Following on from the great practical insights Rat On co-founder Nathan Sidoti dished out in part 1, part 2 of our feature digs deeper into the mechanics of the mind, and more existential questions concerning the future growth of the grassroots music industry (focusing on Shanghai). If you can make it to the end you’ll be rewarded with some great on-the-ground observations.
[UPDATE: a day before this went live we discovered the show had in fact been cancelled due to complications. Very sad news indeed. Nevertheless we’ll go ahead and share the interview as it’s full of great input.]
[Chachy and F rock in]
Radar
- You work a lot of shows around town. Is there anything in particular that is really making an impact? A certain style or type of act that’s striking a chord with audiences here?
Chachy
Well obviously post-rock and post-anything.
Nathan
Metal’s such a big thing, metal’s a huge thing here in Shanghai. I’ve got a list on my phone of every band (if I ever see a band in Shanghai I put them in my phone for reference) and I can say more than a third of them are metal. Talk to a metal head and it’s not metal, it’s rock core, or math core, or some sort of core, but the root is metal. It’s in your face for 40 minutes.
Chachy
Definitely. I mean dude, every time a mainstream metal band comes into town, they’re always playing the big venues and charging an ass-ton of Mao backs for entry. Look at Avenged Sevenfold…god who else…
Radar
Children of Bodom
Nathan
Yeh, that was the biggest show MAO’s ever had.
Chachy
Metallica added a second stadium night when they were here. Metal is definitely one of, if not the king genre as far as rock categories go in Shanghai.
Nathan
But again, where do they all hide when there isn’t a metal show? Whether it’s ….they don’t want to show face and they don’t want to be seen in anything but a metal show…I don’t know.
Radar
That’s interesting, the idea of not wanting to go to other shows because that would conflict with the identity you’re trying to cultivate for yourself.
Nathan
Exactly, it’s who you are. And I think that just comes down to the naiveté and newness of it: that liking a particular style of music defines who you are. We’ve grown up with music all our lives – I go to nightclubs still, I listen to anything. I go to JZ Club on the weekend – that doesn’t mean that I love jazz or that I’m a jazz head. It’s just that I’ve listened to enough music in my life that I want to try and listen to other things and not get bored. I love hardcore, but I wouldn’t go see a hardcore show every weekend, it would kill me.
Radar
- We recently reported back from Dongdong conference on a panel where three representative ‘music fans’ talked with a panel of industry experts about their expectations of live shows. One of them said that the bar has been set high for live concert production – even small shows in live houses are being judged against big K-pop productions in stadiums/arenas. What do you think of the view that indie shows – in the minds of casual music fans who might not have learnt to appreciate their grime and unpredictability – might be getting pegged alongside bigger productions?
Nathan
It’s reasonable for me because I work in the industry, and even I get pissed off when I go there and the band doesn’t start on time, and I can’t walk over to a wall and find a set listing with the timings, and you know, a light in the corner doesn’t work because I know how easy it is…simple production is not that hard to do.
Radar
It could be a money thing – they’re willing to spend more money to get that big production experience, versus 100 / 120 / 150 RMB for a show that’s maybe a bit rough round the edges.
Nathan
Yeh but for me personally I prefer to go to somewhere like YYT or Harley’s and get the raw experience and band interaction as opposed to going to MAO and having the band stand up there like a god figure and being lost in flashing lights and videos. I can understand kids going to MAO and being pissed off at paying 400/500/680 RMB and half the lights don’t work, half the sound system doesn’t work, the LED screen’s flickering.
Radar
What you’ve said kind of makes sense. The relationship between the audience and the artist is different. If you go to a K-pop show, you’re meant to look at them as if they’re a god, whereas if you’re in Harley’s, you’re on the same level.
Nathan
Yeh you’re on the same level, you’re looking eye-to-eye, and the band’s interacting with you. A lot of people don’t understand it, you know, putting 4 lights up and a controller and having a lighting guy to control it, that’s an extra couple of thousand dollars on a gig. It’s not just a matter of sticking it up. When we’re doing a show, we’re struggling to cover the cost of the bands, let alone putting a projector up, putting a screen up, putting 4 lights up etc. It all adds up.
Radar
- Referring specifically to the 2 Kolegas drug raid and recent closure of 390, do you have any thoughts on the sentiment of local authorities toward indie shows? There are two angles here: how do you feel knowing closures are taking place while you’re putting on shows, and also what do you think of the sentiment toward doing independent live shows?
[Part way through this question we discovered MAO would be cancelling a bunch of shows following the New Year’s stampede at the Bund, an ominous sign.]
Chachy
It’s always a concern. Always a concern, especially when we’re bringing someone in.
Nathan
To tell you the truth, after the bund thing, I’m a little bit sort of worried. I’m not really stressed out, but a little worried.
Chachy
Nothing’s ever 100%.
Radar
- Nathan you’ve already touched on this. You do what you do so you can stand back, admire the crowd enjoying themselves and feel a part of it. But especially with you Chachy, do you have any goals or vision that ties into the growth of the music industry at the grassroots level? Is there anything that’s guiding you when you’re doing these tours? Are you trying to build something? Or are you just doing it for fun?
Chachy
It’s never just for fun. I mean we’re killing ourselves out there and fighting uphill every step of the way as laowai [foreign] artists trying to create something original. It’s a blast but it’s taxing. We know what we want to see happen in Shanghai and we’ll do as much as we can for you and for ourselves to spread the word. We go to all these smaller towns like Huainan (淮南), Kunshan (昆山), Zibo (淄博), etc. for shows and keep our touring schedule booked solid and our fingers crossed. I personally like playing smaller towns. Once you go to places like that, you can note it down as something really viable and cool to revisit or as a place to avoid as if it’s salted ground where nothing will grow. It’s like touring the States, trains and back-line aside. You try to make a web and hope the new friends you make along the way take note and develop something by the time you get back. Dan of GUIGUISUISUI (鬼鬼祟祟) knows all about this shit as well as did Xiao Zhong and F when Pairs were around, Dirty Fingers, Mike Herd from Xiao Xin Yi Yi (小心翼翼) and Nate here. We all trade contacts daily and work like dogs. All of my heroes were the trailblazers of areas nobody wanted to go to. There are fans there too you know.
Think about this: when Daikaiju (大怪兽) were here they destroyed China (in a good live spectacle sort of way; one of the coolest live shows in the land). In Shenzhen and Hong Kong we got people dancing and screaming to the music and the show. These places have never seen anything like it I’m sure (save for Hong Kong). They even made top lists in Beijing live shows for that year (PiL was on the same list) and these guys were completely unknown by all until that point. Now, is anybody beside me asking them back? Probably not. Did anyone buy CDs on that tour? Few. T shirts? Uh-uh. Do they even remember the name Daikaiju? I hope so. Now when we toured with them in the States we made bank off of merch of all kinds (both bands). People wanted in on our club and dug the music/show. It wasn’t just a show for them. I mean everyone did research on who we were before we got there and would request songs from us in places we’ve never been. Rock culture. Daikaiju have been touring for nearly twenty years and all along the way people would come and reminisce about this and that and sport their 2007 tour shirt. They remember. That’s what I would like to see happen here.
It would be nice to see something stick on Shanghai after more than 3 years. I guess to a degree some things do with guys like Top Floor Circus (顶楼的马戏团), GIVE (给乐队), Torturing Nurse, Loudspeaker (扩音器), and Chaos Mind. These guys have been rolling for nearly a decade or more. With Beijing, it’s a snowball. It keeps getting a little bit bigger – not much, but slowly, a culture is developing.
Shanghai…god it’s just…
Nathan
We lost 6 good bands this year…
Chachy
You hope for some sort of lasting impression to take home, and that’s only going to happen if a culture develops around it. You do what you can to spread as much as you can, and pray that it sticks. I’m not going to stop in 6 months. I hope other people come on board and start doing this shit man. And plus god, it’s not only bands that we lost this year, we lost venues.
We lost 696, that’s gone, which was an awesome place to have. For a touring band to come to Shangahi, you could play 3 potential shows to 3 potentially different audiences, and 696 was one of those audiences, and now that’s gone. I hear that a new venue is gonna open up, and I hear that Dirty Fingers’ guitar player (Xiao Hai) is opening it.
Nathan
Well you know me and F introduced the owner of XiaoBai to Harley’s so hopefully he’s going to take over and do some stuff down there from now on. I’m going to Inferno on Saturday to look at their new venue and put a sound system in there. Hopefully it opens up a little bit and does more than just metal.
Chachy
I think he’ll do some punk…We lost a lot, but we gained a lot. This year saw the birth of 4-5 bands that I know of, and who knows what’s going on in metal.
Radar
- If you could think 5 years ahead, based on what you’re all doing and the challenges you’ve set yourselves, where do you think things will be?
Chachy
Christ 5 years…who fucking knows. All I know is we’ll try our best to keep touring and bringing shows to town.
I think it’s a very present-tense thing, the experience of going to shows for most people is just some novelty recreation. Like going ice skating, KTV or going to Happy Valley. Not for everyone of course, but certainly for the majority. Just look at the attendances of festivals compared to shows with the same festival bands. There’s definitely an imbalance there.
Nathan
I can only count a few people who are actually doing this stuff at the moment. There aren’t many people doing much.
Chachy
One important fact is, there’s hardly any Chinese doing it…There’re some but not as many as one would think given the facts.
Nathan
Yeh, and they’re the ones who have to do it, because we’re all going to go – I mean I’m going this year, so who’s going to take on Harley’s after?
Chachy
We came out of nowhere so someone else can too…what really needs to happen is someone Shanghainese needs to step up and do it. Frank who runs the annual Shanghai Punk Festival tries. The shows can potentially be as big as you want them to be. I remember I was talking to Nevin a long time ago about this, and he was like, you know why a lot of these artists don’t come back a second time is because there’s no growth in the audience. I really disagree. The thing is, China man, you can get almost any western band that wasn’t super huge but was super influential, for a super discount price, solely on the fact that China is still a mystery to the outside. It’s always turned out to be a great and special experience for those who visit and those who greet the visitors.
Nathan
And the thing is it’s easy to tour here too. You don’t have to lug your amplifiers, you don’t have to lug your drum kit around, you don’t have to lug anything. Every venue has a stage, has a sound guy, has drum kits, it has backline, everything.
F
You just rock up.
[Reminder: the show in Nantong has now been cancelled, unfortunately.]