And so, the Inmusic / Zhangbei Festival legend continues. This time, the organisers have (unofficially) snagged one of the biggest artists in the world. The local government (seemingly without the permission of the organisers) have announced on Weibo that Lorde will be making the long trip from Beijing to the Hebei grasslands. It will be interesting to see how this goes down based on the experiences of previous acts that have made the same trip.
The festival was originally founded through a partnership between the local government of Zhangbei (a few hours North of Beijing), and the festival’s brainchild Li Hongjie (a notable music critic who acted as former editor in chief at Rolling Stone China, which was pretty short-lived).
International bands have had their fair share of problems: Killing Joke awesomely blogged the ordeals of their trip and back in 2012, Spiritualized ended up playing to just 200 people on the Sunday night at 2am due to technical problems.
In 2013, the festival was taken over by Sun Media Group (the conglomerate run by “China’s Oprah Winfrey” Yang Lan and her husband Bruno Wu) and this year, they seem to be pulling all the stops, according to this Weibo post. Has somebody jumped the gun here?
[Weibo post Image expanded]
It’s barely been shared, so either Lorde isn’t that popular in China, or the Zhangjiahou Tourism Bureau isn’t well followed by music fans. In any case, if she is actually confirmed, it will be interesting to see if she actually turns up and whether she lures fans to Zhangbei.
Interesting times indeed.