This is a holiday week (nationalism day) and a lot of people are off at one festival or another. For Shanghai, the Changjiang Midi, up the road, is the main culprit. Still, life went on at Yuyintang and Indie Pop favs Bang Bang Tang were back with some younger supporting acts.
I saw The Rank and BBT. No worries, Yin and Bremen are cover version heavy acts anyway.
Ahhhh, how to keep this short? During BBT, a guy with a huge camera set up, including an assistant with a pole mounted flash, took photos from the front every song, continuously for the entire set. It included putting the camera and powerful flash directly into band member's faces. He was everywhere and not an un-intrusive second was to be had.
That shameless c**t had absolutely no regard for ticket buying audience members there to see the band. It was so extreme that I can only think that maybe he was hired by the band or something.
Now the band. As usual, the musicianship of this band was top drawer and singer Xiao Bai has one of the best voices on the scene. They played through a good set of all their famous tracks ending on A Song for my Angel. There was a decent turnout for them and they have a lot of genuine fans. If there was a normal music industry in this country then surely they'd be a nationally famous pop act. They should be.
One odd side note is that the Douban event info had all the links for the Zhu Lu He Feng label on it in a way that suggests they put this on. The flyer looks like their style too. But none of the bands are on the label and non of their crew were around.
Bang Bang Tang seem to always attract the camera-toting types and the occasional older pervy dude who thinks he has a chance with Xiao Bai.
Back in April they played a really packed show at YYT, and CNNGo got this pretty good live footage and interview with Xiao Bai for one of their internet TV segments: http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/cnngo-shanghai-going-grid-part-deux-921861 (it's a longer video and the BBT portion comes in later on in the clip).