A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

For me, this felt like a very trun­cated ver­sion of the Straw­berry Fes­ti­val. Last year, I went all three days and while the ticket lines were a night­mare on day one, I gen­er­ally felt pretty good about it. I think that watch­ing the slow dete­ri­o­ra­tion of all the per­fect prepa­ra­tion that goes into a fes­ti­val area is almost as fun as catch­ing the bands. The flip side of that is that when you turn up on day three where everything’s tram­pled and dirty, you don’t feel like you were a part of mak­ing it that way, and it all just feels… unsanitary.

None of this was helped by the alco­hol ban that I didn’t hear about until I got there. I don’t like get­ting drunk off my face at fes­ti­vals, but I like to have a beer on a hot day in the park, so I really dis­liked the ban. Of course, peo­ple still got their beer, and by the time the sun started set­ting, one of the stalls behind the love stage and some enter­pris­ing ayi man­aged to smug­gle in enough beer for who­ever heard about it.

I’m sure the cheng­guan had their rea­sons for the ban — how­ever unfounded they might be — but I won­der if any­one will ever learn that putting rules like that up at a chaotic fes­ti­val? Isn’t really going to work. I went to a fes­ti­val with camp­grounds in Aus­tralia one year where this group of guys had taped goon sacks to them­selves to smug­gle alco­hol on the grounds. Oth­ers filled sham­poo bot­tles with vodka. And that was just because they were stingy bas­tards; there was alco­hol at the fes­ti­val! Never under­es­ti­mate the population’s cre­ativ­ity when it comes to get­ting alco­hol with their music.

In other things non-music related, I was really unim­pressed with the food choices this time around. I gen­er­ally love fes­ti­val food, and China does it really well, but this time just sucked. There were life­less sand­wiches and spaghetti, the oblig­a­tory chuan’r and rou­ji­amo meat sand­wiches, but even the noo­dle choices were unin­spir­ing. Where’s my quail egg chuan’r??

The com­bi­na­tion of turn­ing up late and hav­ing to explore the grounds didn’t make for the best music-seeing expe­ri­ence, I must admit, but I did get to see some solid favorite acts of mine. First were Life Jour­ney. I went down to the front-ish for a while, but after get­ting burned in the sun and wind, and real­iz­ing that they were going into the bal­lad sec­tion of the show, I moved back. I’m not dig­ging their cur­rent sound as much as I used to; it’s all feel­ing a lit­tle bor­ing to me, so I hope they make some upbeat tracks soon.

Later on was Zhou Yun­peng, the blind folk artist who seems to have cap­tured everyone’s heart. Last year he per­formed at the smaller Love Stage, but this year he was at the main stage, the Straw­berry Stage. The crowd was incred­i­ble, and the dif­fer­ence was clear. Last year, every­one sat in front of the stage qui­etly with some peo­ple in the back stand­ing on the con­crete. This year, the crowd stretched on for ages, every­one stand­ing and singing along. It was inspiring.

I also got to see all of Hang­gai’s per­for­mance, which reminded me just how much I love them. I was with a friend of a friend from Mon­go­lia, and he said they were kitschy and he didn’t like them because they were just revamp­ing old folk tunes and doing noth­ing orig­i­nal. While I think it’s a valid point, that doesn’t negate the fact that Hang­gai rocks. They have an incred­i­ble stage pres­ence and energy that just doesn’t show any­where else. Their recorded tracks might be great, but their live per­for­mance is where it’s at. No won­der they’re tour­ing the world these days.

We capped off the evening with a brief look-in at the Queen Sea Big Shark per­for­mance, which was as much flash­ing lights and bright red cos­tumed as you’d expect it to be. They’re play­ing to such huge audi­ences at these fes­ti­vals, it never ceases to amaze me that they can play smaller venues with­out a hitch.

Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t get to see a lot of the minor acts, but I did enjoy the inclu­sion of the Tai­wan stage. When I sat down on the grass near it to eat lunch, I didn’t know what stage it was (by day three, almost all the flags were taken down from hav­ing been ripped by the wind), but as soon as the young woman on stage started singing, I knew that it was the Tai­wan stage. Nobody makes adorable indie pop quite like the Taiwanese.

On the whole, I would def­i­nitely say that I enjoyed myself. There were some draw­backs, atmos­pher­i­cally, but the music was still good, as was the com­pany, so we made the best of it. And some­times, just hav­ing some­one to bitch with about not hav­ing any beer is just as enter­tain­ing as shar­ing a beer with them.