UPDATE: we have posted some video here, here, here and here. The quality is pretty rubbish, but you get the idea!
Without doubt, China is going global. Chinese companies are buying global brands, China is employing a “string of pearls” strategy around the Indian Ocean, and Chinese music is starting to make headway into the world market. The band making the biggest waves are CarSick Cars, who are fast becoming China’s first indie super band. Their break came when Sonic Youth requested avant Beijing twosome White as their support act on their first China tour (April 2007, organised by Split Works). White weren’t available as Shenggy was in London at the time, and so White frontman Shouwang’s band CarSick Cars was mooted as a replacement.
As it turned out, the Ministry of Culture intervened (bizarrely banning CSC’s from playing the show at the Star Live), but Shouwang met the band backstage and struck up an immediate friendship with Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Subsequently, Sonic Youth invited them to join them on part of their European tour later in 2007. This year, the band were invited to play Primavera Sound, Barcelona’s incredible smorgasboard of international alternative music. The performance is described here by the Maybe Mars head honcho Michael Pettis. Note that Maybe Mars is the band’s label.
On May 29, two days before the band played the Bad Bonn Kilbi Festival in Switzerland, Carsick Cars joined a stellar cast of bands and musicians, including Neil Young, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Mogwai, Yo La Tengo, Michael Nyman, Liars, and about 80 other performers from around the world to play for over 60,000 spectators at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival, the first time any Chinese band has played such an important international festival. Interestingly enough Carsick Cars and the explosive Beijing music scene have become so widely known among European and American music industry insiders that judging from the Primavera BBS and the comments in the Spanish press there was a lot of anticipation before their show, and among their audience when they performed were a lot of musicians and criticseager, it seems, to judge the band for themselves.
When they took to the ATP stage at 9 p.m., one of six stages at the festival, they were playing against My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, Art Brut, and two other bands, but nearly 2,000 people nonetheless came to see them, with the crowd steadily growing all through their 30 minute set. In spite of a weak sound system the band put on an explosive show. Those of us who were there were not surprised by their performance. They had just completed a tough seven week tour of China with label mates The Gar, and their performance was incredibly tight. What did shock us, however, was to hear hundreds of people in the audience, in which very few Chinese faces could be seen, singing the lyrics, especially during Rock ‘N Roll hero and Zhong Nan Hai. How did do many people in Europe know the lyrics to Carsick Cars songs? When the band finished the set with Zhong Nan Hai the singing in the audience was so loud – even though very few of the singers probably had any idea of what the lyrics meant – that for those in the front rows it was hard to hear Shouwang’s voice. Who says foreign
audiences won’t like Chinese songs?