Now, despite an incredibly tough year for music in China (due to Government clampdowns surrounding the Olympics as well as the horribly misguided soap-boxing of a certain elfin Icelander), exactly a year later and the Beijing sound has come along leaps and bounds.

I thought it was about time I follow up on that year-old post, using the medium of budget video, to bring you up to speed a little:

• The Old-Guard: The older bands are still getting better (See SUBS, Re-TROS and Miserable Faith in the videos).
• Strength In Depth: The younger bands have come on from being self-conscious mimic-artists into snarling, full-blooded outfits of their own (See Snapline and Carsick Cars in the videos).
• Public Demand: A number of festival organisers still went ahead in seemingly impossible conditions with defiantly impressive results.

While 2007 will be the year the paper-trail leads back to in terms of the new Chinese bands really starting to find their own voices, 2008 is the year they perfected them. This video of Maybe Mars‘ artists Carsick Cars (taken last weekend) shows an increasingly confident band belting out their bona-fide indie anthem, ‘Zhong Nan Hai’. I really thought very little of them when I arrived in 2006 and it has been a pleasure having my initial assessment slowly being proven wrong:

Against all the odds both the Midi and Modern Sky Festivals went ahead in some form or other. Modern Sky resorted to a strange, half indoor, half outdoor, all-concrete affair just next to last year’s Haidian Park venue. There is no doubt that it lacked the grassy festival atmosphere but there was a pleasingly rough-around-the-edges industrial feel, made all the more so by the abysmal pollution which can be seen in the opening shots of this crudely put together festival video:

The daddy of Chinese music events, the Midi Festival, moved around it’s date and venue so many times that most news sources gave up reporting on it. For better or worse at the last minute they decided to host it back at the Midi School campus. This meant a huge scaling down and a number of sound issues. Combine this with some filthy weather and you would have thought it was a washout, but outstanding Saturday headliners and Midi School alumni Miserable Faith gaily skipped through the genres – ska, rap-metal, reggae, rock-ballads – to make my one trip up there totally worthwhile, as you can see from this next video. Their set closer, Life’s Most Perfect Day, is a hard-men-go-soft ballad that would play well anywhere. Also worth noting is the bemused crowd reaction to sugary Danish pop-mongers Summerhill: Two worlds collide with indifferent results:

So all things considered this place is shaping up nicely. If the post-Olympic landscape allows for more and more live music opportunities, then the crowds and the confidence will grow. The bands are certainly getting there. The night I filmed the Carsick Cars video also featured current buzz-band Ourselves Beside Me and The Gar, making a night of Chinese newcomers who would do themselves proud in any venue in the world.

© Ed Peto 2008