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Boys in the band
(eastday.com)
Updated: 2004-05-26 09:04 Shanghai's dormant rock scene
is heating up, but can Shanghai's bands thrive in a city that doesn't even have
its own independent label?
A college student
plays guitar. [file photo] | Think of venues for
local bands in Shanghai, and dives immediately come to mind -- darkened streets
leading to half-deserted warehouses in the city's northernmost heavy industry
zone.
The tiny performance spaces are filled with students, wearing their favorite
Western metal bands image on baggy T-shirts. Slouching singers wear a decadent
expression while yelling themselves hoarse with incomprehensible lyrics,
occasionally interrupted by feedback from the second-hand loudspeakers.
There is none of this in evidence as Midnightbus kicks off a five-concert
campus tour at the East China University of Science and Technology to promote
their eponymous debut album, released in March.
The band "Frog" performances on the stage; The
young today find the best way to relieve their feelings, rock&roll
music. [file photo] | A renowned band on campuses
in Shanghai, their delicate fusion of blues, folk and a slight touch on metal
rock wowed the 500-odd clean-scrubbed audiences who pack the concert hall and
wave colorful fluo-sticks. ``Be brave and get on the way to roam, leave me your
photo and take my guitar, a friend is on your shoulder,'' belts out Wang Chun,
the band's guitarist and lead vocalist, whose timid smile stirs up an instant
enthusiasm among the screaming girls. ``It is a shared dream of any band to have
its music heard and loved by people other than themselves,'' Wang says
backstage.
"We're so lucky that it didn't take very long for us to reach our goal." In
2001, Wang and the band's second guitarist, Li Xiaobo, moved from Beijing to
Shanghai to try to make it in music. Back in 2000, the duo was already the
winner of the best original group in a national campus music competition held in
Beijing. With bass player Ni Tao and drummer Hou Haipeng joining in, the band
gave their Shanghai debut at the campus of the Fudan University under the name
of Midnightbus and was later offered a gig at Ark Live House in Xintiandi. Local
music producer and critic Fan Li recalls that he was stunned by the band's
bravura, which was as mature as a professional group. ``They jazzed up elements
of different music genres and fused them into their own style, which was a sharp
contrast to early original bands whose raw and unrefined materials were only
good for underground mini-concerts,'' Fan says.
"I'm not suggesting that they are going to represent the mainstream of the
original band scene. But I'm willing to see more bands like that as their music
is approachable to a wider range of audiences, that is, they will bring a
market." In fact, the market for local original bands has grown rapidly over the
past few years, along with the boom of live venues, be it obscure or mainstream,
proliferating performing opportunities as well as nurturing a large and stable
fan base. Unlike their counterparts in 1990s, music is not only a pastime for
these young and promising talents but a possible shortcut to fame, recognition
and a fairly nice income. But in order to have all this, there is the sometimes
thorny issue of the city's embarrassing shortage of independent music labels,
without which a band can not issue their own albums, let alone garner name
recognition or carry out strategic promotions.
Take "The Red," a one-time campus sensation, for example. With all its four
members winners of regional music awards, the band used to be the most
widely-known original group among university students, with plenty of material
in its repertoire for an album. Upon graduation, however, they failed to hook up
with any local labels and the financial pressure finally forced them to break
up. ``All of us have our stuff going on in Shanghai and we don't want to move to
any other cities,'' says Zhang Zhilin, former lead vocalist with the band. Zhang
is now a resident singer at Ark.
"We weren't willing to give it all up but there was simply no way out."
Fortunately, Midnightbus has crossed the barrier. In January, the band signed a
contract with one of the foremost independent music labels in Shanghai -- Fine
Music Production Co Ltd. In November 2002, the company released The Honey's "On
the Street," which marked the first album of a Shanghai original band with a
Shanghai label. In the first Shanghai International Music Carnival, which took
place over the Labor Day holiday in the Century Park, the two bands, along with
Fine's other band, Crystal Butterfly, were the only Chinese musicians invited to
rock with 10 overseas top bands.
Yuan Yue, the founder and the general manager of Fine Music is strongly
against the assumption that local original bands, especially those from campus,
are only capable of pub gigs. A private entrepreneur from Xi'an, central Shaanxi
Province, who relocated to Shanghai in the early 1990s to open the city's first
audiovisual equipment shopping mall, Yuan has a keen sense of hidden market
potential.
"You will probably never find another city in China where cultural influences
from East and West merge seamlessly," Yuan notes. "There should be voices
speaking for a special cultural ambiance like this, and I think that these young
men, who have been living and studying in this city, are the most qualified
candidates to fill the market blank." Although Yuan set out ambitiously, the
inexperience of both the company and the band once dragged the process down. It
took more than one year for the company to come out with "On the Street," which
released only 5,000 CDs and 2,500 cassettes.
The launch of "Midnightbus" took another year and its total copies sold so
far sold is only around 1,000. "Sales are not our first concern at the early
stage, as it takes time for our bands to trade on the appeal of their music,"
Yuan says. "As a producer, the company's mission is to make high quality
productions out of their fine music and introduce them to the public with
strategy." One remarkable breakthrough the company has achieved was investing
more than one million yuan (US$120,400) to set up a high-end studio equipped
with the Power Mac G5 -- an advanced studio processor in the world). Instead of
scattering advertising bombs on mass media, the company chose to start from
where the band came from -- the universities.
The five concerts of the Midnightbus campus tour were all free of charge to
lure the "great purchasing power of tomorrow," Yuan says. All these strong
backups leave the coveted lads with no excuse to slack. Apart from the weekly
pub performances, the band is now busy working on its second album -- writing
music, solving disputes and exercising a hundred times for a 10-second solo.
It's like university life all over again, only with fewer
distractions.
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