by Linda Jaivin
If rock was where the excitement was, karaoke and disco was where you'd find the vast majority of the unrevolutionary masses. Cadres or entrepreneurs or students by day, everyone was a DIY pop star by night. In silvery rooms hung with disco balls and plastic grapes, people crooned the sort of soppy love songs for which that guy on the bus got himself detained not so many years earlier. At one club I visited in Beijing in the early nineties, meanwhile, the entire dance set consisted of a compilation tape of Samantha Fox's four or five best hits. Everyone boogied over and over to ‘I Want to Touch Your Body’, no one touching anyone, men outnumbering women on the dance floor by about six to one.
Rock was a harder place. Instruments were expensive and practice space hard to find. The authorities were prone to cancel gigs at the last minute for no reason at all. Despite copyright laws, pirates ruled the seas. It was extremely difficult for local bands to get any exposure on either television or radio, which was only cautiously beginning to introduce the ‘easy listening’ end of foreign rock music. While rock musicians denied vociferously in published interviews that what they were doing was politically subversive, the government clearly still had its doubts. Satellite television put MTV within viewing reach of anyone with a dish, but the government controlled those as well. Still, new bands formed every day.
If it was still trendy to like Cui Jian, it became super-trendy to claim he was boring, and mega-trendy to claim everything was boring. ‘I'm in hibernation mode,’ a former singer in a rock band declared to me. A good-looking boy of twenty, he sat enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke and an almost equally palpable cumulus of ennui. A portrait of Mao hung on his wall. Jack Kerouac's On the Road, in Chinese translation, lay well-thumbed on his bedside table.
‘Don't you know,’ he told me. ‘There are three books that all the cool people are reading right now: On the Road, The Life of Picasso and One Hundred Years of Solitude. If they're into poetry, it has to be Ginsberg.’ He yawned. ‘Don't talk to me about Cui Jian.’
Visiting Beijing in 1994, after a few months' absence, I try to round up the usual suspects. He Yong is out of town. His father tells me he's at a wedding. Another friend thinks he's lying low because one of his songs has become a major pop hit and, as an attitudinal punk, he finds commercial success mortifying. I dial Cui Jian's number, and get a ‘this number is not in service’ recording. I attempt to find his new one, and begin to think it would be easier to discover the home number of Deng Xiaoping. Willie, an American reporter, tells me he's been trying to track down an Inner Mongolian crew that does covers of Beatles songs but they're apparently still in Inner Mongolia. Everyone's talking about a new band called Acupuncture Point, but no one seems to know when or where they'll be playing next.
The only thing anyone can tell me for certain is that there's going to be a ‘party’ on Saturday night. That night, at 10.30, I bike over to the Pizza Hut in the eastern part of the city. Waiting for me, on their bikes, are Liu Shen and Fang Hao. Liu is pale and voluble, the son of a playwright and an editor. Fang is dark, almost sullen, the son of railway workers and the grandson of a Red Army veteran. He's got two earrings in one ear, but only puts them in on weekends—they're not keen on piercing at school, where he's a member of the Communist Youth League.
Liu and Fang are best friends and serious rock fans. Nearly all their spending money goes towards buying cassette tapes of rock music. They think Cui Jian, who recently hit thirty, is a bit ‘old’. They're both eighteen. Fang, who adores Guns n' Roses, writes songs and hopes to form a band some day. Neither has ever been to a rock party.
We cycle to the Xuan Hao Disco Hall. The decor in this place is weird—a promotional pamphlet describes it as ‘fanciful, yet primitive, recalling the “Tales of the Arabian Nights”’. Hmmm. Picture the Arabian Nights as interpreted by someone with training in Soviet aesthetics, no clue as to where or what Arabia might be, a disco ball and a few plastic palm trees, and you begin to get the idea. None of us can ever recall seeing anything quite like it.
Quaffing Beijing Beer, we check out the scene. It's a mixed crowd of Chinese and foreigners. Straight and sedate, for the most part. The first act takes to the stage, lets loose with a soulless hiphop number and follows this up by crooning forties and fifties-style ballads. It's like being on a nightclub on a cruise ship. By the time the band takes a break, Liu and Fang are bored shitless. They get up to go. Tomorrow, they promise, we'll have a real rock n roll experience.
The following afternoon we're on our bikes again, riding to the Central Drama Academy. Our destination is a large lecture hall in a bland building on the campus where acting classes are held.
Liu and Fang are interested in new bands. You can't get much newer than the one about to start rehearsing in this room for their first gig: I*m. We find I*m—they don't have a Chinese name—setting up the stage. Liu introduces me to the lead singer, Liangzi. Liangzi is Venus as a boy. At a venerable twenty-eight, he's father-figure to the rest, whose ages range from twenty to twenty-three. Originally from Harbin in the far north, Liangzi is a teacher in the acting department. Acting is in his blood. His parents are Peking Opera singers; his father is famous for his role as the hero of the Cultural Revolution revolutionary model opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
Liangzi detests Peking opera. ‘My parents are always singing it,’ he explains. ‘It drives me crazy.’
Liangzi introduces me to the others as they file in: rhythm guitarist Zhao Ju, bass player Wang Rui and drummer Qi Qi, both students at the China Conservatory, and lead guitarist Wang Feng. They're waiting for the only woman in the band, Wang Xiao, the keyboard player. She's giving someone a piano lesson.
To get started Liangzi borrowed a whopping 40,000 yuan (about $10,000, equal to more than twenty times his annual salary at the academy). He bought a keyboard for 14,000 yuan, as well as a drum set, guitars and sound equipment. ‘I'm supposed to pay my creditors 50,000 yuan at the end of three years,’ he says. Will he be able to? ‘If they throw me in jail for bad debts, but I've managed to leave behind some good music, then it's worth it,’ he says with a nervous little intake of breath.
Students from the stage-design department file in, kneel down on the floor to draw posters, and set up the room. They hang up sketches of the band in the style of a Guns n' Roses T-shirt. They dress up a male mannequin as another macho fantasy and then, incongruously, decorate the walls cutely with streamers.
This is Liangzi's rock n roll dream. The first rock songs he heard in his life were by Cui Jian. They came into his life like a revelation. He collected all the tapes of rock music he could find. He discovered the Black Panthers, and foreign acts like Aerosmith, Sting and Bon Jovi.
Liangzi started to write songs. When Hong Kong's Star TV began broadcasting into China by satellite, Liangzi channel-surfed straight over to MTV. He studied the videos and learned how to dress and move rock n roll.
After enlisting Zhao Ju, one of his students, he put up a handwritten advertisement—we're starting a band, it's going to be tough, but join us. Forty people responded. I*m finally came together about a month ago.
Others—friends of the band, more students—arrive and quietly take seats at the back of the room. Wang Feng appears to be a major babe magnet.
Wang Xiao finally arrives and they start to practise.
Wooden world
Wooden boys
Wooden world
Wooden girls
Wooden boys
Want wooden girls
Wooden girls
Don't cry or bleed
I wanna get far away
From this wooden world
I wanna get far away
From this feelingless night.
When they take a break, Liangzi confesses he's ‘a bit nervous’ about the gig tonight. He didn't sleep a wink last night.
Suddenly someone spots a red mark on Wang Feng's neck. ‘Kouhong!’ he exclaims, ‘lipstick!’, and everyone bursts out laughing.
Wang Feng grab
s at his neck. ‘No way!’ he cries.
‘Which one was it?’ asks Liangzi.
‘Haven't a clue,’ replies Wang Feng, setting off another round of laughter. ‘Wo cao,’ he says, ‘well, fuck me.’
Wang Rui tells me he fell in love with rock after the Wham! concert. A provincial boy himself, he says that Beijing is still really the only place in the country where there's an ‘advanced’ rock scene. ‘In some of the provinces,’ he says, ‘their understanding of rock is pretty crude. They think if you scream a lot, it's rock.’ Wang Rui thinks that young Chinese are taking to rock because it's a good way to let off steam. He's into Skid Row, Guns n' Roses and the band he calls Hong Lajiao—Red Hot Chili Peppers.
They run through the rest of the set and we break for dinner. I go to Liu Shen's house. Sitting around the table in the cramped dining room with his elderly grandmother and middle-aged parents, enjoying steamed dumplings and literary gossip, I feel a million miles from rock.
We head back to the academy around eight. About two hundred people, mostly students, pack the room. I spot three other foreigners. As the band does a sound check, two guys holding torches climb up on chairs on either side of the room—stage lighting.
Liangzi looks slightly dazed as he thanks the school for its support. ‘Our first song is “Red Paradise”,’ he tells the punters, who are by now totally off their faces with anticipation, shrieking, applauding and jumping up and down. A nanosecond later, Liangzi makes the transition from shy boy to rock god, belting out ‘Red Paradise’ while seriously endangering the mike stand and stomping the stage with his mock-Doc Martens.
Red paradise
Red paradise
Wild infatuation
Explosive illumination
They're sounding and looking good, though Wang Xiao remains the classical pianist, completely composed, not a strand of her long hair moving. Liangzi's voice travels easily up and down the octaves; he may hate what his parents sing, but they've bequeathed to him a terrific set of vocal cords. Liu and Fang and I are swept away by the good vibes in the audience. We jump up and down and grin madly at each other, as if we had something to do with it.
Overall, it's a victory of energy over finesse, but the students love it. When the band finishes, the crowd surges forward to pick up Liangzi and throw him into the air.
Wang Feng rushes over and throws his arms around me. ‘Zenma yang?’ he asks. ‘What d'ya think?’ They're all so excited they've forgotten to be cool.
Finally, the fans trickle out, leaving us, the band and a few of their friends. They carry their instruments and equipment over to their tiny rehearsal room, also on campus, and we all crowd in for the post-mortem.
‘How do you think it went?’ I ask.
‘We have to work a lot harder,’ says Liangzi. ‘I was so nervous. But this school has 300 students, and I teach fifty of them, so I felt pretty sure…Anyway,’ he laughs down at his feet, letting his hair curtain his face, ‘I think our existence is itself a kind of accomplishment.’
A few days later Wang Feng calls. He wants to see me off at the airport. We go out for a coffee first, to Uncle Sam's. Wang tells me that he hopes the next time I return to China, I*m will be big…
Bendy Wendy
It's a big confession: ‘I'm the anti-Christ!’ Wendy Matthews, sweet Wendy Matthews, the Wendy Matthews of exquisitely delicate beauty and big soulful voice, the Wendy Matthews whose album, The Witness Tree, is pop spirituality and gospel with a touch of Elvis, yes that Wendy Matthews, is revving up into a most devilish laugh. ‘HeheHEHEHEHEHE! In disguise!’ She giggles. ‘I'm completely delirious today. Epping does it to me.’
We're in a dressing-room in Channel Seven's Sydney studios in, yes, Epping, where Wendy is appearing on ‘The Denton Show’. She was opening the show with the single ‘Standing Strong’ from the album, and closing it with a suitably goofy rendition of ‘Sugar, Sugar’. When she's not needed on the set, we talk.
Or should I say, we shriek, and laugh, and shout, and flail about. Wendy Matthews, whose press clippings and music and demure appearance on such shows as ‘Midday’ had led me to expect a serene slip of a thing, mistress of ‘the quiet art of standing still’, is tonight a bundle of animation, a woman in perpetual motion, a non-stop joker, a mug, a stand-up, sit-down, stand-up-again comic. It isn't an interview; it's a party.
The voice that could almost make you cry with ‘The Day You Went Away’, the voice is surging out of her in great long caws and guffaws, speeding up and slowing down, rising and falling, playing, jousting, and changing form like a verbal poltergeist. She's a Scot! She's an Aussie! She's the voice on the TV! She's her original Canadian self!
So, I ask her, where's the staid and sedate Wendy Matthews I'd been led to expect by her image and her press clips?
‘HA!’ she explodes. ‘HAHAHAHA! You know, people in this business are supposed not to get up in the morning and have a crap like everyone else, but it's NOT THE WAY IT IS!’
So Wendy Matthews, ethereal beauty and pop goddess, takes the occasional crap?
‘HOOHOOHOO.’
Flipping through some of those clips, we come to a publicity picture of her, close-up, dreamy, eyes downcast. ‘I look like I'm nodding off there,’ she chortles. She says she took to autographing the photos with the message, ‘Wake me when it's platinum!’
I read to her some of her more sanctimonious-sounding quotations, quotes against sexy dressing on stage, quotes that had given me the impression she was a nun or tree-hugger or something. By the time I finish she is howling.
‘That's so funny!’ she gasps. ‘Oh my God…HAHAHAHA. Oh, please!’ She shakes her head. ‘It's like reading about somebody completely different,’ she says. ‘I don't know why, but people don't get my jokes a lot of the time. Or I feel like, be serious… It's all so serious, so I kind of slip into that. I would love,’ she confides, ‘to take the piss out of the whole thing most of the time.’
I say that her music doesn't lead people to expect a wacky Wendy. The Witness Tree is uplifting and emotive; the one before that, Lily, was a bit of a heart-wrencher.
She agrees. ‘Oh yeah! Music, for me, personally, that's what I get emotional about. And that's what tends to come out… I wouldn't see a whole lot of point in singing happy, vapid songs.’
Wendy uses the word ‘incredibly’ a lot. It's as if this one-time busker and backup singer can hardly believe all that's happened to her since her debut Emigre—featuring the hit single ‘Let's Kiss (Like Angels Do)’—came out in 1990: the fandom, going platinum, working with people like Booker T Jones and Tim Finn, the ARIAs.
Here are some facts about Wendy: she loves an empty dance floor even if you have to go to ‘these incredibly daggy places’ to find one. She's reading a book called Meeting the Madwoman. She's listening to Shawn Coleman and Sarah McGloughlin. Her dream is to buy a rural property and live in a teepee. She regrets that Bondi, where she's lived for ten years, is ‘getting so incredibly disastrously groovy’ that you can't ‘shlep down for the Saturday paper in your jammies’ any more. She makes salads from rocket she grows herself. She is ‘a feminist, whatever that may mean’. She works hard. Her next album is ready to go.
And vices? She doesn't drink, but it's not a ‘moral’ thing. She just doesn't like the taste of alcohol. Unless it's disguised, as a strawberry margarita, for instance. She had two of those recently—and they were the size of soup bowls. ‘My only vice, if you want to call it that—my mother's going to kill me, I told her I quit—um, is smoking,’ she admits. She's talking about grass. She supports decriminalisation of marijuana ‘absolutely’. She doesn't smoke cigarettes, but cuts her joints with tobacco. Tobacco? I flash her a you-devil look. And that's when she confesses the big one.
Why Sex Makes Me Laugh
Covered in mud, panting steam into the cool night air, we were bumping and grinding away when the two pretty teenage girls flung their heads back and shouted, ‘I want to fuck you like an animal! I want to feel you from the
inside!’ I was screaming as well. We all were, all 25,000 punters at the outdoor Alternative Nation concert, going off with Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch Nails for the chorus of their hit song ‘Closer’. I don't know how it was for Trent or the others, but it was great for me.
Talking (shouting, singing) dirty can be excellent fun. Even more so when you're in a group of less than 25,000. Say two, for instance. For some people, ‘oooooooohh, baby,’ or ‘just to the left…ah, that's it’ is about as articulate as they can manage while vertically challenged. For others, a key dialect of the language of love is language itself.
Language here can be defined rather broadly. I once slept with a man who babbled in nonsense syllables as he made love. I wondered briefly if I'd gone to bed with the Jabberwock (‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!/ He chortled in his joy.’). At one critical point, I thought he was trying to communicate something specific.
‘Pardon?’ I gasped.
‘Nonverbal,’ he replied, not missing a beat.
Foreign languages work like aphrodisiacs on some people. Remember how in the film A Fish Called Wanda the woman protagonist adored it when her lover spoke Italian in bed? A gay friend in Hong Kong told me that he refused to make love in his native Cantonese. ‘It's so harsh,’ he explained. He preferred either Mandarin or English. ‘Take, for instance, the statement, “your skin is so soft”,’ he said. ‘That's fine in English, and better in Mandarin, where it ends on the very sensual word for soft, ruan, but absolutely appalling in Cantonese.’ He shuddered, and translated into his mother tongue. ‘Leiga pee-fook ho yook-ah.’
A friend knows some people who were camping in the former Yugoslavia. They noticed that the fellow who was staying in the next tent fancied himself a bit of a groover in skin-tight leopard-skin hot pants. They didn't think much more about him until night fell and the sounds of wild animal sex poured out of his tent. Suddenly, they heard him cry,‘Speak to me in Eengleesh! I lak it zat way!’
