The Mushrooms, Yuyintang

New Year's was celebrated at Yuyintang with an emotastic night featuring F.A.F (Forget and Forgive), Double Control Where and The Mushrooms. It was crazily busy. It was so full that we were getting crushed stood in the second room with the tables, not even in the main stage area. So I didn't get to see F.A.F this time (though they sounded good from next door) and only caught a bit of Double Control Where's set. Of course, I fought my way in for The Mushrooms and they gave a typically strong performance. You can read a bit more about the other two bands here.

The shows were kind of overshadowed by the arrival of the police half way through DCW's set however. Apparently someone had called the police to complain about the number of people in the venue. It was probably pushing 500, which Yuyintang has seen before, but usually people spill out into the park. Given the cold weather and the state of Tianshan Park, this didn't happen last night however, creating a crush inside.

So they showed up and had a walk around the venue. Luckily by this point the crowd had thinned out a bit, but this may be because there were people out on the street in front of Yuyintang, which the police were unimpressed by too. The police walked around the venue for about half an hour, with a few more officers showing up during this time and it seemed for a while that the gig was going to be shut down. Eventually, the show was allowed to continue (unfortunately for DCW the sound seemed to be poor once they picked up their set) and people were told if they left the venue they wouldn't be allowed to re-enter as the police were most likely going to be checking on the street situation for the rest of the night.

Although the gig was ultimately allowed to continue, there could of course be further ramifications for Yuyintang - particularly if they don't sort their crowd control out and keep letting people in when the venue is already crammed full. With the Expo on the horizon, live music venues in Shanghai are going to have enough problems without attracting more attention from the police with incidents like this. Hopefully YYT will be able to smooth things out and this won't be a sign of things to come from the police. We'll see.