MCLC: Uncovering Beijing's DIY Hideaway

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Uncovering Beijing’s DIY Hideaway
Source: Pitchfork (1/13/16)
Living Rooms: Uncovering Bejing’s DIY Hideaway
BY Jamie Fullerton
In the first installment of Living Rooms: Global Punk & DIY Venues, a series that looks at DIY clubs around the world, writer Jamie Fullerton and photographer Giulia Marchi visit School Live Bar, a venue in Beijing’s Gulou area.
Gentrification has taken over on Wudaoying Hutong, once a quiet traditional residential lane in Beijing’s Gulou area. Pizza restaurants pile up next to trinket stores selling tin Camden Town signs and postcards featuring pictures of flat-faced cats. At its eastern edge an ornate single-story building houses a branch of Costa Coffee.
During the day, selfie sticks bob down the narrow lane as the #wudaoying Instagram hashtag feed is flooded with images of tacos and leather handbags. At night, as the atmosphere shifts, stark yellow streetlights silhouette anyone walking down Wudaoying into Slender Man-esque figures. It’s then that School Live Bar’s battered door, which is bolted shut in daytime as if to protect its interior from the zombie lurch of camera-snap tourists outside, swings open.
I first visited School in 2013 to watch four local bands, each more inebriated than the last, run through brilliantly ramshackle sets. Then someone plugged an iPod into the soundsystem and played back-to-back Libertines and Babyshambles songs until the final punter’s shoes were pried from the sap-sticky floor and trudged home. As a British indie obsessive who made most of my significant life choices in grimy sweatbox venues, it felt like I was home.
School opened in April 2010, but the layers of gig posters on its walls and the build-up of dust-sodden trinkets that make its shelves bend, fool you into thinking it must have been there since China’s first heavy rock explosion in the 1980s. A little more than 150 people can cram into its two-story interior, and the place is near capacity during a mid-December visit to watch Wuhan-based math-rockers Chinese Football play a typically sweaty School compression session.
As the band’s clever, clattering guitar stabs penetrate the room, local girls in ankle-length overcoats swig lager at the bar. With no physical barrier between band and crowd, a woman in a bucket hat shoves a Polaroid camera towards Chinese Football’s singer Xu Bo, shaking the resulting print as his guitar neck bobs by her forehead. Behind her, a stick-thin Western man wearing women’s jeans, stomach exposed and with waist-length Robert Plant hair, swirls rhythmically.
Shows like this take place most nights at School, overseen by the owners, cousins Liu Hao and Liu Fei. Beer in hand, and wearing a Tottenham Hotspur football shirt ("It’s match day tomorrow" he says), Fei admits that the he was inspired to open School as much by drink as music.
After the 2010 closure of Beijing’s D22 venue, an underground music mecca considered the Chinese capital’s answer to CBGB’s, Fei and his friends needed somewhere new to drink. His answer was to open School as the headquarters for his rag-tag gang of friends on Wudaoying, which was still a peaceful area with just a few restaurants on it. They called themselves "Nianqingbang," which translates to "Gang of Youth," which they tweaked to "Gang of Gin" to reference a Babyshambles song. The venue didn’t have a stage and the group, variously 20-30 strong, drank there every night and fought over stereo control. The place was funded by dubstep and house music DJ shows pulling in punters at weekends.
"It felt like a friend’s basement hangout place, like when someone puts in a makeshift bar and a foosball table and you do a bunch of drugs when you’re 16," says Michael Marshall, a 27-year-old American who came to Beijing in 2010 and basically hasn’t left School since. He now helps out with promotion for the venue.
"Some of my favorite memories are about a band called Omnipotent Youth Society," he says. "In 2010, when they were recording their first album, they would show up with songs they’d just mixed and play them on the sound system while we did tequila shots. It’s still one of my favourite albums of all time."
School’s reputation as an inclusive underground space slowly grew, but in 2012 it was under threat of derailment. Reacting to alleged incidents of violence at the bar, the US Embassy issued a warning about the venue, branding it unsafe for foreigners.
Marshall says the warning came about after School’s owners ended up in a street brawl with some Europeans they had befriended, with things turning sour when the latter group spouted extreme right-wing views. Fei, however, references an incident in which an American customer was beaten up by one of School’s bar staff after the former attempted to touch up the latter’s girlfriend.
Both admit that School’s staff hiring policy at the time may not have aided its reputation. "The selection process was, ‘My buddy just got out of jail and needs something to do, can we put him behind the bar?’," says Marshall. "Some of those guys would get really vicious and violent. As a joke I once bought the venue a wooden baseball bat but it ended up getting used to threaten people."
"Fist fights happen everywhere, School was no exception," shrugs Fei. "A foreigner flirted with the girlfriend of a staffer who had been released from prison and had a hot temper, so he beat him up. We made friends with foreigners for years and it just so happened that this man was American. If he were Chinese it wouldn’t have had such an effect."
In addition to shifting the bar staff demographic away from violent ex-convicts, a big factor in the rescue of School’s reputation was its transformation from sketchy dance club to gig venue in 2012. Fei fondly remembers the floor looking like it was covered with cement as customers’ vomit mixed with sawdust during its initial years, but he wanted change.
Being musicians themselves—Liu Hao had success with the band Joyside until their split in 2009—the cousins ditched School’s dance nights, installed a stage and set themselves up as a sweatbox venue primarily for new bands.
In 2012 Beijing’s indie rock scene was—as it is now—healthy, still pumped up from the mid-2000s emergence of strong, internationally-touring bands such as Hedgehog and Queen Sea Big Shark. With the demise of D22 and few alternative small venue options, fans were looking for their next HQ. They found it in School.
Casino Demon (described as "The Chinese Arctic Monkeys" by some), punks Demerit, icy synth-pop band Nova Heart (who enjoyed a breakout year in 2015 with their debut album) plus rockers the Bedstars and the Diders made early appearances, the latter pretty much becoming School’s house band. A ‘hall of fame’ of photos of acts playing there quickly spread across the walls, an appearance being a badge of honor for any Chinese band.
"School has a cache that other Beijing venues don’t have," says Marshall. "You’re not just performing a gig, you’re performing as part of a legacy because it has a community atmosphere I’ve not seen anywhere else." Fei recalls: "At our end-of-year party gig in 2012 a drunk man at School softly held my hand and said, ‘This is exactly what you wanted to do’. I was deeply touched by that."
As well as alcohol, nudity was a recurring theme during School’s first year as a gig venue. "The bikini party was particularly crazy," says Fei, who regularly performs at School singing in his hardcore band Dr Liu and the Human Centipede. "We made a pond on the roof full of girls in bikinis and guys in their underwear and all the bands played in swimsuits. It was like a bathhouse.
"Also, we had our third anniversary show on my 30th birthday. My band wasn’t scheduled to play but we decided to perform impromptu—the people in the front row tore off my clothes and I played naked. All I can remember is being scolded by my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, on the way back home in my underpants and socks, still holding my other clothes. A classic School night."
Dan Makowski, who is from Milwaukee and has been a School regular since its opening and now organizes shows there, says a gig by heavy four-piece the Bedstars was a particular highlight. "They were set to play last, and if you know anything about the Bedstars you know that’s not a good idea," he says. "They were plastered when they came on at 1 a.m. and just argued with each other. They continued to drink, then the guitarists got in a fight and smashed a guitar. It hangs in the School hallway to this day."
The lack of a backstage area (and bathroom: customers use public squat toilets across the alley) has added to the feeling of inclusiveness and community. Marshall talks about an early 2015 show where he spotted the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei milling around at the bar alongside the veteran godfather of Chinese rock, Cui Jian. Seymour Stein showed up last October.
Then there was the time Steve Mackay, the late saxophonist behind Iggy and the Stooges’ distinctively squalling sax sound on Fun House performed with the Shanghai band Round Eye. "This guy, who made one of the most iconic punk sounds of all time, was just hanging around chatting," says Marshall. "There’s no separation. It’s a village mentality that leads to amazing exchanges between local and foreign bands and fans."
I revisited the venue this past Christmas and found School’s sense of fun intact. On Christmas Eve, a man in a moth-eaten Santa suit stumbled around in front of a machine that belched out bubbles, distributing lollipops as punk bands played. On Christmas night, a bill of hardcore acts showcased an untethered flipside to the measured math-rock bands I’d seen previously.
Liu Fei donned a Santa hat (lost to the crowd after one song) to perform with Dr Liu and the Human Centipede, limbering up before delivering Slipknot-worthy bellows. Doomy hardcore types LaiSee incited a bobbing mosh pit and the Diders delivered their latest set of unpolished, drink-saturated bludgeon-punk. After their show, singer Cookie careened through the crowd, spraying a beer can and dousing everyone around him.
"We’ve played here 200 times," Cookie says. "Seven times so far this month. The biggest show we played here was our 100th performance. After three songs I set off a smoke bomb that spread through the whole place. Liu Fei stopped us playing and shifted everybody out, but it was fun. We’ve played here naked, too. Well, our drummer wore underwear.
"This place is so important," he adds. "There are few places in Beijing for young people like us to have fun in. If it didn’t exist, where would we go? Nightclubs? You can hardly enjoy the music there, or talk. Rock music can change history and Beijing need such places, like Tokyo and other big cities have. If School didn’t exist, young people would go crazy."
"Everything about School is right," says ZO, singer of Hedgehog and the man credited as the first musician to perform a stage dive at School (impressive, considering there is no real stage). "The owner plays in a punk band so he makes it feel right. You just get this feeling when you walk in the bar."
It’s testament to School’s importance that the place is thriving in a potentially tough environment. As authorities crack down on youth-attended events and rent rises sharply in Beijing, many rock venues have closed recently, such as the similarly grimy and intimate XP. Mao Livehouse, another long-standing Beijing favorite, is under severe threat of closure at the time of writing, allegedly due to rent issues.
Buttressed by its loyal community, School stands firm, and will open a new bar section soon. "Everyone is equal here, no matter how famous you are or how rich a customer you are," says Fei. "I hope School, as its name suggests, can provide more opportunities for new bands so they can grow. That’s where the spirit of School lies."
And with that, he opens another beer bottle.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on January 26, 2016
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