A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

I should say this up front: Con­ve­nience Store has been one of my favorite Chi­nese indie bands for a long time. I did some dig­ging on the sub­ject before I moved to Bei­jing and they were one of two main­land bands that stuck around on my playlists (the other one, unsur­pris­ing to any­one who reads this blog, is Life Jour­ney). I have seen them live twice before this year, once in the sum­mer of 2009 with Super VC, and again in Novem­ber of that year when they announced, tear­fully, at the end of a bril­liant gig, that they would be tak­ing a break. I talked to some peo­ple in the indus­try later on and it seemed as though not only was the announce­ment a sur­prise to every­one but lead singer Gou Shuo, but also that it was less of a 休息 and more of a 分开. So to say that hav­ing a tenth anniver­sary show two years later was unex­pected is a bit of an understatement.

How­ever, all that aside, this was by far one of my favorite gigs ever, and it was — I’ll admit — largely to do with the incred­i­ble cameos they had by all their musi­cian friends. Before the show, they revealed their come­back song — the video for which is embed­ded above. In it, there are cameos by some of the biggest names in Chi­nese indie pop: Peng Tan & his wife Chun Xiao, the duo of New Pants, Life Journey’s Yann, Reflector’s Li Peng, rap­ping done by Kungfu’s Yang Fan, and much more. I remem­ber their last show at Yugong Yis­han being seem­ingly over­run with Peng Tan fan­girls because of his cameo, but this time it was clear that the show belonged to Con­ve­nience Store. They had peo­ple in the crowd from all over the coun­try; one that Guo Shou men­tioned in par­tic­u­lar was a young lady who had come all the way from Macau one day after tak­ing exams.

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From the very begin­ning, the stage was set for this to be an awe­some gig, and I was not dis­ap­pointed. Enti­tled Bái (both mean­ing “white” and a play on “bye” as this was billed as their last con­cert of 2009), the gig started out with a white sheet cov­er­ing the stage. The first three songs — the songs off their recently-released EP《潮汐》(“Tide”) — were played entirely from behind a white sheet, with two lights mak­ing lead singer Guo Shuo (郭硕) look like two peo­ple. Even from behind a sheet, they gave a great per­for­mance, but the moment the three songs were over, the show was kicked up a notch.

The sheet dropped and they busted out with a high-energy per­for­mance of their infec­tious 世界 (“World”, off their album “TV Mon­key”) wear­ing white masks which they promptly threw into the audi­ence once the song fin­ished. This got the crowd ready to go, and they played a string of high-energy songs until bring­ing down the mood a lit­tle, play­ing older songs they said they hadn’t played in ages. The mel­low tunes con­tin­ued for a while until Guo Shuo and bassist Du Wei (杜玮) filed off stage, leav­ing drum­mer De Heng (德恒) to back up gui­tarist Lang Lei (郎磊) in an acoustic solo song.

Then, it was time for the spe­cial guests. There were meant to be three, and there was no expla­na­tion as to why Yann (孔阳, of The Life Journey/旅行团) wasn’t there as billed, but the crowd seemed happy with Peng Lei (彭磊, of New Pants/新裤子) and Peng Tan (彭坦). In fact, if the Douban forums are any­thing to go by, there were some hard­core Peng Tan fan­girls at the gig who went pretty much only for his appear­ance. Which, well, I can’t blame them — I’ve done it before — but it felt a lit­tle bit strange to have throngs of scream­ing girls fill­ing the room get­ting excited only once the heart­throb took the stage. In any case, the guest appear­ances were great. Peng Lei played a very sim­ple ditty that even my rudi­men­tary Chi­nese skills could fol­low (New Pants’ “I Love You/我爱你”), and Peng Tan played one of his own songs (which I didn’t rec­og­nize, sadly). Then Guo Shuo returned to the stage and the three of them played a song called 未来 (The Future), which was appar­ently a song that they used to sing together often back when they first met.

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