When you were young, and your heart was an open book
I took part in the 2009 West Lake Music Festival as a guitar-player in ‘Zuo Bin & band’ on Thursday, May 28th. It was very cool when we performing and the audience were all excited.
We played 5 original songs and covered the brilliant Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (G N’ R version) in the end. For some reason the voice of my 2nd solo sounds not right, but it’s still OK, I think.
There are lots of videos recorded by Sohu.com have been put on the internet and I uploaded one onto the YouTube:
Last Thursday I performed as the guitar player in Zuo Bin & band in “Pepsi Rock Heroes Competition” runned by Menllo.com. The competition was placed in Star Live, which is the biggest live house in Beijing and it was the place when Testament performed in China. 40 bands performed in the contest and it was really high. The styles of each band were various with each other, like metal, pop, folk, hard rock, post punk, low fi, even hip-hop.
We played 2 songs, ‘What can I do’ and ‘Perfect World’. ‘What can I do’ is a fair-sounding love song, like Brian Adams’ style and ‘Perfect World’ is a heavy, riffs-and-howling-and-solos rock song. When we were performing the audience were jumping and screaming, it was very nice.
This is a video recorded our performing the song ‘What can I do’. Which funny is in the video I was wearing a leather jacket while the singer was wearing a little T-shirt. I remember it was pretty chilly that day… But I took it off when I playing the next-and-heavier one.
Smartkin, the band in which I playing guitar, was invited by whrock.com to perform in “Wuhan Rock Festival 2008″ during the National days. You know that’s pretty nice cause the 4 members of Smartkin are all from Wuhan. That means we can get free tickets to go back to hometown and enjoy the holiday.
However, it was a nightmare when we taking all the bags, notebook, effectors and guitars from Beijing to Wuhan by train! I finished MAO by Ross Terrill when I had nothing to do in the carriage.
Nonetheless, the performance was wonderful. We met lots of old friends, and Gao (he’s the singer of my former band, a talent photographer) took tons of photos for us.
You can see those photos in my Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/messbook/sets/72157611945464246/
The band Today threw a celebration concert for releasing their first album, ‘Feeling in A Garden’. For the purpose of performing perfectly, the band had 8 members this time (5 guest-musicians, so luxury), including 2 wooden guitar players, 1 keyboard player and a chorus girl. I played the electric guitar part.
Today is a Indie-Pop rock band which prefers a somewhat old-school style. The 2 song writers of the band (Lau and Wei) are both from 2 famous bands in China – Hopscotch and Dada. They have a workroom called “the Bridge Studio” so writing and recording songs are very convenient. Yanyan the singer is a very funny girl whose voice is pretty like Faye Wong, the female superstar in China.
Well, as Lau and Wei wished, the concert was perfect. Over 300 audience came to MAO Live house even it was not weekend. The space was crowded, we played wonderfully, and there were lots of people bought the CD after the concert (I got a CD for free, and the serial number is 0906, it’s my birthday number).
Here’s a live video on YouTube:
Mess is a designer and a writer/translator in Graphic/UI/Flash fields. Also he plays guitars in several Rock N’ Roll bands in spare time.
He is now living in Beijing, China.
