Shanghai, China
It's almost twelve hours later that we touch down at Pudong airport in Shanghai. Sleep has eluded all three of us but as rough as we feel, we're nothing compared to the girl sat at the other end of my row.
As we taxi to the gate she stands up and proceeds to vomit everywhere. The seats, the floor, her hair and fellow passengers all get sprayed, but fortunately she has her back to me so I avoid the splashback.
Her devoted, but deeply embarrassed boyfriend, grabs blankets to mop everything down and then tries to cover the evidence as all around try not to gag. We can't get off the plane fast enough!!
Shanghai airport is shiny and new and not unlike a super-sized Stansted. It's also remarkably efficient with our bags collected and us whisked through immigration in double-quick time. Considering the nervousness we've had about our visas it seems it's much faster to enter the Forbidden Country than it is to get into the Land of the Free.
Once we exit customs into arrivals we're greeted by two Chinese chaps holding up a big sign marked with the words Metal Hammer. So much for being discreet, our cover has just been royally blown.
Tone from Blackstar Entertainment is our appointed rep, and reassures us all will be fine. "Everyone on tourist visa! All good. Just promotion." he says. "No problems!". I ask who's headlining tomorrow's festival. "Mercury Rev," he sighs despondently. "But they not come no more". Oh, why's that? "Couldn't get work visa". Hmmmm. Best move on.
"You want Burger King?" he asks brightly. No, it's fine, let's just get straight to the hotel.
"But we wait for bus. You want Burger King?" Alex and John shake their heads and go out for a cigarette. I say I'll have a diet coke and walk with him past the slightly odd BK signs in Chinese, and as I do my blackberry pings to tell me I have a new Facebook message.
"Oh, I didn't think Facebook was allowed in China," I say and immediately he looks incredulous.
"You have Facebook?!?! No, no, is banned. No Facebook here!!"
Well mine seems to be working, I say... just as it freezes and splutters to a halt. Intermittently it connects over the next few hours but now I'm acutely aware that every post will be scrutinised, every email read. But hey, who's to say that ain't happening all over the world anyway; our every
cyber thought banked away for future use against us in some draconian new world order. God, I must need some sleep!!
It's 10.15am by this point and we're led outside to the arrivals forecourt where our bus should be waiting for us, but Tone and his friend keep wandering around making phone calls and looking concerned. There's no sign of the bus.
45 minutes later and we're still sat there, frazzled and wondering what on earth is going on. Finally a creaky little shuttle bus arrives to collect the three of us and take us five minutes down the Dongqihang Rd towards the Jinjiang Inn, an airport hotel that makes the Travelodge look like the Ritz.
In the foyer sit Darrin and Lee from the band, Carl, the tour manager and Luke, the sound guy, waiting for us. Their look of tiredness says it all but it's very nice to have a welcome party. I introduce John and Alex before Tone issues us with room keys, two for three people. Looks
like we're sharing then, so Alex and John pair up while I get a single room and off we retreat to catch up on some sleep and a shower.
It's midday before I've located a power switch, blagged the correct adaptors from reception and got my blackberry recharging so gratefully I crawl into bed, 21 hours since yesterday's alarm went off.
The plan is to meet at 4pm for a quick bite to eat, then 5pm is lobby call for transfer to Hangzhou and our hotel for the night ahead of tomorrow's festival by the lake. We're told we will be there for 7pm, when a Welcome Dinner will be held in our honour. It all sounds quite delightful, but sadly it isn't to be.
After a couple of hours sleep Alex and I meet as planned at the restaurant, admiring the signs for Bullfrog with Asparagus that are proudly displayed and opt for what seems to be a relatively safe dish of beef noodles. We're also served enormous bottles of Tsing Tao beer with comically tiny glasses beside them.
At 5pm we meet everyone in the lobby, ready to drive to the city of Hangzhou by its famous lake. The sun is shining and it's gloriously hot and we're all thinking of what a lovely evening lies
ahead of us. But it seems that waiting is the name of the game in China and it's a full hour of us standing on the hotel forecourt before the coach arrives.
We're then told that we're heading back to the airport to pick up the sound crew for the festival and travel on to Hangzhou all together. Fair enough. At the airport however the coach parks in a concrete carpark beneath a flyover and we all disembark. Tone, his friend, a random lady in a ra-ra skirt who's joined us and an older gent in a white t-shirt embossed with what could be a cat or a guitar (I'm not sure I care) totter off and tell us to wait.
They return twenty minutes later with some warm beer and two bags of Burger King whoppers and flaccid chicken monstrosities. It transpires that our Welcome Dinner has been replaced by fast food in a carpark as we wait for someone else's plane.
By 7pm we're told it's not the soundcrew we're waiting for, but another band who are due to play the festival, legendary 80s goth icons, Bauhaus. While Alex, John and I are all quite excited by the news we'll be sharing our bus with heroes of our teens, the lads in SMT confess they have never heard of them. I don't think our renditions of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' and 'She's In Parties' do much to enlighten them.
Fortunately we're all getting on very well and our little private party in the carpark kills time as we wait for the solemn goth overlords to descend. But by 8.30 we're bored senseless and can't wait to get away.
Nevermind, hurrah!! Here comes Tone, chum #1, ra-ra lady and cat man... carrying some more burgers, more warm beer and no sign of a band. WTF?!?! Oh, it transpires it's not Bauhaus joining us after all but their erstwhile, chisel-cheeked singer, Pete Murphy, playing a solo gig. And he decided not to board the plane after all and is arriving tomorrow so we've been waiting around for hours in a carpark and hotel for no reason. In fact, we've been in Shanghai for almost 12 hours and seen the airport, the local motel, the carpark and the coach. What great pics they'll make. And now it's dark.
We get back on the coach and drive for hours to the city of Hangzhou. It's so dark outside there's nothing to see just a brand new motorway and the outlines of urban sprawl around us. Bizarrely there's thousands of buildings and houses lining the way but very few seem to have any lights on; whole suburbs sit in darkness.
Carl and I go through the itinerary realising the promoter has changed things around. We're all meant to have Monday free in Shanghai to enable us to get a full shoot done but it seems the band are now flying straight to Beijing at 8am that day meaning we'll have to cram everything into showday, on a very tight turnaround. But on the plus side, Alex, John and I don't fly back until Tuesday so it looks like we'll have a day free to experience Shanghai. Tourists after all!!
Carl's not happy to have so many early starts in a row but it seems this is just another in a series of bizarrely random promoter-related logistics that we'll suffer from as the trip progresses.
It's 11.30pm when we arrive in Hangzhou. Unfortunately the driver's sat nav dies just as we enter the city so we drive round endless roundabouts before pulling up outside the Hangzhou Institute of Technology and asking directions from the security guard who is so nervous at the sight of a bunch of hairy metallers disembarking that he gets on his scooter and races off in fright.
We all mill around outside while lots of heated Chinese shouting between the driver and Tone occurs before we're ordered back on the bus and visit some more roundabouts. At midnight we pull over in the middle of nowhere and more phonecalls are made until a rep from the hotel jumps in her little car, comes and finds us and tries to lead us to the hotel, but she does a U-turn across the central reservation and loses us before we end up stuck down a rural lane, to the surprise of some locals who are obviously playing an illicit came of cards in a little shack.
By now it's 12.30 and as the coach reverses up the lane slowly, narrowly missing a power line and running over a bicycle as we go, we're all getting a little fraught. Finally at ten to one in the morning we pull up outside an enormous, modern hotel next to a huge glowing conference hall - surely the easiest damn building to find in the whole city!! It's utterly deserted except for two people at the front desk.
"This is like some surreal Stanley Kubrick movie," observes Alex. Our body clocks are all over the place and our heads in a mess. Considering we met in the lobby at 5pm for a two hour transfer it's now taken us eight hours to change hotels. At this point we are told our lobby call for soundcheck tomorrow is 7am. It's been 36 hours with just two hours sleep and it looks like we're gonna have four hours or so before having to do an entire new day. Mutiny is in the air!!!!!
They try and placate us with boxes of pizza from the local Pizza Hut and we all calm down a touch, while the rooms are allocated. The hotel is vast and it takes Alex, John and me a good ten minutes to find both our building and floor, all of which are utterly deserted. Finally at 2.15am I enter my room for the next two nights, a fabulous 5-star suite with a gorgeous bathroom and enormous bed into which I sink in seconds to have the deepest, most dreamless sleep I've had in months.
