A new category tag

The harsher critics amongst you might have been inclined to object that my little drinking blog here hasn't really lived up to its name.

Where is the variety, where the international scope, where the restless wanderlust we had been led to expect?  they may carp.

Yes, indeed, quite so; it would be a reasonable complaint.

For the past eight-and-a-half years, I have rarely set foot outside of China. Indeed, I have rarely set foot outside of Beijing. Loyal aficionados of the blog will recognise that I have in fact seldom set foot outside of the 5 or 6 bars I find tolerable in this city, almost all of which are within a convenient staggering distance of my apartment.

And when I have ventured overseas - or delved back into the nostalgia archives - it has almost invariably been to reminisce about bars in the UK or the USA. Never anywhere terribly exotic.

Well, apart from a whistlestop visit to North Korea, a school trip to Crete 20 years ago (as a teacher, not a pupil!), a romantic trauma in Dublin, and an excursion to Jamaica with my friend The Mothman at the end of my undergraduate days, that is. Such has been the feeble limit of my booze-fuelled globetrotting on here thus far.

However, my recent splurge of posts about Malaysia got me to thinking that this might be a good time to create a new 'label' for posts about my drinking experiences other than in the UK, the US, and China: Around the world.

There'll probably be a few more Malaysia posts to be added to it over the coming week or so.  And I have some good stories about Fiji that I've somehow never yet got around to recording on here.  And then.... Hmm, and then I might have to go on a holiday again, to garner more material.

HBH 224

Old haunts abandoned,

But nothing's taken their place.

A change of habits.

Strange to tell, I've hardly been out at all since I got back from Malaysia at the start of last week.  Stranger yet, I haven't been missing it.  Have I really become so jaded with bar going (and gig going)??  Perhaps it is so.

Or maybe it's simply that I can't afford to go out at the moment?  No, it's not just that.  I really fear I may have taken a decisive step towards senility....

Mordor wins?

As of around the middle of this afternoon, Beijing time (I suppose around 6am or 7am GMT), Witopia - formerly the most robust and reliable of proxy services - got comprehensively squelched here. None of their numerous proxy server locations seem to be accessible from mainland China any more.  None of their websites can be reached for information updates without a proxy.  And even their ordinarily ultra-prompt e-mail helpline is now unresponsive. It would be nice to suppose that this Mother-Of-All-Internet-Crackdowns was evidence of the outbreak of significant opposition to the ludicrous regime we suffer under here, mass protests in several of the major cities, countrywide flour-bombing of Mao statues and so on. But no, it's probably just the Kafka Boys playing with some new toys again. Memo to the old farts in Zhongnanhai:  There's no better way to provoke rioting than to mess with people's Internet functionality. OK, allowing food and housing to become too expensive for people to afford - that's a better way.  But you're already working on that. And nepotism in the transfer of political power, that's never good either.  Whoah, you're on to that one as well! Denying people their Internet is next, huh? You really do want to get overthrown, don't you??

What I was doing two weeks ago today (6)

Drinking in Big Joe's Bar in Langkawi, Malaysia.

Well, no, I wasn't actually. I fantasise, I fib.

I had planned to head out to the island for a day-trip on my last day in Penang before I returned to KL for the weekend.

However.... the imagined romance of a sea journey rapidly dissipated. I found the waters of the Malacca Straits to be disappointingly grey and murky; too deep, I suppose, (and perhaps too polluted?) to give us the vibrant blues and turquoises I've seen elsewhere in the tropics. A perpetual heavy haze shrouded the mainland coastline and the numerous small islands thereabouts, rendering them all but invisible (and the coast doesn't have much appeal, anyway: it's heavily built up, just one huge oil terminal). Friends told me that Langkawi was becoming an increasingly expensive resort, appealing mainly to Malaysian yuppies - which didn't entice me! The two boats operating the daily ferry service to and from Penang are huge and swanky super-cruisers, not the sort of rusty old tramp steamers I'd hoped for. The journey was rather longer than I'd originally been led to believe, meaning that I'd have more time at sea than I would on the island. And the fare had recently been bumped up from 70 or 80 ringgit to a rather offputting 120 (I think; it might have been even more).

So, I gave up on the idea. Something else deferred to a possible future visit.

One of my main reasons for being curious to visit Langkawi (white sand beaches? pffftt!) had been reports of a bar there called Big Joe's. Subsequent researches online seem to indicate that its more formal name is the 1812 Bar, in the town of Cenang on the main island of Pulau Langkawi, and that the genial proprietor Joe is an Englishman. It's been heavily written up online, mostly very positively. I am definitely intrigued. The Lonely Planet Shoestring Guide To South-East Asia (a useful loan from The Choirboy) alleged that beers there were only 2 ringgit!! I was deeply sceptical. In fact, I didn't believe it for an instant: that information was either an egregious typo (they'd meant 12 ringgit, perhaps?), a mischievous practical joke, or.... maybe 20 years out of date!

The cheapest beer I found in a supermarket anywhere (330ml can or bottle) was about 6 or 7 ringgit, and major brands usually rather more. Thus, I would think that the wholesale price must be getting on for 2 ringgit (and that's on the mainland, not a small island - where there are presumably significant additional transport costs involved).  And I doubt if our Joe is enough of a philanthropist to sell his beer at or below cost.

But one day, yes, one day... I shall return to find out what he does sell them for.

Disappointed though I was to miss out on another island, another bar, and a bit of sea travel, the abandonment of this trip did allow me to enjoy a fairly mellow last day in picturesque Penang... and a very pleasant last evening in Restoran Kapitan and the Monaliza Café.

What I was doing two weeks ago today (5)

Some may think this blasphemy, but... I wasn't all that impressed with the food in Malaysia.

Yes, it's certainly a step up in quality from what we get at most hole-in-the-wall type places in China.  And basic grungy restaurant fare is pleasantly cheap (particularly welcome in a country where almost everything else is at least 1.5 to 2 times as expensive as in Beijing [and, god knows, Beijing is now 1.5 to 2 times as expensive as it was just a few years ago!!]).

But it's not a huge step up in quality. In cheap'n'cheerful places like this, you can't expect haute cuisine; it's going to be cheap cuts of meat, crudely chopped up with the bone fragments left in, and left to nurture bacteria on a barely warmed counter display for hours, or days.

Moreover, in KL at least, the great majority of the restaurants are Chinese. Did I want some Chinese food? I was constantly being asked by the front-of-house hucksters. Well, don't take this personally, but - NO, I was rather hoping for a change. The few Thai places I found seemed OK, but fairly unremarkable. There was one of the big Hindu festivals in progress, so a lot of the Indian restaurants seemed to be closed. And the local Malaysian nonya style cuisine - well, it seems to be a little bit limited in range, and heavily focused on seafood (which I'm allergic to); I have much the same problem with our own dear Café Sambal here in Beijing: once I've had the nonya chicken and the beef rendang (the latter strangely elusive down in Malaysia last month!), there's not an awful lot else for me in the way of entrées.

So.... my food experience in KL, while not terrible, had decidedly failed to live up to the high hopes friends had encouraged me to have for it.

But I found things rather better in Penang, where I spent the period between my two weekends in KL. In particular, I happened upon Restoran Kapitan, on Lebuh Chulia, just on the edge of the 'Little India' district in the old colonial settlement of Georgetown (which a couple of years or so ago became a UNESCO World Heritage site; its balconies and wooden shutters and ramshackle [poorly maintained, mouldering in the tropical damp, and slowly, inevitably losing the war against the termites] charm are a little reminiscent of the French Quarter in New Orleans). It seems like just one of the run-of-the-mill 'food court' type restaurants that abound in Malaysia ('indoors' but open to the air, the ground floor of a building stripped of walls and doors; and usually with several disparate serving counters touting different kinds of food in a frenzy of barely co-ordinated entrepreneurism); but it's a little larger and more professionally run than most of them. And, although it offers a fair range of Malaysian dishes as well, it's pretty solidly Indian - so I was finally able to satisfy a yen for Indian food that had been building steadily for some months, until it had become practically an obsession.

I was particularly intrigued by their 'naan special'. 7 or 8 ringgit seemed rather a lot for a naan bread, however scrumptious and fresh-from-the-oven made-to-order it might be. However, I learned that - as well as being freshly baked in just a few minutes and very, very scrumptious - they were also enormous. And the 'special' came with a selection of dips.... and half a tandoori chicken! That was VALUE. I went back the next day as well (twice): great food at knockdown prices - at last, the cheap nosh paradise I'd been dreaming of!

They don't sell beer, alas (although their freshly-made fruit lassis are gorgeous! I think I had at least one mango - in some form - every day I was in the country; god, I love fresh mangoes!). So, afterwards, I had to repair half a mile or so down the road to the unassuming Monaliza Café - my other great discovery of that week, where the beers are icy cold, and (at least, by Malaysian standards) reasonably cheap.

Guitar heroes

For those of you who just couldn't get enough of my performance photos from the Grand Final of the Global Battle of the Bands last week, here are a few more (well, a baker's dozen)....

[More photos of this event here and here.]

What I was doing two weeks ago today (4)

Drinking in a wine bar. (I know - quite a departure from my usual low-life habits!)

That Little Wine Bar, on Jln. Chow Thye, just off Jln. Burma in north central Penang.

Shameless plug - it's run by a couple of old friends of mine from Shanghai (well, Shanghai and Oxford - but that's really delving back into the mists of time!), and was a large part of the reason for my choosing to take a break down in Malaysia at the end of last month.

I'm not a 'wine bar' fan (I can't really drink the stuff any more: I quaffed too much of it in my youth and have become acutely 'sensitive' to the congeners in it); and my friends are exclusively about the wine here (they do a few fine brandies and brandy-based cocktails, but that's it; absolutely NO BEER, or whisky, or gin...). However, I did find it a rather charming spot - a beautifully renovated old colonial building, with a small terrace at the front, a cosy bar area with a few small tables on the ground floor, an impressively well-stocked - floor to ceiling racks! - little wine room, a wee courtyard out back, and a couple of private rooms upstairs.
Prices struck me as just a bit above what we'd pay in Beijing, but not at all unreasonable - particularly in comparison to the beer in Malaysia being at least 2 or 3 times as expensive as here in most bars and (where you can get it at all) around 8 times as expensive in bog-standard restaurants.

Tommes, the hubby, is the nicest German I've ever met (and I don't mean that as faint praise *) - and a superb chef. So, the food on offer, although it's quite a simple menu, is extremely well made and uses the finest ingredients.

Highly recommended, if you find yourself down in those parts.

I hope to go and check it out again myself - one day when I have a slightly fuller wallet, and a girlfriend....

[* If we were speaking of Austrians, it might be otherwise; but I've always had a soft spot for the Germans. Well, I'm a Kraut myself in the maternal line.]

What I was doing two weeks ago today (3)

Drinking in Coco Island, the sidewalk café/bar attached to the Blue Diamond Hotel in Penang.  I was tempted to put "Hotel" in scare quotes, since I'm not sure the place offers accommodation at all, and if it does, it can only be of the most rudimentary backpacker variety.

The Blue Diamond was boosted in the Lonely Planet as the premier spot for cheap, divey drinking on the island.  As so often, I think LP's recommendations have been outpaced by events.  It seemed rather cheerless to me, with unremarkable food, slow and surly service (the only place in Malaysia I found this), and very few punters.  It appears to have been comprehensively displaced in the affections of foreign tourists by other, friendlier bars a little further down the street - notably the Monaliza Café, where I subsequently hung out every night.

Still, I was tempted in to try it on my first night, in a spirit of experimentation.  A big bottle of Skol was only 14 or 15 ringgit, which didn't seem so bad after the depredations of Kuala Lumpur and The Reggae Bar.  I later noticed a discreet sign advertising a special promotion: a bucket of Skol (5 x 330ml bottles) for only 33 ringgit. That was rather more bang-for-the-buck (or burp-for-the-ringgit), but I've never liked small bottles, and didn't feel like committing myself to a two-hour stay there.  (And the offer may have been defunct; the staff were doing nothing to promote it.)  In any case, the 12.5 ringgit asking price for big bottles of Skol at Monaliza proved to be - very marginally - superior value even to that.

Live music was promised - or threatened - every night from 10pm.  I caught a little of it walking past a couple of days later: the worst band I've ever seen!  Just two guys, a guitarist and a keyboardist (a drum kit was permanently set up in the corner of the beer garden, but was not being utilised on this occasion), who appeared to know only about 4 or 5 chords between them - and not the same ones. It had that uncomfortable gawp-magnet quality of a car wreck, but it didn't hold my attention for long.

There's probably a very successful blog (or several!) to be made from 'Bum steers I got from the Lonely Planet'.  (LP nearly got me killed in Fiji.... but that's another story.)

What I was doing two weeks ago today (2)

Watching highlights of the weekend's football matches from the major European leagues in The Reggae Bar in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown.

Also, I suffered one of my embarrassing episodes of displacing the rogue cartilage in one of my knees, and having to adopt a kowtowing posture on the floor for several minutes in order to pop it back into place and so regain full use of my leg. (Luckily, it is a Muslim country.)

How is it that almost every country in the world has a 'Reggae Bar'? (I came across another one up the coast in Penang a day or two later, but that one didn't lure me in...)

Not that I'm complaining. Jamaicans tend to be a very hospitable people (not sure if the owners of this joint are actually Jamaican, although there was a Jamaican dude manning the DJ station the couple of nights I looked in here). And I like me some reggae. They were playing some very good stuff here, too: the classic sound of the '60s and '70s, with a judicious admixture of reggae cover versions I hadn't heard before (including a surprisingly agreeable take on China's abiding favourite, Hotel California); none of that ragga and dancehall rubbish from more recent decades.

Apart from that, though, the place is lacking in any great charm or character. There's a broad selection of quite decent food, it has the dark and grungy vibe that I tend to like, and the service is OK (actually, pretty stupendous in comparison to China: I love it that they don't take your glass away without asking, and don't ask if you want a refill until at least a few moments after you've finished... such simple things, but they make such a big difference!). But the pool table is dreadful.  And the place is oddly lacking in soul (I suspect it's because of its location in Backpacker Central: I'd guess at least 95% of its custom must be transient; there are few, if any, regulars). Worst of all, the beer prices really bring a tear to the eye. The cheapest offering is on dull-as-ditchwater Carlsberg, which is 10 ringgit per glass; but that's a very small glass (only 250ml, I think). Stella makes a very appealing (and more cost effective!) alternative at just 15 ringgit for a little 330ml bottle - which is about 35 rmb. And these are "happy hour" prices! A stingily brief "happy hour" of 6pm-8pm, at that!  Ordinarily, everything is 30% to 40% more expensive; 30%-40% more than we'd pay on a full tariff just about anywhere in Beijing. And this is supposed to be one of the cheapest bars in Kuala Lumpur?!  Ouch!

It is, however, the only game in town. Or very nearly so. Kuala Lumpur has very, very few bars (Penang was much better, but still not exactly teeming with drinking options). There are a handful of stupidly expensive places around the Bukit Bintang area and in the CBD near the Petronas Towers. But in downtown KL, The Reggae Bar is it. There are a few streetside restaurants that sell beer (usually at 14-16 ringgit for a 650ml bottle); but there are no other bars. Rather sad. Not my kind of place, KL.

The weekly bon mot

"You can taste baijiu when you're dead.  Especially if you've lived a bad life."

One of my lady friends suggested to me last month that perhaps it would be 'safe' - and a useful money-saving ploy - to switch to baijiu, the rotgut Chinese 'white spirit', after drinking a lot of whisky, because "you won't taste it when you're drunk".  Silly, silly girl!  At least she provoked a good reply from me.

A Tale of Two Bars

Two bars side by side on a quiet street in the middle of Georgetown, the old colonial settlement on the island of Penang, just off the north-west coast of Peninsular Malaysia.

On the left, Monaliza Café (sic), where the cheapest beer (a big bottle of Skol) is only 12.5 ringgit, and where the affable owner is usually sat out front watching the world go by or shooting the breeze with one or two of his regulars.

On the right, Hong Kong Bar, where the cheapest beers are 18 or 20 ringgit, and the owner skulks inside, grouchily resigned to going out of business.

Yes, Monaliza always has a healthy gaggle of customers in it.  Hong Kong Bar not one.  Nope, the place appeared to have absolutely zero custom throughout the four days I was there.  Go figure.

No prizes for guessing where I spent most of my time.

What I was doing two weeks ago today (1)

Watching Everton beat Chelsea on penalties in their FA Cup 4th Round Replay, in a Thai restaurant in Kuala Lumpur's nightlife district of Bukit Bintang.

I don't love the Bintang - it might once have been a quaint night food market, but it's now a seething tourist trap, and not at all cheap.  I found there were many better places to eat (well, cheaper) along the adjacent main road of Jln. Pudu - every third or fourth shop down there was an open-to-the-air 'food court' type of place (it's never very clear whether there is a unified management or several entirely independent vendors sharing the space in these places; and it's never clear who you're supposed to try and order from, or who you're supposed to pay; but it all gets worked out somehow in the end...) selling a range of Indian and/or nonya dishes for just a few ringgit. However, these places didn't sell beer (a predominantly Muslim country: alcohol is very restricted in its availability, and hence very expensive!); so, on my first couple of nights in town, I was forced to venture into the Bintang in search of a beer'n'footie option.

Luckily, that wasn't too arduous a search. Malaysia is football crazy: so, every bar (such few as there are), and almost every restaurant, and all these grungy food court places, and even a few street-food stalls have TVs showing European games - live! with English commentary! - on ESPN. They don't (usually) play obnoxious music over the top of it. They do play the commentary loud enough to hear. They do let you listen to the half-time, pre- and post-game analysis. It was such a pleasant change from the sports bar hell we suffer here in Beijing!

And I later discovered that - later in the evening, anyway - most of the food courts were quite happy for you to stop in to catch some of a game without buying anything (and even finishing off a road beer!)... although I'd order a lassi or a watermelon juice just to be polite.

Ah, I'm going to miss that about Malaysia - being able to watch sports anywhere, everywhere.  Why oh why is it so hard in Beijing??

Gee, Bob!

For that, indeed, is how we are encouraged to pronounce GBOB, the Global Battle of the Bands, the 2010 Grand Final of which was held in Kuala Lumpur last Saturday (and I was there).

My partner-in-drink (and World's No. 1 AIS  fan) Ruby already put up an excellent post over on BeijingDaze a few days ago about how it all went down, so you should go and check that out if you haven't done so already (Badr put up a slew of posts of his own immediately afterwards, so it got bumped way down the page, and was rather too easy to overlook).  I'm now going to add a few additional photos and some brief impressions of my own.

First off, I was very pleasantly surprised by the standard of the music. I had been fearing something like a crappy high school band competition where most of the entrants are pretty dire and you're desperately hanging in there hoping there might be one or two gems amidst all the dross; but in fact, just about all the bands on this occasion were pretty impressive technically (which, I gather, hasn't really been the case in recent years). Second, I was, on the whole, very impressed by the organisation. Although there were inevitably a few hitches and technical breakdowns here and there (most galling of which was the unexplained delay in starting - or even opening the venue doors - which left us scuffing our heels outside in KL's stifling early evening humidity for 40 minutes), but on the whole the event ran amazingly smoothly, and finished pretty much bang on schedule. With 17 bands following each other in quick succession, that was a superb achievement by the sound technicians. Third - nice venue, too: good space, great sound, friendly staff, not too unreasonable prices (I know Ruby bitched about this in her post, but it worked out to 23 rmb for a small beer or 35 rmb for a whisky & coke; you'd pay about the same at any of Beijing's music bars; and KL is, on the whole, nearly twice as expensive as Beijing for most things - especially for bars - so this wasn't at all bad).

On the other hand.... it was not the easiest place in the world to find. Had sharp-eyed Ruby not spotted the poster below hiding away behind a row of palm trees, we might have been vainly cruising the strip with our amused Indian taxi driver for another half an hour.  I'd actually done an advance recce the week before (via the city's monorail: the line runs down the middle of this street for quite a way). The host nightclub was supposed to be in a shopping mall at No. 20, so I was looking out of the train window for names or numbers of buildings: "No. 38, No. 32.... oh, this must be the right side of the street... soon, soon.... oops... the 20 block appears to be one huge building site. That can't be right, can it? No, no, I'm sure I must have missed it somehow. I guess it's next to that building site."  Er, no - it was indeed a building site: the KL Live venue (and the quaint Japanese restaurant on the floor below [aside: KL Live had been advertised as being on the 1st floor, but it was actually on the 2nd or 3rd - depending on whether you follow the British or American convention about these things]) was the only part of the complex that had been completed - and it was very hard to find the way in (Malaysia isn't good on signage!), dodging behind the blue metal screens and the scaffolding.  I suspect this awkwardness of access and near invisibility must have inhibited the turnout rather (although ultimately the crowd was just about right: nicely buzzy, but not uncomfortably dense).  It also nicely cranked up Ruby's anxieties about getting there on time.....

While musical ability was mostly at a high level, musical variety was not. Rubes, much more down with [post-1970s] musical trends than me, claimed to discern suggestions of "alt rock" and "garage punk" and a few other things amongst the entrants, but for me.... two thirds of them sounded very much the same: not quite Metal, perhaps, but definitely at the very heavy end of rock, and all very, very generic. This kind of thing is great fun to play (and guarantees you a fanbase amongst the entrenched subculture), but it's very difficult to play really well; and it's almost impossible to establish a distinctive sound for yourself within such a well-worn genre.  By the end of the evening, I was feeling that I had perhaps just seen 10 of the best instantly forgettable bands in the world.

Amongst these identikit rockers, I liked Thai band Luminasion best. Apart from our own dear AIS, I thought they were the best musicians of the night, and their singer had a lot of presence. Their guitarist was especially impressive, a classic shredder (apparently he's won some title as Thailand's best).  Unfortunately, he had a problem with his lead for a lengthy spell in the middle of their set. His buddy covered for him very well on the guitar-piano (is that what it's called? a keyboard slung on a shoulder-strap, with a stubby handle on the left-hand end like a kind of abbreviated guitar neck, with a touch-sensitive pad on it which allows the player to produce bend and slide effects - I've never seen one before), but I wonder if this unfortunate hiccup cost them a place amongst the prize-winners. It shouldn't have: I can't see how on earth they weren't named amongst the top 3 or 4, at least. Being on first may have worked against them a bit as well; but the judging was, erm, eccentric, to say the least (more on that at the end).

Second up were Aussie youngsters, The Tillegra Damned. I'm afraid I didn't manage to get any decent pictures of them.  They were a dauntingly youthful crew, with bags of energy; and also the least experienced band in the competition, having only played together in public for the first time at their local GBOB heat last summer (I had thought the ethos of this competition was supposed to be to foster 'new' bands - but there doesn't seem to be anything in the rules about this [I would have expected perhaps a requirement that their first public performance should have been not more than 2 years before the closing date for entries], but some of the contestants have been knocking around for years!). Their lead singer was very athletic, but more of a yeller than a singer. And their only notable gimmick was adding a classically trained keyboardist to the mix - but this just didn't gel for me: his little introductory bits didn't seem at all integrated with the rest of the songs (although there may have been a sound issue here; I'm assured he was playing - and doing some backing vocals - almost throughout, but you just couldn't hear him). Ruby loved their demos she'd heard, but she's an honorary Aussie; I'm afraid their live show didn't really do anything for me.

Third on the bill were Beijing's finest, The Amazing Insurance Salesmen.  They put on a great show (watch the official video of one half of it here), but I always feared this was not really their sort of competition.  In terms of pure musicianship, they were clearly in a different class to almost everyone else, but... they're just not really a very 'commercial' sort of band: a bit too thinky, rather than the sort of barnstorming rock-the-crowd outfit that a 'battle of the bands' contest tends to favour.  I think it may have been a tactical error to go with a conventional set choice of doing two short songs - just like everyone else; if they'd just soloed their arses off for 8 minutes (which they typically do in a full set, closing their performance with an extended improvisation on Duke Ellington's Caravan), the difference in class would have been more apparent - even if they still weren't the kind of thing the judges were looking for on the night.  I also think their compact line-up was a bit of a problem for them.  The stage was huge - one of the biggest I've ever seen outside of a stadium gig.  Almost every other band had at least 5 or 6 members (one - I can't remember which it was now - had three guitarists).  It was almost impossible for a trio to fill that space.  Never mind - it was great to see the lads play overseas for the first time; and, with a bit of luck, this may pave the way for one or two tours for them later this year.  (And I gather they received a lot of flattering commendations from the other musicians taking part, which should more than compensate for any unfortunate ego-deflation the judges inflicted on them.)

Ruby had got hold of a Chinese flag to drape over the safety fence at the front...

Next on were ExNN (Ex Nihilo Nihil - a bit of Latin for you!) from Moldova, a bit more mellow and folky than anything else on offer that night, and distinguished by their very sexy frontwoman Gala in a stunning gypsy outfit (Malaysian boys behind me were yelling "We LOVE you!!" within seconds of her taking the stage).  Unfortunately, their music left very little impression.  I fear they may again have been the victim of set-up problems: from the the post-gig interview (and their demos, too, I gather) it would seem she has a really gorgeous voice, but it just wasn't coming across very powerfully during this set.

Romania's White Walls were more generic rockers.  Their singer was much better than most, but he didn't have a very commanding stage presence (most of the time he just walked round and round in tight little circles - which soon got kind of irritating). The judges - astoundingly - placed them amongst the runners-up. They wouldn't have made my Top 10.

Indonesian band Strangers just didn't look the part: they all turned up wearing pullovers and cardigans!  I hope it's not just that that turned me against them, but I felt their performance was kind of insipid as well.

Belgian hard-rockers Experienced (and they are: they've been together 8 years or something) were much livelier. I'm told they overran their allotted 8 minutes, and may have been severely penalised for that (although I didn't notice: it didn't feel as if they'd played significantly longer than anyone else). They also swore quite a lot (all the performers had been asked not to swear, nor to reveal too much naked flesh or show off their tats excessively, in deference to the prudish sensibilities of the predominantly Muslim host nation), and there was a rumour that marks might be deducted for this as well (but if that's so, something very funny was going on with the judging standards: last band up, Shenaniganz from Germany, swore almost continuously and were still placed 3rd). Their second number, the catchy singalong Bad Girls Burn In Hell (I can just imagine Kiss doing this one!), really got the crowd on their side; and - although there wasn't anything very distinctive about them - I can't understand how they didn't make the top 4 or 5.  Something going wrong around here...

And then.... well, then, we had Nope from Morocco, who were (along with Tillegra Damned and Shenaniganz) the babies of the competition, barely out of their teens. They were also the least categorisable act of this - or any other - night.  They had two vocalists: one a very slight and effeminate figure carrying a bullwhip and shrouded in a Red Riding Hood cowl; the other very buff yet still strangely feminine, wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, a man-skirt... and a single ice-hockey glove, with which he enacted a series of cat-like stretching and clawing gestures. The pair, both wearing harlequin masks, put on an elaborate pantomime of... something-or-other (fraught with sexual tension, but no clear narrative emerged).... while spitting out ultra-high-speed vocals in a sort of rap style (I couldn't even make out the language: a mixture of French and Arabic, with maybe just a little bit of English thrown in, I suspect).  It was strange, creepy, but utterly mesmerising.  They were a tight band, too, and their song structure and musical style was quite unique. They were big favourites with most of the crowd, and would have been in my top 2 or 3; even the judges - in perhaps their one populist gesture of the night - gave them a nod as fifth runners-up. I believe one of the criteria - perhaps the overriding one - was something like "potential to gain international recognition"; and these lads, fantastic though their live show is, are probably never going to find a mainstream audience outside of North Africa (and perhaps not even there).

There had been a bit of buzz about The River Raid from Brazil. I'd been hoping they might marry some rock'n'roll energy with the luscious rhythms of their native samba, channel a little Carlos Santana for us... but no, they were just another cookie-cutter hard rock band. And after the acid-trip vaudeville of Nope, they fell completely flat.

The UK's Scarletta were the nul points entry of the night: a fairly ho-hum band fronted by a Lady Ga-Ga wannabe with a screechy voice and a ridiculous Alice-In-Wonderland costume (and wearing teetering platform shoes which rendered her almost utterly immobile). I decided to spare my camera battery - and my eardrums - for a few minutes.

Sonsteek from South Africa seemed to generate a very warm response from the crowd (though perhaps they were just grateful that Scarletta was finished).  They had three USPs: they had a pair of [ginger!] identical twins on guitar (one of whom was very Angus Young in his mannerisms, though not, alas, in his sound); they sang in Afrikaans (ever heard that before? me neither); and they had a lead singer who looked as if he worked in an IT department or a comic book store. Apart from that... the cookie-cutter again. The judges placed them amongst the runners-up; I couldn't help thinking that this was tokenism ("Oh, only one entry from Africa? We'd better give them something, to encourage more interest from that continent next year. And they didn't sing in English - how brave!"  Yes, yes, quite so; just not a very interesting band.).

The Malaysian champions Bombers naturally got a huge lift from the home crowd, but.... for me, they didn't do anything with that. They whipped the excitement to a peak while the previous band Sonsteek were still doing their post-gig interview at the side of the stage (not the best manners!), and it seemed to ebb away a little during the set itself. I felt that, as with AIS, they had a little bit of a problem filling the stage; although there were quite a few of them, they were tiny guys (well, apart from their elephantine drummer) and they seemed a bit lost in the space. They were a bit poppier than most of the other acts, which didn't endear them to me. And many people seemed to think the lead singer's brief breakdancing interlude was the highlight of the show.... which didn't endear them to me. Next!

Well, I didn't manage to get a picture of Magua from the Ukraine. They were one of the few bands to have a really distinctive approach and sound, but it didn't work for me. The use of a screeching harmonica seemed promising, but their tune-up sounded better than the set itself - and their songs seemed to lurch schizophrenically between psychedelic blues rock and throbbing metal... without ever really going anywhere.

I joked the other week that Voodoo Vanity from Norway were probably going to be corpulent and whiskery dirge metal rockers (just because every other band I've ever seen from Norway has been....), but in fact they were all young, slim, and clean-shaven.... and disturbingly effeminate, with their stage make-up transporting us back to the early '70s heyday of glam rock. A tight band, and the most outright fun of the night: it was mystifying that they didn't make it into the judges' top 5 or 6.

The bizarrely named Salvador from Russia (or was it vice versa?? Either way, no explanation was offered...) were on next. Maybe I was getting a little weary by this point - but they just seemed like yet another run-of-the-mill heavy rock band being angry about something I couldn't understand; their only point of interest was the fact that their frontman played an amplified acoustic guitar; I'm afraid they lost my attention early on. The judges, of course, rated them top runners-up!

At this point, my camera battery gave out on me.  The last two bands were Dubtonic Kru from Jamaica and the (much derided for their name) Shenaniganz from Germany.  The Dubtonics had an excellent drummer, but otherwise seemed like the kind of house band that you might find at any decent club or bar in Montego Bay. Neither of their singers impressed that strongly, and their bongo player was... well, I can play the bongos better than that (it would appear that, like all good rasta men, they had been partaking heavily of the sacrament before they went on). Still, it was nice to get back to the 'roots' sound of the 1970s rather than all this hip-hop and dance music flavoured garbage we've had to endure since. And it made for a mellow round-out to an evening of mostly fairly indistinguishable hard rock.

Shenaniganz, on last, were a very pleasant surprise - yes, more cookie-cutter hard rock, but one of the better exponents of the style we heard that night; and at least they weren't hip-hoppers or a boy band, as their name had threatened they might be. They were, however, likely lady-pleasers: good-looking, and very, very young - only just into their twenties. A good, tight unit, though; they've been playing together since they were in high school 5 or 6 years ago. Boy, did they tear up that memo about the no swearing! They were scattering the f-bombs around freely throughout their 8 minutes on stage, including one in the title - and chorus - of their second song. One might have expected that to count against them.

But no, the judges made them second runners-up.  And the I've-heard-better-reggae-bands-than-that-busking-on-Clapham-Common Dubtonic Kru were the winners. Well, good luck to them. They seem like a nice bunch of fellas, and they can play a bit... and I suppose reggae is due for a bit of a comeback in the mainstream, after a decade of dormancy (I gather it is suddenly becoming very popular again in America lately; so perhaps the judges were shrewdly calculating that they had the best commercial potential in the current climate). But really - WTF?? That announcement was met with stupefied silence by the audience; I don't think many people there would have placed them in the top 10, let alone the top 5. You can't help but feel that - whether or not the organisers are openly conniving at this - strategic factors have some influence on the decision-making: the GBOB brand would like to establish more of a presence in the Americas and Eastern Europe... so, we get awards for Russia, Romania, and Jamaica. Then again, maybe it was just fatigue: the judges - all Scandinavian, all in their 50s or 60s - looked catatonic with boredom throughout most of the show.... and then awarded the top 3 places to the last three bands to go on. Hmm, you think maybe they just couldn't remember any further back??

Never mind. Apart from the dodgy judging, and the lack of deserved recognition for AIS and a few others, it was a very entertaining night. I might even get tempted to head out to Casablanca for next year's Final....

[More photos of this event here and here.]

HBH 223

Beer tastes colder, smoother,

In hot sun, after a long day.

Drinking in the tropics.

I've given up counting....  Sue me.

New Picks of the Month

Two more picks from three years ago this month....

From Froogville, I choose Roll Call - a 'classic' post illustrating the perverse inventiveness of Chinese students in choosing 'English names' for themselves (all examples completely genuine, I promise).

And on Barstool Blues, I go for A little taste of Hell - an unfortunate bar experience which reminds me most powerfully that I must never allow myself to become a middle-aged drunk.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for February

Ah, finally I've achieved the sort of scaling down of output that I've long professed to aim for in my blogging habits.  But February is a very short month.  And I was out of town for the last 10 days of it.  So, we shouldn't get too carried away just yet.  Given that this was, in effect, only about 65% of a 'normal' blogging month for me, I suppose my rate of production was about as profuse as ever.  Oh well.

Anyway....

There were 37 posts and just over 10,000 words on Froogville.

There were 27 posts and nearly 7,000 words on Barstool Blues.

Oddly enough, the visitor stats held up remarkably well over the past week or so that I was away (and not posting), with 50-60 'unique visitors' daily on The Barstool and over 100 each day on Froogville. Were people just checking in to see if I was back yet, I wonder?? If absence makes the blog reader more curious, perhaps I should give up writing new posts altogether; maybe then I'd suddenly attract a vast readership to my extensive archives... (Well, that's always been my 'master plan'; but I think I have a year or two of wittering left in me yet.)

Not much news this month, other than that I appear to have picked up new 'regulars' in Canada (for Froogville) and Australia (for The Barstool - possibly my bar owner mate, JK), and have added Uganda, Kenya, and The Bahamas to the list of countries who've looked in just the once.

I wonder what the mad month of March will bring us?

Dampened spirits

Be careful what you wish for!

Over on Froogville, I noted just this morning how sorely in need of some rain we were (after a 6-month dry spell in Beijing!), and how welcome it would be.  But, you see, I was looking forward to the regular little spell of 'April showers' we usually get here in another week or so; I hadn't been anticipating that it would start pissing down almost immediately, ruining my weekend - on a Friday evening in the wet, our taxi availability plummets from scanty to just about non-existent!!

I haven't been to much music this past month, or indeed this year, so - despite falling so heavily out of love with 2 Kolegas over the last 18 months - I had been planning to head out there tonight to hear Ricky Sixx doing his ebullient 80s Hair Metal tribute show (with rumoured support from Jacky Danny, one of the best new bands to emerge on the scene lately).  But then I heard gossip that the even better Almost Famous, my favourite recent discovery, might be playing at What Bar - and that's much less hassle for me to get to.

Alas, in current conditions - it's not only pizzling with rain, but arse-freezing cold - I don't think I can stir my stumps even to check out Gulou 121 or Jiangjinjiu, which are but a few minutes' walk away from me.  Oh dear, another music-less weekend.....

Springs eternal....

Yes, indeed, I usually am hoping Guinness - but most of the time I am disappointed. The black velvet isn't widely available in these parts; and, when it is, it's almost always dauntingly expensive.

[Can you guess where I was yet?? Yes, MALAYSIA - the "home of Guinness" in Southeast Asia. It's about the only country in this region advanced enough to be accorded some trust on matters like quality control and respect for IP, so for a long time now Guinness - and a number of other European brewers (surprisingly enough, Skol - an unremarkable and even derided brand back home in the UK, but a completely different animal down there: clean-tasting and unexpectedly strong in alcohol - is the most appealing of the several familiar names available there) - has established one of its largest overseas production facilities there, supplying most of Asia Pacific. Unfortunately, only the bottled stuff was on offer, not draught; and, despite proximity to the factory, it was no cheaper - in fact, a smidge more expensive - than it is here in Beijing, so I only indulged the once.

Mr Ho Ping's café is in Penang.]

Now, I REALLY have seen everything

I have found a bar where Tsingtao is more expensive than Guinness.

Well, not quite in the headline price: the Guinness (the stuff imported from Malaysia, 330ml bottles) was being advertised at 48 HKD, whereas the Tsingtao was a mere 45.  However, this was draught, which around here is rarely or never a superior product to the bottled variety; and it was being served in tiny 250ml glasses.  So, overall, significantly more expensive than the Guinness.  WTF?????

OK, yes, this was a restaurant rather than a bar.  And it was in Hong Kong, probably the most expensive city in China (although Shanghai is certainly running it close).  And it was at the airport, and airside.

Even so, those prices are monstrous - well beyond what you'd be asked anywhere but the most outrageously up-itself cocktail bar or nightclub here.  I tell you, I nearly passed out with shock.

And thirsty though I was, I did not partake.  It didn't look like anyone else was either.  Although this area of the airport was pretty busy, and it was lunchtime, there were only a handful of diners in there - and none of them was drinking anything.  Way to price yourself out of business, guys!!

[By contrast, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the restaurants airside at Beijing's new Terminal 3 offers Tsingtao - and the rather better Yanjing - in 330ml stubbies for just 10 rmb.]