Beating the odds with Wu Bai

In the early 1990s, members of Zavolta's Magic band invited Wu Bai to tag along for a series of gigs.

"He still had his band going on at the time. He tagged along and we'd just do cover songs, Play That Funky Music, old pop that we liked to play. Every time we played at a club it would go belly up a week or two after. We felt we were cursed or something," Zavolta said.

The band's break came when Wu Bai worked on the soundtrack of Hsu Hsiao-ming's (徐小明) film Dust of Angels (天幻城市, 1992).

"We worked with him on that," Zavolta said. "The director liked Wu Bai's music and would come to our shows. He'd call his friends and before we knew it there'd be 500 people at the door."

As Wu Bai got off the ground, Bobby Chen (陳昇), Taiwan's wild man of pop, invited the band to go with him to Beijing.

Back in Taiwan the band built its own studio in Tienmu,

finishing construction within a couple of weeks.

"One of the lighting guys put a light too near the insulation and the whole thing went up,"

Zavolta said. "All our tapes and machines were burned up. My drums were covered in a

charcoal film. We borrowed equipment from friends and that's when we did our biggest selling album."

A series of record deals soon followed.

"We were with Magic Stone, a subsidiary of Rock Records. We still receive royalties from that. Now we are under our own label, Moonlight Records, which we set up last year. We are also with Avex."

Now China Blue and Wu Bai have a plush studio in Hsintien.

Political considerations intervened in the band's rise to stardom.

"We did The End of Love. The mainland started to get pissed off because we were playing for Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) when he was mayor of Taipei, doing his rallies and picking up big bucks... . China wouldn't let us go over and play, which pissed us off. We moved on, kissed their asses, and they let us back in."

After a string of hits, playing to packed concert stadiums in the US, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, which Zavolta describes as "better than sex," the band changed direction with Two Faced Man, adding an electronica layer to their sound.

"We listened to a lot of The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy," Zavolta said. "It's a bit repetitive, but it's groovy."

Zavolta, along with China Blue bandmates Da Mao (大貓), and Xiao Zhu (小朱) teamed up with Chen's guitarist to form a new group, ABS, which made it's debut in Taipei in November, 2005. At the band's gig on April 15 he

proposed to his girlfriend on stage at The Wall. She accepted.

"I can't sit around and wait for Wu Bai, for the next gig, this gig or that gig," Zavolta said. "We used to do shows every weekend.

"We're not as famous anymore. The new stuff is taking over, we are like the old cats now, we're the forefathers. A lot of young cats call me teacher [in Chinese], they love watching us play. ... We have a name for ourselves and we have a sound that no one can emulate. We are starting recording on our new album soon. And that should bring us back up again."