Wu Wei (吳維) is not your average punk rocker. For a start, he was one of China’s first-ever punks, and formed the band he still fronts — SMZB (生命之餅) — in the mid-1990s when the genre was only just being discovered there. For another thing, he has had to deal with things rather more challenging than most Western punk bands face: tapped phone lines, curtailed festival sets and general confusion from the public as to what the hell the racket he is making on stage is all about.
Being a punk in China can be a risky experience, but it is a thrilling one too, Wu Wei said at the bar he runs, Wuhan Prison.
“I started SMZB in 1996, after hearing the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Clash,” he says. “I felt like I had finally found a way to express myself. Before punk, I had listened to other types of rock — the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Doors and Pink Floyd. But when I heard punk, I realized that this was the music for me.”
Wu Wei was studying the bass in Beijing’s Midi school when he first came across punk and, along with Zhu Ning (朱寧), moved to Wuhan to form SMZB. Given that there were no other punk bands in Wuhan (and only a couple of others in China full-stop), audience reaction was a mixture of bafflement and sheer energy.
“They were crazy, pogo-ing — we tapped into something that let people express themselves,” he says.
SMZB’s songs deal with “life, the city, and society,” but their more political maneuvers — for instance, Wu Wei is a signatory of Charter 08, the human rights manifesto that led to its key author Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) receiving the Nobel prize and also a lengthy jail sentence — have caused the band difficulties.
“We were trouble-makers, so we would be banned by the big music festivals in China,” he says. “Of course, the government didn’t like it either. Even now, I have two cellphones — one is more private, because the other one was being monitored from 2008 by people from the government. The same goes for my Internet account.”
Three years ago, the band were invited to play 10 songs at a festival in Nanjing. As the day of the show approached, they noticed that their set was being increasingly curtailed until they were left with only five specific songs that they were allowed to play.
“We weren’t happy about that, so we insisted on playing a sixth song,” Wu Wei says. “Our manager tried to stop us, but we insisted and finished the song. Afterwards, our manager told us that he had been urged to stop us playing by a government official, and when he failed, the government official slapped him.”
Wu Wei is proud that Wuhan is regarded as a punk city and believes the city’s music stands out from that of China’s other punk hub, Beijing.
“The audience feel that our lyrics and our work is more sophisticated, deeper. Some call me a punk thinker,” he says, smiling.
It took a few years playing with SMZB before other punk bands in Wuhan began forming, and Wu Wei says there was a lull in the scene until relatively recently, when new groups such as Sharp Pills and Loafer started making waves there.
Has this revitalized scene emerged as a result of, or despite, China’s recent, rapid economic expansion?
“It’s a big question,” Wu Wei says. “The influence of the economy is in everything, but in punk rock music and music in general, not so much. Or at least not in a meaningful way. Sometimes it can even be in a negative way. Many people have lost their ability to think independently; the only thing they think about is getting more money.”
There is a picture of Shane MacGowan on the walls of Wu Wei’s delightfully scruffy bar. Wu Wei is a big Pogues fan and what is more, SMZB’s recent releases have been incorporating the Irish sound — tin whistles, fiddles, the lot. A Chinese punk band with a decidedly Irish flavor? Only on this country’s brave new musical frontier would such a thing seem plausible.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not