on the desks. One is for surfing the World Wide Web, the other for the Intranet. There’s a feeling of paranoia and stiffness to the extent that we have to break into two groups, one of the Caucasians and the other of the Asians in the group, to diminish suspicions of the various soldiered checkpoints. On leaving, some stern looking young soldiers stood at the gate and warned us that once out we couldn’t come back in.

 

None of the dozen Chinese (of various ages and professions) I polled last week said they read the People’s Daily because it’s too “boring” and “serious” they variously said. The People's cadres must envy the more colourful, flashy tabloids and more news-driven papers like Beijing Times and Beijing Youth Daily. Both run oceans of adverts, sold on the strength of readership. There are taboos too for these papers – politics – but they make up for it in stories of lurid divorce cases, food scares, ripped off tourists and Internet fraudsters.

 

The People’s Daily overseas edition is slightly less stiff than the national edition but still a tough read. Amid verbatim chunks of Party speeches there’s photos of token foreigners dancing with smiling minorities. In a recent edition an English woman is photoed visiting heritage sites in Guizhou province. She and another foreigner, visiting Chengdu, are both full of praise for the country’s development.

 

There was a nice slice of irony was when we sat down to eat in a private room in one of two cafeterias on site. Our host is the newly appointed editor of the environment pages - environmental sustainability is currently all the rage in Chinese officialdom – and then we were served the centerpiece dish, shark’s fin soup. Sharks are being hunted to extinction for their fins, a cruel trade where the rest of the big fish thrown back into the sea to die a long, slow death. The dish we were served may or not have been the real deal but was described as “very expensive” by our host I can only assume it contained at least some shark’s fin.

 

You wonder how long the old organ can survive these brashly capitalistic times. Certainly there’s plenty of real estate developers salivating at the prospect of building a forest of skyscrapers on the site. The People’s Daily may already be in on the act itself: long term staff got the chance to buy their own apartments in several beige-coloured apartment blocks built overlooking the paper’s private park several year’s ago. They’re a major improvement on the cold, blackened concrete of the original digs, built in the 1950s and which, we were told, now house extra workers hired to run the print works: the People’s Daily has begun publishing newspapers on the country's auto and real estate industries (read: loads of advertisements).

 

This week I’ve been in Gansu province, a long spindly northwestern stick of land that’s often described as China’s poorest region. It’s certainly also its most diverse. The other day I went from Linxia, a town about three hours on the highway from the provincial capital Lanzhou. There’s 50 mosques and a lot of traditional Islam in this town. I didn’t have a a lot of choices when I went looking for an example of the local Hui music in one of the town’s several music stores. As is often the case in Chinese provincial towns there’s more VCDs than CDs.

But then I spotted Bono peeking out from a pile of paper-wrapped CDs in the pop section. The shop sold How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, the band’s most recent release. In travels around China I’ve tried to figure out who’s the most popular western artists in locals music stores. From Urumqi in the country’s west, to Xiamen in the south and Harbin in the north and Shanghai in the east, I’ve come to the conclusion that U2 and Christina Aguilera are listened to more than any other artist.

Of course neither artist gets much from being in several million music stores around China: 90 percent of the CDs and DVDs of western artists which I’ve seen are pirated versions. Much depends on the region - it's a lot harder in Shanghai to get a fake than it is in Beijing or Guangzhou, unless you go down the back streets. But until CD and book brands take their prices down to compete with the fakes they'll have the bulk of the market here. After all who’s going to pay RMB50 (a special China price for some of U2’s earlier albums in Beijing department stores) for genuine U2 product in Linxia, where the average monthly wage hovers at around RMB800?

 

While in Salvador’s Café, a great hangout in Kunming, I met the Tribal Moons an American-British-Chinese-Irish quartet playing gigs around southern China. The band is fronted by the garrulous John 'Nevada' Lundemo from Reno, Nevada, – “some people call me 'jeronimo,' that was my stage name for years while playing in and around Reno and Lake Tahoe, and up and down the Sierra Nevada mountains in Nevada.

 

He plays rhythm guitar, harmonica, percussion and sing. From Ireland, bandmate Mark Corry plays slide guitar. Londoner James Martin plays lead guitar and harmonica. The band’s Chinese member is drummer Ma Tu, a Kunming native. Like the two Europeans in the group he’s versatile: all three take turns at bass, drums and join with Lundemo on vocals. 

 

John told me about the band’s gigs and plans for a sunny winter in Thailand the Philippines. Given that he’s a better story teller than me, below I’ll run a transcript of our chat:

 

“Over Halloween the band played in Kunming on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. We opened for Brandon Thomas, from Texas, an extremely wonderful blues-rocker and guitarist currently on a 16 city tour in China, playing our own show at the Halfway House Club on Thursday night, which really went well and was packed. The band then played two Halloween performances on Friday and Saturday nights at the Dragonfly in Dali, Yunnan.

 

We met last summer, in July, in Dali, where my wife Caroline (a university English teacher, and from Australia) and I got married. Caroline has been acting and has become our manager and chief 'organizer' and there are so many things we just couldn't do without her! All of our four children and friends and familes from the USA and Australia came for the wedding; we needed a band for the wedding party and dance, and some friends brought Mark, who was living and playing in Dali, and James, our friend of 4 years from central China, who had been teaching and playing music in Xiamen in eastern China, together. We met Ma Tu in Kunming and soon the four of us had settled into Ma Tu's studio and began rehearsing.

 

We play original music, in a variety of styles: blues, rock, reggae, country, and some jazz-oriented or jazz-flavored songs. We also do some covers of famous blues musicians, such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson; and old rock 'n roll songs by the Kinks, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Santana; and country songs by Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Hank Williams... just to name a few famous people and bands we like. But we choose what we personally like, and don't do the cover versions exactly, but rather, do our own 'take' or concept of the basic song. It works out quite well. I write many of the songs for the band and have been writing music and playing in bands all of my life. Now Mark, James and Ma Tu are also contributing songs they have written and also their specially selected cover tunes.

 

Our lucky break came when I had submitted my own personal resume and Youtube videos of some of my songs, and a background of the band to the promoters of the Lijiang Music Festival. I wasn't sure, nor were we at all convinced the Tribal Moons would be selected to play. We worked hard and our performances in Kunming prior to Lijiang, and then at the festival, and then through jamming and playing at the after-hour parties and bars in Lijiang during the festival, and meeting people and promoters and agents, our band began to get some notice and now more and more gigs and opportunities are coming out way. Since the festival we've had to make a few changes in our lives: Mark has moved from Dali to Kunming and is living with James, Caroline and I and James are all university English teachers, so we have had to make some band decisions around our teaching schedules. We have really began to 'switch around' with all of us playing various instruments to build exciting and interesting sets of our music, and finally, we're making some future plans.

 

I guess our next thoughts have to do with playing the holiday and shows that come up around the Christmas and holiday-New Year seasons. But beyond that we are now developing the itinerary and schedule to get all of us to the Philippine islands, and then on to Thailand for the months of January and February. We have some connections in both countries and are now looking at some resorts and clubs in the warmer climates and scheduling what we can. It will be a perfect time to take a winter break and 'go south' while at the same time keeping us together on the road for a couple of months where we can really work hard on the music and polish our sets. We have dozens and dozens of good original songs and we want to present a variety of sets we can keep in a constant evolving cycle so when we play two or three nights in a row we can keep things exciting and interesting for the audiences.

 

Beyond that, we'll see. Of course, we must get into the studio and record some CDs to take along with us, or maybe we'll face that recording thing in the spring. We are in no rush and at the present just enjoying playing together. I've played with a lot of musicians in my life, but these three young men are about as easy to work with and get along with as I've ever wanted. We enjoy each other's company, we're good friends, and we have loads of laughs. I have a lot of band and music experience behind me, so they look to me for some direction -- but really, Mark and James are very creative and accomplished writers and musicians and when we all are together, there is a wealth of musical knowledge to draw on, talk about and everyone contributes.

 

This week the band is resting, rehearsing, and preparing for the Kunming Outdoor Music Festival which will be held about 45 minutes from Kunming on Saturday November 10th. There won't be as many bands performing as at the huge Lijiang Music Festival, but still, lots of local bands, some foreign and most Chinese. All types of music will be represented -- from rock to punk to metal, to..well, us!"

Before most shops were stuffed with generic local guitars – my first one was an RMB300 (EUR30) Starsun made in Fujian province in the deep south. Thick neck and head, strings far off the frets - but fine for a beginner. Since then (2003) a lot of the large international marques like Gibson and Yamaha have stared building guitars here. Now you walk into an instrument store and get the best brands for a fraction of EU/US costs because low labour costs allow the big brands to sell guitars locally while exporting the majority to international markets.

 

On a trip to the southeastly city of Suzhou the other day I acted on a good tip off from a local musician. The best instruments store in town, the Blues Music Store, is run by a local blues musicians who knows his stuff, I was told. When I found the small, crammed store I also found he spoke the truth. Proprietor Robin Cao, a pony tailed blues funk enthusiast and band member took me through his guitars and his dozens of real and photo-shopped photos of him and famous guitarists. Cao's infectious knowledge (the shopkeepers I bought the Starsun off, in a state-run department store, didn’t have a clue) meant I ended up trying out a dozen guitars and nearly buying one.

 

A Gibson Les Paul at the Blues Music Store in Suzhou costs RMB2,000. It looks like the real thing but it’s not quite. Some enterprising hands at Gibson’s factory in China have been siphoning off guitar bodies. Cheaper, Chinese pick ups are later added and the guitar sold locally. "But you'd never tell the difference," said Cao, whose Blues Music Store located just off the Shi Quan Lu entertainment strip gets business off the sizeable tourist hordes who come to visit Suzhou's famous gardens (it's only 40 minutes from Shanghai to here on a new bullet train serving the region).

 

The real Gibsons are shipped out of China and often come back in as imports, says Cao. An imported “real” Gibson Les Paul retails for RMB11,000 at his store. Gibson in 2002 chose Qingdao on China’s east coast as the location for its first foreign factory – and the first company-owned plant producing Epiphone guitars.

 

Yamaha acoustic guitars sell  for RMB900 at Blues Music. They're not fakes, rather “produced in China to Yamaha specifications” according to the label. That means outsourced to a Korean company who build the guitars at a factory in Dalian and Qingdao, two cities in Shandong province within easy flying district of Korea and Japan. The brand has an edge in China, says Cao, because Yamaha motorcycles are known and admired here.

 

Chinese music shop owners like Cao are getting a lot more sophisticated too. That’s maybe down to more gigging opportunities. Many of Cao's Beijing counterparts also run instrument shops to supplement gigs they play at the bars that have sprung up in Chinese cities. Their methods often differ however. Yesterday I took an Epiphone Les Paul (Chinese made, RMB2,500) to a place on Xinjiekou, a street in Beijing’s old low rise quarter. To change the strings the technician took a pliars and cut the strings just above the guitar bridge. Messy, though he got the strings on in 20 minutes and charged me RMB10 - a euro - for the job.

One of the most enjoyable CDs I’ve found on the shelves in Beijing record stores recently is Favorite Beijing Sounds, a collection of indisputably Beijing sounds compiled by self-described “sound artist” Peter Cusack.

 

The British field recording maestro came to China last year as part of Sound And The City, a sound art project funded by the British Council. Described by the Council as “leading UK sound artists,” Cusack and six fellow Brits - Brian Eno, David Toop, Clive Bell, Scanner, Kaffe Matthews and Robert Jarvis - “were invited to create new work inspired by the civic sound environments” in four Chinese cities. Crowded and noisy, Chinese cities seem to be breeding a new wave of sound art - see my earlier post on French sounds collector Laurent Jeanneau. What's different about Sound And the City is that locals in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou were invited to describe their favourite sounds before the men and their mics went and recorded them.

 

“Many of those favourite sounds are ambient ones, less and less frequently heard as Chinese society changes at its current ferocious pace,” says the British Council in an introduction to the project in a new book. Run by the British Government (rather profitably in China, where it also runs English proficiency exams) the British Council lately came up with the cash for a fine 200 page English/Chinese book that comes with two CDs of recordings made by Cusack et al.

 

Sound And The City “speaks to the general public, not the selected public,” local sound artist Yan Jun told a wine and crackers reception at Timezone 8 arts bookstore on Jiu Xian Qiao Lu in Beijing’s industrial-chic 798 gallery zone. “They invite us to listen again to our own cities and our lives,” said Yan Jun, whose own electronic and ambient CDs sell next to Cusack’s Beijing Sounds in the Sugar Jar, purveyors of indie and avant garde music in the 798 district.

 

Aside from the collaborative box set, Cusack, 58, seems to have gotten a very tidy side-project out of his Beijing trip. He edited, and recorded most pieces of (the rest were recorded by local students volunteers and artists). The CD is in the spirit of an earlier Cusack brainchild, Your Favourite London Sounds (2001). Beijing sounds include the mutterings of tourists as the national anthem is played during the flag raising ceremony at Tienamen Square. There's also the familiar rattle of the city's knife sharpeners, bicycle-mounted tradesmen who shout and shake a metal rattler as they pedal through the city's neighbourhoods.

Back home in London, Cusack initiated the 'Your Favourite London Sound' project that aims to discover what Londoners find positive in their city's soundscape, an idea that has been repeated in other world cities including Beijing and Chicago. Cusack earlier produced 'Vermilion Sounds' a monthly environmental sound program on ResonanceFM radio, London, and currently lectures on 'Sound Arts & Design' at the London College of Communication.

The sound artist, who plays guitar and bazouiki in his down time, likes to get out of the city too. Areas of “special sonic interest” which he’s rubbed up the right way with his mic include Lake Baikal in Siberia -"Baikal Ice.” For 'Sounds From Dangerous Places' he recorded soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage, such as Chernobyl, Azerbaijan's oil fields. To get his recordings he's also boated along controversial dams on the Tigris and Euphratees rivers in south east Turkey.

 

 

After months of will-they-won’t-they speculation the US indie rockers the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs played the Modern Sky Festival on October 2 to 4, during the five-day National Day holiday. The hour long wait between the preceding Joy Division-admiring RETROS and the headliners of the inaugural Modern Sky Festival suggested some space between the on-stage requirements of the visitors and the preceding local bands, who played their 30 minute sets almost concurrently in the hours preceding the New Yorkers arrival on the main stage around 9.10pm.

 

A rain-induced exodus prior to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs set suggests local fans aren’t yet hardened to rock festival conditions. The downpour had driven about half the crowd to the sea of taxis depending on the festival crowd for business on a slow National Day holiday week night.

 

Their appearance on stage quenched a bizarre succession of build-up tunes: Phil Collins and R Kelly seemed a bizarre choice by a label with the Indie credibility of Modern Sky. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were up for it though. Band vocalist Karen O had learned a few Chinese words and belted off plenty of “xie xie” (thanks).

 

The enthusiasm of the mostly-student crowd (the Haidian Park) suggests the gig was, in words frequently used by local cadres, a “complete success.” It certainly drew a significant local audience for the O and bandmates Nick Sinner and Brian Chase, who paid no heed to the rain in belting out trademark-nonsensical lyrics to tunes like Is Is, Down Boy and Show Your Bones.

The New York trio came, conquered - and enjoyed themselves. After the show the band told of eating Peking duck, and admiration for local bands and organizers, on their MySpace site. The Yeahs appeared on a mostly-Chinese line up of Modern Sky bands: New Pants, Hedgehog and newcomers My Little Airport. However even though there’s more foreign bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs coming – propelled perhaps by the pre Olympic excitement – there hasn’t been a dramatic growth in the number of decent Chinese bands. Beijing festival line ups this summer have often looked remarkably similar.

 

The Modern Sky festival was however this year’s most affordable. Lower ticket prices – RMB60 a day compared to RMB150 per day at September’s Beijing Pop Festival – and the location, in Haidian Park in the city’s main university belt, ensured a good turnout. Locals made up 70 percent of the crowd. There were none of the ticket touts of the Beijing Pop Festival at more salubrious Chaoyang Park, which had lots of freeloaders selling their VIP tickets for RMB200 at the gate. Bag ladies collecting plastic bottles and the scents of lamb skewers and marijuana lent the festival credibility.

 

But who paid for it all? Probably the marketing departments of Levi’s, MySpace and Motorola, all of whom paid to install marketing stalls on the festival site. Social website MySpace was also on-site, with a sizeable booth next to the Levi’s stall. Modern Sky tagged Levi’s and Motorola as “partners” in promotional material. In some ways the Indie label, headquartered in a converted 1950s apartment block in a unglamorous pocket of Beijing’s northern Haidian district, upstaged the Beijing Pop Festival, headquartered in more salubrious digs in the heart of the business district.

 

A local corporate presence was that of Sculpting In Time, a chain of coffee stores set up by Taiwanese film graduate Jimmy Zhuang and his wife. The brand, whose outlets are larger and cosier than Starbucks’ in China, had a large stall selling tea and coffee, though the profligance of plastic-coated paper cups calls into question their environmental credentials stated on their advertisement in the festival programme. Others with stalls included glossy local rock magazine In Music and Painkiller, a Beijing heavy metal magazine. Disposable camera maker Lomography was another corporate presence, with a big, red-liveried booth manned by the Lomography Society of China.

 

No figures or arrangements for getting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs here have been disclosed – one imagines the Grammy-nominated New Yorkers don’t come cheap - but Modern Sky have gotten a lot of criticism for engaging in vanity lao wai (local slang for foreigner) projects, engaging foreign bands for gigs and recordings in China which have no sustainable impact on the development of the local scene. The money, says critics like Berwin Song in That’s Beijing magazine, would be better spent finding and releasing quality local artists.

 

Sculpting in Time was inundated with customers as the rain spilled down on the last night of the festival. A lot of the corporate sponsors looked pretty glum however in the least glam looking VIP tent, too far away from the main stage to see anything and too scared of the rain to join the other punters.

 

The choice of food vendors on the festival site – no camping allowed - was nothing if not colourful. What really stood out was the image of a smiling Middle Eastern looking man, complete with red-white keffiyeh head dress, plastered over Arabic script above one of the food stalls. It all looked very exotic and drew an expectant crowd. The vendors, bearded Uyghurs from the western province of Xinjiang, sold the same lamb skewers common on many Beijing street food stalls. True, no one does them like the Uyghurs, but what a smart way to draw a crowd.

 

Sales were brisk too in the plastic sheeted village constructed on a car park near the park’s southern entrance. Huddled beneath a giant replica space rocket, the vendors sold the usual mix of t-shirts and CDs on offer at most Chinese rock bars. Yet the range of shirts and the quality of the designs – from kitschy Cultural Revolution-era motifs to go green environmental slogans and nifty takes on Kurt Cobain and local stars AK-47 - there’s plenty of hints that China’s t-shirt makers are now as creative as they are prodigious.

 

None of the foreign artists whose images and logos appear will be getting royalties off sales – but the price and uniqueness of these shirts – average RMB50 - make them compelling buys for foreign fans. Out of the piles of second hand and shop-cut CDs on offer I plucked Lipstick Traces, a two-CD set of Manic Street Preachers B-sides, for RMB40. A good bargain, a good night. More credit to Modern Sky then.

Two acts come through Beijing this week both courtesy of Jon Campbell, who runs the YGTWO music event management company. Aside from bringing Bus Driver to Beijing Canadian-born Campbell is also the local promoter behind Lache Cercel and the Roma Swing Ensemble. The Romanian group performs gypsy-flavoured jazz with a violin maestro, said Lache Cercel, and two guitars as well as bass and percussion. They'll play three shows in Beijing: Saturday October 13 at the new White Rabbit (more on that later) on so called “Lucky Street” bar strip - Zaoying Lu to locals – and October 14 at Peking University Hall as part of the Time Arts Jazz Series.

To get the student crowd YGTWO has graciously kept tickets as low as RMB20 (2 euros) for that Peking University gig. There’s a final gig on Wednesday Oct 17 at the new Purple Haze Bistro at China View, a new real estate project. Purple Haze’s Swedish co-owner has been a big supporter of local jazz and plays bass in several Beijing groups. The new Purple Haze will have to compete with custom however with China’s first Hooter's bar, next door. Lets hope Lache's sound is as good as Hooters'  publicity push on its Chinese bar girls, though the place looks empty any night this writer's cycled by.

Campbell, who also drums with two Beijing bands has been steering a lot of business to the new Yugong Yishan, in the former courtyard home of Duan Qirui Government on the Zhang Zizhong Road, Dongcheng district – what’s left of Beijing’s old city. Abigail Washburn, an American banjo player who sings in Chinese came back to China on September 29. Billed as The Traveling Daughter Returns Washburn played with a mixed bag of local friends, including a trio of girls on classical instruments pipa, guzheng, zhongruan, to an enthusiastic expatriate-heavy crowd.

 

From New York, off-kilter hip hop Busdriver played the new Yu Gong Yi Shan on Zhang Zizhong Road on Friday October 12. “Intelligent, if wacky, lyrics and music,” said the flyer and the man known to his mother as Regan Farquhar delivered. A good show of Chinese hip hop fans is perhaps explained by the fact that there's a bit of a hip hop craze sweeping Beijing right now. Several city gyms, including my local, Evolution Fitness, offer hip hop classes. Most of the students are young women who seem to prefer an emerging uniform of khaki pants and tight black t-shirts, kind of like 1990s Irish metal fans who'd strut their stuff at town-hall discos.  

Two local acts opened for Bus Driver: the Beijing Live Hip Hop Experience and the Red Hand Jazz Band the RMB70 door. Hats off to promoters YGTWO for the show and for the decent turnout. How come he managed to do it cheaper than last week’s scattered NO CH festival? They charged RMB100 but never really seemed to hit the nail on the head with a mix of Scandinavian electronic and folk avant garde.