Friday night and it was time to check out the downtown Live Bar location for the first time. The official name is Live Sound Garage and it's situated inside the Weihai Road 696 centre, a cluster of old buildings for art studios.
The show was advertised as a 9 o'clock start and here was the line up:
Small Man
塑料拖鞋 (Plastic Slippers)雷人 (Lei Ren)I mentioned that Lei Ren translates roughty to Lightning People in the podcast but then noted in the comments that it usually means to shock someone. Well, I looked into it and the band have the official English name 'Lightninger'. So make of it what you will.
Firstly, the venue. I was quite impressed, despite being a smaller space it was nice. Good stage, lots of brand new equipment including a huge speaker set for the PA that seemed way over the top and a good standing area that could probably get 150 people in. Someone who knows how could put on some cool shows there. It's basically like a rectangular version of the main room at YYT, but with nothing else around it. Only odd thing is how big they made the stage, the drummer seems miles away.
So, Small Man didn't play finally, just three bands tonight. We got there at 9.00, the advertised start time, and they were still sound checking. Long story short, gig started at 9.45. Plastic Slippers are clearly a brand new band but were well received by the audience of the bands, their friends and me and the wife. I should say that some other true punters did trickle in a bit later. The band shared a member with Lei Ren (their drummer) too.
Up next, Lei Ren. Lei Ren seem to live the Lei Ren life and were behaving off stage much like on. Anyway, they got up and went into their set of 80's Japanese TV theme covers and parody songs. In between songs, the front man and band members went through several lengthy stand up routines. Most of this revolved around the joy of saying rude stuff or slang in Shanghainese. Example joke, keyboardist starts using his head to play, singer exclaims 'Lou lu'. Lou Lu means old cock and means literally cocky, which can be good or bad. This typically reduces the whole band to tears of laughter.
Finally Second took the stage and were uncharacteristically sloppy and out. Before long it became aparent that they couldn't hear themselves or each other ... and then the drum kit fell apart. They asked for the previous drummers to come up and help. The previous drummers didn't come up, they stood around being very Lei Ren. So, it took a good ten minutes or so for the sound guy, and I use that in the broadest possible sense of the term, to sort everything out and finally Second managed to play some quality tracks. I look forward to catching them at the next 0093 showcase at Yuyintang.
Watching Lei Ren's performance was very painful.