China, unlike glass and reputation, is hard to crack

You can dance with their daughter, but there’s an iron chastity belt downstairs with the key at the bottom of a tank of electric eels. You may submerge your head and fight the eels with your teeth to retrieve the key. Shanghai is a very romantic city.

Waiting at the airport, and huddled in a sleepy drunken group, the nineties pop stars waited in fear for over two hours as their work visas were processed by the tour manager and Chinese officials. Airport staff in green workers uniforms, complete with the little red star on the hat, glided by eating with chop sticks from steaming bowls of noodles. In the public washrooms, a rusty tin can on the back of the toilet held a burning joss stick. That ever-present institutional mint green paint and bad fluorescent lighting made it obvious that you were in communist China. In fact, this was one of the first western bands to be invited. Some Canadian promoter had done the unimaginable and opened the door for Western acts there in 1996. The West came roaring in like savages. Again.

At the Portman Shangri-La, it would arrive and from there it would plan the attack. Shanghai is now an overwhelming forest of shiny skyscrapers. But just 12 years ago, the Portman hotel was one of the few tall, decadent buildings; a luxury hotel, regarded by the locals with awe and disgust.

From the 20th floor, you could see the whole city rising up and being built over. Cranes and, unbelievably, bamboo scaffolding were just beginning to churn out glass and steel towers that the West had taken for granted for decades.

Beside the hotel was a bar (run by more Canadians) called the American Bar; kind of ordinary with spicy wings and a big screen TV. We tumbled in and drank more in the hope of getting a good sleep at night and reversing our body clocks. It doesn’t work: one just finds the power to drink endlessly, then has a broken sleep, then the hangover is a nightmare set among tanks of eels and chickens being plucked. You would expect a coffee shop, but there’s no English printed or spoken anywhere. Seething chaos on bikes.

The Chinese eat everything. They laugh and slap you on the back and push more shots of snake bile into your hand. The roof leaks into a bowl of shiny black winkles, and there is good cheer and dangerous merriment. More wild than their Japanese enemies offshore. They talk with their hands like Italians. Even the cripples must work and smile, delivering refrigerators on hand-pedalled bicycles. I promised I’d return to live in it, but I’m weak now. Wouldn’t take LSD anymore in middle age either. Thanks anyway.

The problem began when the promoter told the pop stars that before we received the final go-ahead from the Ministry of Culture to perform at a sold-out concert in two days, they would like to see a video. In the days before the internet could deliver that, a tape had to be flown from North America at great cost. It would be last minute. Until permission was given, the authorities sent men with newspapers and sunglasses to follow us and make sure we didn’t burst into songs of rebellion.

If we could crack the Chinese market, we’d be billionaires! If we could get them all smoking cigarettes and opium, they could fund our old boys’ club for generations! If only. But the Chinese won’t fall for that again, and they’ll make it much more difficult now. Now they have plenty of bloodthirsty businessmen of their own to capitalise on the party. Warner Bros. are pulling out! See the panic hit whitey in the wallet!

The old man was no hustler. Slow as a snail. I asked him directions and was surprised by his English. He had worked as an interpreter for a bank for 30 years and was still dirt poor. If I bought him dinner, he’d take me wherever I wanted to go. He ordered a simple and delicious meal, I demanded ballroom dancing, he took me to his regular hang-out and I danced with old Chinese women to a sedated, synthetic sounding swing band. We talked of the cultural revolution, and Madame Butterfly. He was happy that they were allowed to play the old music again. I returned to the American Bar for one more drink with the crew. The place was an animal house. Our whole entourage was snot-faced. The owner was filling up trays of shots on the house. The men with newspapers and shades were watching with pained expression.

I was told the video tape had arrived that evening. The ministry of culture watched it. Unfortunately, some fool had given them the wrong video: a farcical thing, banned by MTV, which had cost fifty grand US, starring the lead from the movie Kids, and featuring scenes of his teeth being pulled out with pliers. With a simple shake of the head, the Chinese decided we were a threat to their enormous population and had cancelled the concert. I raised the tiger urine to my lips and leapt from the balcony on to the dancefloor, a five-metre drop. Then I saw her.

She came down a stairway and we stared at each other. She spoke first: “Where have you been?” I said: “I’m sorry I’m late”. I took her in my arms and knew she was perfect. She was from Frisco. She was a journalist, had a Sigourney Weaver toughness and drank like a soldier. We kissed vulgarly in a barber chair at the bar. She tilted the chair back and said something in Cantonese to the bartender. He mixed a drink in my mouth. She drank it. Then we reversed positions. Shanghai is a very romantic place. This continued until she lurched aggressively into a cab, leaving me with an illegible phone number. My heart has been suspended ever since. At five in the morning, the boulevard outside the towering hotel fills up with old couples who quietly do tai chi and dance to swing music and schmaltz. It’s surreal. I watched for a while and cried uncontrollably until one of the crew put me to bed, where I lay laughing until unconsciousness. In the press scrum which I woke up to, we were instructed to say that there had never been a concert to play. Orwellian. No concert. Don’t attempt to explain why. “So, you are excited to play big concert in Shanghai tonight?” “There is no concert.” The reporters stared blankly, then moved on to other questions, understanding immediately what had happened. Barely even a knowing look was looked. Fear. Government. Prison.

The truly adventurous go to China and survive. A complete reverse polarity. It’s a wild frontier. The characters in the American Bar were cast in iron. A Texan complete with hat and loud mouth. What the hell was he doing in China? Pig hooves. He bought all the hooves to make film out of them. Millionaire in three years. Nice guy, actually. The artists who were dodging the system and trying to do something political, the journalists with the sense of a mosquito flying towards a major artery, and the people running or hiding from something, all had courage to move to a madhouse where the signs and sounds are indecipherable. What it takes to move from Ipswich to Hackney versus what it takes to move from Smallville to Big Chinatown.

The Chinese want a lot from the West now, but on their own terms. Control. The grinning face with the gun poking in the ribs. As much as the Olympics opened them up, they shut the ugly in the dungeons. The hypocrisy of advertising reaches new lows with a pretty girl lip-syncing, while the ugly girl sings from her cage. They learned how to do it from America. They will do it better. I’m too weak and hungover now to do anything but watch. Decadent Westerner.

Bambino di Davidos