Hangzhou, China

Four and a half hours of comatose unconsciousness come to an end with my alarm hammering away. I drag heavy limbs from my indescribably comfortable bed and slowly pull the curtains wide to reveal a lake below my window and grey skies above, pelting rain upon the earth with grim delight. What joy!

A quick shower is followed by the discovery of a strange gas mask in the wardrobe next to the safe. This place is surreal. I descend through the empty corridors, lifts and gardens and cross into the main hotel building where an enormous restaurant with twenty staff houses just one diner, John McMurtrie. I join him for breakfast wondering just who the mountains of food are supposed to feed. There are cereals and fruit, eggs and bacon, cheeses, bread, jam and honey and then an entire buffet of stir-fried broccoli, tofu and bean curd, chili noodles and steamed rice, glutinous sesame rice balls, pork cha sui buns and much, much more. But not a soul to eat it!

Alex joins us, along with Lee, and Luke, and we tuck in to toast and fruit before all gathering in the lobby at 8am to transfer to the festival for an early morning soundcheck. We drive through vast building sites of unfinished flyovers, cranes, skyscrapers and traffic jams that skirt the centre of Hangzhou, before thirty minutes later arriving by the banks of the Xi Hu lake, one of China's premier tourist destinations and home to the Xi Hu Music Festival 2012.

We enter the festival production area and the band get straight into soundcheck mode. The rain has stopped so while they set their gear up and line-check Alex and I head off to search for suitable locations for John to shoot the band later.

The festival is set in Tai Zi Wan park, a landscaped botanical gardens based around a waterfall that cascades into the lake, and in amongst the bridges and pagodas we find a tomb and traditional Chinese pavilion housing a museum dedicated to Zhang Tayan, a hero of the 1911 Xihan Revolution which led to the formation of the People's Republic of China.

As we get backstage again the band are just coming to the end of their soundcheck and Luke, who's been on the mixing board, tells us that there's strict sound limits to be obeyed. Apparently the general of this province lives in the mountains above the park and has only granted a licence for the event to happen as long as the sound doesn't go above 96 decibels. Luke had taken the sound up to 100 and the local engineers freaked out, scared the event will be shut down before it's begun.

As soon as the band come off stage I tell Tone we need an hour to shoot photos while the park is empty and the rain has stopped but Tone insists we have to return to the hotel "for lunch". I argue that now is the ideal time for us to get photos but he flaps around getting upset that I want to alter his schedule, promising we will have plenty of time to get everything we need later. Reluctantly we all troop aboard the minibus and head for the hotel.

As we drive back we see huge billboards promoting the 8th Annual Cartoon and Animation Festival and learn that the entire super-sized hotel complex has been built especially to house thousands of animators who will be based here in future as China sets up studios in Hangzhou to rival Disney.

Once we arrive at the hotel Tone reveals he has made a mistake and there is no lunch and we have to eat in the catering tent back at the festival, but our minibus won't be available to take us back there for 90 minutes so we all retire to our rooms and I take advantage of the unexpected downtime to get on with work. Internet access proves remarkably swift but type Google or Facebook into the browser and it instantly freezes. Carl later tells me the same is true for YouTube but apparently there are no limits on surfing for porn of any kind. Censorship of mind rather than body.

When the time comes for us to hop aboard the festival shuttlebus again, the heavens have decided to deliver their very own waterfall so we all grab umbrellas from the rooms and look through the windows at a rapidly disappearing skyline obscured by sheets of rain pounding down. This is going to make a photoshoot very difficult.

On site everyone is clad in brightly coloured waterproof ponchos and on stage a Chinese version of Limp Bizkit are playing some crunchy rap metal. "Get the ruck up!!" implores the bouncing frontman to the sodden masses who half-heartedly respond.

We are led to catering where two meals are on offer: Italian or Chinese. Both come in meat or vegetarian options although the Chinese vegetarian offering still comes with shredded pork and garlic. "Those vegan pigs!" exclaims Alex.

We're shown our room for lunch and the very polite team of young girls looking after us produce beers and a bottle of Jack Daniels to the delight of the band. However, when I try and explain we want to chill the beers in the fridge they don't understand the concept, offering glasses of ice for us to pour warm beer over, rather than putting the bottles themselves in the chiller. I relieve them of the crate and shove them all in the freezer to much fascination. This is obviously a revolutionary concept here.

While we eat lunch some awful school band takes to the stage, playing shoddy out-of-tune songs of a distinctly amateur nature so we decide, despite the torrential rain, to try and get a photoshoot done around some of the locations we scouted earlier. Unfortunately as we try and enter the Zhang Tayan memorial area the police turn us back, having shut the whole place down for the event.

Frustrated we traipse on through the mud and monsoon to the bridge over the waterfall where John and the band do their best to ignore the inclement conditions, while I'm strapped up with a portable battery and lights and act as a human floodlight with Luke and Alex providing
umbrella shelter to stop electrocution.

As we return to the backstage area a new band have taken to the stage, sounding like a Chinese cross between Mogwai and Sigur Ros. Their beautiful dreamy instrumentals suit our rain-drenched jetlag perfectly and they get a round of applause from us when they finish. Tone reveals they're from Taiwan and their name translates as something like Sweet Barry Ferry. He's at a loss to explain what that actually means but we're all very impressed by their glorious sound.

Next up is Sacred Mother Tongue. We all take to the stage, with myself and Alex huddling on the edge to stay under the canopy, while John prowls round snapping photos of the performance. The audience is 80% female and a multicoloured mass of raincoats who all scream when Andy, who is famous in China due to his online guitar tutorials and status as a guitar god, takes off his jacket to reveal armfuls of tattoos. By contrast I don a bright red poncho and after a couple of tracks Alex and I venture out into the crowd to watch the band, just as the rain miraculously stops.

'City Is Crying' and 'Suffering' go down a treat, with the audience loving it, raising horns and going generally nuts. Darrin has been warned not to say anything political from the stage so instead opts for the metal perennial of getting the crowd to repeat swearwords after him, and then asks them how to say one particular epithet in Chinese. They all cry out "muddafudda" at the top of their voices with gleeful liberation. "Very similar," he laughs.

'Evolve/Become' and 'Seven', new tracks soon to be released, sound awesome and get the crowd bouncing wildly and by the final track 'Force Fed', Darrin is having such a good time he goes into the crowd to be greeted like a rock messiah. John gets it all on camera - this will look great!

Straight after, Luke is delighted, telling us he'd pushed the mixing desk up to 104 decibels. When he'd offered to turn it down, the engineer replied,. "No no, crowd go crazy!! Keep it loud!!!!!". Let's hope the general likes his metal!

Backstage afterwards the band gets mobbed by girls and autograph hunters all wanting pics and it takes a while for us to get off site. Back at the hotel a swift change of clothes precedes a drink in the lobby bar. The staff manning it are obviously stunned to have customers and it seems we're
the first guests ever to use it. We ask for Canadian Club whiskey, Bacardi and red wine and each brand new bottle is opened with great ceremony. Unfortunately the barmaid has never seen a corkscrew before so I'm handed the bottle and asked to open it myself, while she and her colleague go back to studying the instructions rather than watching me actually do it.

While we wait for everyone to gather Tone introduces me to two colleagues, Mel ("like Mel Gibson, yeah! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!) and Olga, who will be taking us back to Shanghai tomorrow while he looks after Peter Murphy and his band. But before that happens Tone is taking us out for a traditional Chinese dinner tonight, to make up for the pizza and burgers we've been fed up to this point.

The restaurant is called Grandma's Kitchen and we are given our own private dining room, with a
huge circular table complete with a lazy-susan in the middle to pass food around. I suggest Tone orders for the whole table and he goes to town. When it arrives we are presented with the following:

Bean starched jelly
Honeycomb tofu cakes
Sliced pork in mashed garlic sauce
Potato salad curry
Beef with green pepper
Beef with egg and onion
Prawns with roasted coral stones
Grandma's Fish Head
Steamed Tofu in Sichuan Spices
Sliced Fish with sauerkraut, white gourd and tofu skins
Spiced Chicken
Kung Poa Chicken
Chicken in Green Tea Flavour
Green Beans
Organic Cauliflower
Green Tea Cakes
Grandmas's Pancakes

Bottles of Cheerday beer and tiny glasses of Hui Ji Mountain Yellow Wine, a cross between sake and sherry, also arrive and we all toast each other with the traditional Chinese cry of "Gan bei!!" - bottles up!

The final dish goes by the mysterious name of You Are The One and is apparently a famous delicacy of eel and clams. The door opens and it is brought in with much ceremony. However the smell is utterly atrocious. "Oh my God, it's like Grandma's knickers," gasps Luke as Alex and John turn white.

"It's delicious," promises Tone, mystified by the revulsion and disgust on all our faces. It really is horrific. To be polite I volunteer to try it and manage a mouthful against my better judgement. It truly is the most abominable thing I have ever tasted. Only bassist Josh is brave enough to also try and his reaction is even worse than mine. It's like eating from a farmyard sewer.

"I'm so sorry," I say to Tone, "it tastes like it's fermented and gone off."

"Yes," he exclaims with delight, "it's rotten fish! Very good." I make my excuses and head to the bathroom.

When I return the dish has been cleared and Tone is getting the bill. Dinner for eleven people, including a large jug of the super-strength wine, comes to just £60. It's been an experience but I can tell the band will probably be back to Burger King tomorrow. Rotten fish has put us all right off further culinary experimentation for the moment.

And later on, as I wake up sweating at 3am with a banging headache and a wave of nausea, I'm convinced that it's not just jetlag playing silly buggers with my sleeping patterns but fermented eels and rotting clams, combined with the Yellow Wine, that have turned my stomach upside down.

I won't be visiting Grandma's Kitchen again!