Dear friend of the Radar, CBC (a high ranking member of a high ranking record label) went to Chengdu for the inaugural Zebra Festival. CBC wrote the following review of Zebra, which we hope will be the first of a couple of reviews of the various May holiday festivals. Thanks to her for giving us another insight into the burgeoning festival scene in China.
Zebra Festival, Chengdu, 1-3 May 2009
Things are looking up and it’s not just the weather.
Zebra festival took place over holiday weekend in a section of a big park about 40 mins drive outside of Chengdu, just past the panda place. It wasn’t like the Beijing parks – a bit wilder and although not as idyllic as lovely Glastonbury, much more attractive than Reading. The organizers say they hope this will be their festival home for the next 10 years, although the construction of some incongruous fancy tower block apartments right at the back perimeter worried me. The new residents aren’t going to like the very loud rock n roll music emanating from 2 stages during the day, not to mention the dance stage which was still gently stomping, albeit to not a very big crowd, when I left on (the first) Friday night at 11.30pm.
I went to Chengdu to see how things were developing in festival world and watch audience reaction to bands of quite varying styles – it’s the first festival that I have been to where we have mainstream pop acts playing alongside the regular indie faves. Hence, New Pants on right before S.H.E. Generally, it works. This was a very local crowd (I spotted only about 20 foreigners, and none of those ubiquitous Scando bands were on the bill) – around 10,000 tickets cited to be sold per day (probably the truth is less) but all walk up. Rubbish advance sales, but my 25-30 year old friends from Chengdu who had been working on Friday said they checked out the festival on douban.com, thought it looked really exciting, and after reading loads of blogs from enthusiastic visitors, decided to come on Saturday, which was definitely fuller than Friday.
The “festival as a lifestyle experience” seems to be the mantra of all the China promoters at the moment, and Zebra certainly understood the Glastonbury model. The site was quite big, lots of wandering around, stalls, food, and different activities . The biggest queues were at the tent where you got to play fashion – make up artists and guys with scissors and sewing machines made you look like a “punk”. Everyone seemed to come away with Robert Smith sticking up hair – more Goth to me but that’s irrelevant. Only thing was, everyone who had been lucky enough to get their hair stuck up then had to sit in the shade to stop the make-up running, and the look being ruined. This was hard as there was very little shade and Saturday was boiling. This sun business causes a few problems for the Chinese “festival experience”. As we all know, the local ladies mostly don’t go for sun tans, so there were a lot of umbrellas around – not good for good stage sight lines…and many groups huddled really tightly (and looking a bit miserable) under any bush or tent pole which threw a shadow.
Top marks to the organisers for things like enough toilets and water stalls, great PA, visuals and lights, fast band turnaround, and the VIP/security area in front of the stage wasn’t toooo big.
As a punter, you learn how to get the most out of festivals. The best festival experience is learnt…. well, by experience – you learn that that its really not the place to wear your fancy heels; that you need bring mud proof things sit on; that camping is a great way to enjoy the long haul (not that many tenters at Zebra); that there are hidden joys to be found on the other stages (the 2nd “local” stage was more or less ignored). My feeling is that that a lot of the visitors were coming to check the whole thing out, not necessarily to see specific music. Lots of families with grannies and children in tow. Groups of very normal looking middle aged guys smoking and standing watching proceedings with a slightly bemused expression. Although maybe they were all there to see S.H.E and the rest of the day was just passing the time. Very little alcohol in evidence, anywhere, and the backstage scene was pretty downbeat and definitely not very glamorous. Maybe that came on Saturday evening with the S.H.E big draw.
For all the bands on the main stage that I watched, the same kids (more girls than boys right against the railings) stayed put in the front, giving mostly equal enthusiasm to each outfit – whether it was miserable poetic indie, perky punk or pure pop. In other words, the more hardcore music fans seemed to want to watch everything and were open and excited by each turn.
As for the music I saw (roughly half of the event), I will just say that everyone did good. After all, one man’s Mars bar is another man’s Maltesers. My personal favourites were Muma (old generation, lots of long hair, skin tight black trousers, Mosaic (new generation, short hair, skin tight red trousers), Shin (sadly no band, dodgy punk style trousers with a silly front zip, but great crossover pop rock songs) and best for me, Wan Xiao Kun who, with a characterful voice, songwriting skill, charisma, and determination to do it his way, is quietly and slowly showing signs of managing to do a rare and hard thing for a mainland Chinese artist – progress from pop idol to a credible, cool artist.
Hot footing it back to Beijing to catch the last day of Strawberry, I was reassured to find that the Modern Sky guys had also pulled it off – great new venue, good crowd
(more hipsters than Chengdu – the dance stage was throbbing and so was the bar selling Mojitos), and I heard great reports from the previous days.
Yes, Mister Phelps, we have progress.
CBC