Results tagged “Andy Best” from Jake Newby

Hopefully you've been following developments over on Indie Everything recently anyway, but Andy has been very busy. He's set up his only music label, Qu (as in 区 or district) and has been busy recording songs for Pairs and Little Punk with the help of Adam. Naturally, everything is being approached with Andy's strong DIY ethic. The results are outstanding.

The tracks all sound fantastic and Pairs have produced a video for the brilliant song 'Yangpu Qu', which looks incredible. Seriously, you're going to love it. This will all be up on t'internet soon, I'm just making sure you're properly prepared and suitably excited about it all. If the stuff I've seen and heard so far doesn't make people sit up and take notice, I might just retire this blog. That's not supposed to be a good thing incidentally.

Anyway, today I was lucky enough to be involved in a music video shoot for Little Punk's song 'I'm Not in the Mood for Making a Song'. Y'know how I am, I can't resist a cameo. So here's  picture of me in my Little Punk t-shirt - that's her looking like a superhero on it. After filming we went back to Andy's and he did a rough cut of the whole video - it looks brilliant. There's a couple of other (better) cameos too: Super Sophia and Ho-Tom the Conqueror pop up in it as well. But yeah, it's really, really good.

I don't want to give away too much more than that, but just keep an eye on Indie Everything and for a Qu Douban page coming soon. It's all very exciting.

Candy Shop have put up a new demo. It's for their track Love Song, which you'll recognise if you've seen them live. Listen to it here. If this is your first time listening to Candy Shop, it's possibly not the best introduction to the band, particularly their more guitar-driven live shows, but then this is a band that mix so many genres, they're kind of hard to keep track of at times. Here's how Shanghai's best website described them recently:

"saccharine pop, hip hop, nu metal, pop ska punk, a little thrash -- it's all in there"

Which brings us to the second point about Candy Shop. You might have seen that picture on the right there already by now. It's in this month's Time Out as part of the main Music feature written by someone or other about the band and a locally-organised, community-based event to promote 81fur.com. Shanghaiist also used the photo recently, although they failed to actually mention the event and instead set about attacking PETA and, by association, the gig, but never mind. A bunch of other places have used it too (see below for the links) and have supported an event that has its roots in the local music community here.

It's been set up by Andy (he's the one on the left of that photo in case you're wondering) in conjunction with Xiao K at Yuyintang and the band themselves (all locals). The photos were taken by Shanghai-based photographer Tim Franco, who has been documenting the scene here for a long time and was recently taken to the States by Maybe Mars to cover their tour there. Splitworks, the music promoters who have been involved in the scene for years and have always ensured their international acts are supported by local bands, provided the studio. So basically a lot of people who care a lot about local music are involved and, though we said weren't really going to write about it much on the blogs, the coverage it's been getting warrants a post I reckon. Here's a few of the highlights (other than that Time Out piece obviously, ahem):

SmartShanghai made it the feature event for their MP3 Monday, here.
Layabozi, who recently launched a podcast by the way, have given it their support, here.
It's even gone international, making it on to the Discovery Channel's Planet Green website, here.
 
Not bad, not bad at all. February 25th is the date, it's at Yuyintang, is completely free, is supporting a great cause and will feature both Candy Shop and one of my favourite new bands, FAF, as well as DJ Sacco. Yes, the DJ Sacco. What more could you want?

Every time about this time of year we're inundated with end of year lists. This year, listmakers have been outdoing themselves with end of the decade lists and what not. Some of these I put more stock in than others.

Morgan has done his usual piss-yourself-laughing-hilarious lists of flyers (here for the good, here for the bad) and he's also done a round up of his favourite gigs from the last twelve months (here). Andy's contributed his own thoughts on that last category here. Morgan's also done one on DJs by asking nearly everyone in Shanghai to submit their favourite DJ performance from the year. I'm in there (as a contributor, not as a DJ) way, way down near the bottom somewhere.

Over at Layabozi, Zack's got an interesting take on the whole listmas (sorry) thing by organising a kind of list showdown, a fight to the internet-based death. Bring it. You can read about the whole thing here and the lists themselves should be going up in the next couple of days, including one from me, so get out and vote dammit.

Finally, I'm heading back to the UK for a little bit so the blog will slow down a bit. In the meantime, I have a sneaking suspicion someone else might pick up the slack... 

I know that most of you reading this came to my blog via Andy's in the first place and that you probably check back there regularly anyway, but just in case you don't, please go and read this now. It's Andy's scene story of 2009 and is an excellent read. Yes, he's a friend and he gave me this blog and blah, blah, blah, but it's not like he gets a load of money each time you click on the link or something, I just genuinely think you should read it. It's a fantastic piece.

That's it really. Sorry if my posts have been a bit light recently (get off my back, I averaged a post and a third a day last month), but there's some good gigs on this weekend so no doubt I'll be back with some write-ups of those. Now, go read Andy's post.

Just a quickie (chortle, chortle):

See, this is why I like it when Layabozi has more regular content. They've produced a list of the 60 best albums to come out of this country. It's a great list with a wide variety of picks and a real "something for everyone" flavour to it. Here's how they did it:

"The criteria was totally subjective and attached to luck and the law of whatever will be, will be. The only thing that was not random here was the selection of the people we asked to do this."

Hence, you'll see Han Han, Super Sophia and some bloke called Andy Best amongst those making the selections. Go check it out now.

I said I wasn't going to do this, but I changed my mind. I'm sure you've all been keeping track of this stuff while I was away, but, seeing as I was sans internet, I've been playing catch up and can't believe I've missed some of the stuff that's gone down. Here's a round-up:

After all the hype, Mao Shanghai opened. Andy's review of the opening night is here and there's his write up of the Mushrooms gig that followed a few days later here. We've been hinting for a while that this could be the last Mushrooms show for quite a bit (making me doubly gutted to have missed it) and I wish I could say more about why this is, but rest assured all will be revealed when I'm allowed to say something. Rounding out the first slew of gigs at Mao was the Rock Shanghai anniversary party. I'm looking forward to catching a show there soon.

The Global Battle of the Bands competition returned to Shanghai. Despite a good turn out of local talent in Beijing (they had 20 bands, of which 2 were laowai acts), the Shanghai leg wasn't quite as successful. I speculated on some of the reasons for this before. Nevertheless, 7 acts took part and you can read all about it here.

Then, the real craziness kicked in. Maybe we should all be used to the ridiculous whims of the Party, but I was still pretty shocked to read about the decimation of the Modern Sky Festival on China Music Radar. That was followed by Andy posting that the ban extended too all gigs by foreign bands which apparently led to the bizarre spectacle of The (International) Noise Conspiracy standing around in Yuyintang unable to play at the gig they were meant to be headlining. What. The. Fuck?

UPDATE, Sep 17: In addition to K.E. and Five Pence, it now seems that October Capricorn (picture below) and Anchor have withdrawn from the GBOB. Sam Dust of YYT has stated that October Capricorn will not be taking part while Anchor's drummer has explained, "after we said we'd enter we discovered that we had to pay to take part. Originally we were just going to play and hadn't realised we had to pay a fee. We're no longer participating in this competition."

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Anyone who's suffering from Battle of the Bands fatigue out there, I feel your pain. And yet, here I am, stealing Elaine's headline and taking up more space on the interwebs about them. I know, I'm part of the problem.

So why bring these competitions up again? A couple of reasons: first, Dan Shapiro has offered "Another Look at that Pepsi Battle of the Bands" over on his blog at CityWeekend (go read it here); second, the Global Battle of the Bands that I mentioned before here, has been taking a bit of stick on Douban of late.

Dan makes some interesting points in his piece and argues that the exposure the bands receive is far greater than that for bands who remain underground and gig at mid-sized venues. He admits that the sticking point is the sacrifices a band may have to make in terms of their artistic vision, but argues that sticking with an indie label doesn't mean you get a carte blanche artistically either:

"Of course, mainstream labels may limit artistic control; singing with an indie label should ensure your band receives complete creative license. But wait, in Shanghai, singing with a local label means you may have to change your sound, your style, your hair (Little Nature) and even your band name (MOMO / Happy Strings), in order to fit the target demographic."

This is a fair point in regard to Soma - they have changed the artists they've taken on board. Andy wrote a while back about the changes to Momo's appearance and when I interviewed lead singer Ding Jia nearly a year ago I asked her about why the band had changed their sound so dramatically and she simply said "because we signed with the label." She didn't bat an eyelid.

UPDATE: Literally as I was hitting "publish" on this post, I got a message from one of the "indie integrity bandwagon" jumpers to say he'd just posted on it. I think you know who I mean. You can read his response here.

Remember back in April when Pepsi announced they were doing a Battle of the Bands contest? Any initial excitement was quickly nipped in the bud when the preliminary rounds of the competition descended into farce: poor production values (if any), ignorant presenters and judges, plus a lot of disrespect to the bands.

Pu Pu of The Mushrooms (a band whose t-shirt you can see on one of the members of Sweet Journey on the right here ironically) decided to take a stand together with Zhang Haisheng against the competition and announced that they would be boycotting the competition. Numerous other bands joined them, while Pinkberry went on to win the Shanghai round.

Well the competition is still going on apparently (minus Pinkberry now) and it has an English-language blog to accompany it. The blog talks to various people behind the scenes and discusses the show and issues associated with it, though fails to mention anything about the massive recent accident in Guangzhou where people are rumoured to have been killed and where Pepsi apparently ordered a press blackout.

Anyway, nearly three months after the boycott, Pepsi have hit back, belittling the bands' stance and chiding them for boycotting an event that was clearly packaged as corporate from the off. Here's a taster:

So Andy's out of action. That sucks.

This is no replacement blog. Andy's blog is great and he's built it into the authority on the Shanghai music scene. I sincerely hope he feels well enough to continue with it soon. But we'd been talking for a while about me blogging more and then he surprised me just now by dropping this link into my inbox. So here I am. 

I'll be tweaking this page over the next couple of weeks so please bear with me while I sort it all out.

Like I say, this is no replacement, but don't be surprised if the focus of this page is also the Shanghai music scene or if some bits look a bit like Andy's blog. We pretty much go to all the same shows anyway...