BEIJING, June 20, 2013 (City Weekend) — It wasn’t that long ago that Gulou was a quiet neighborhood with little in the way of live music. But luckily for nightlife lovers, the past few years has seen an explosion of bars and live houses along the old hutong lanes, with arguably the most popular music venue being Temple Bar/Livehouse.
While today the Gulou music scene is alive and well, it didn’t happen overnight, and the current celebration of sound is a result of a number of dedicated artists and musicians chipping away at the dream. Two French fellas, in particular, have helped to make live music in the old quarter something we can enjoy almost every night of the week, and they’ve had a hand in influencing what’s on offer.
When Temple owner Clément Berger arrived in Beijing in early 2005, he was working at an internship with Carrefour. By September of that year he was studying Chinese at Beijing Language and Culture University and organizing small concerts with his classmates.
After a brief stint in Shanghai slinging cognac for Rémy Martin, he returned to Beijing and took over as manager of the popular watering hole Salud on Nanluoguxiang in 2008. At that point, even though there was no great shortage of live music or venues, Berger still felt there was room for something else. “I wanted a piano bar, but without a piano,” he explains.
He envisioned a place that anyone could walk into on a whim, knowing there would be something happening. He also wanted a place to showcase and promote what was happening in Beijing’s burgeoning music scene, but no matter what, a place where “you finish your drink and see something new.”
In July 2011, Temple Bar/Livehouse opened, and the windowless cavern is pretty much exactly what Berger had hoped to achieve. He has two associates, Gao Jian, an editor for National Geographic, and Gao Xu, the guitarist in Long Shen Dao, “the only good reggae band in China,” Berger notes.
Together they’ve put together one of the most well-respected places in town to check out new local bands, established local acts, underground foreign acts and anything else that tickles their fancy. While it may have been difficult to fill up a schedule a couple years ago, that’s no longer the case. “All the bands want to play here,” Berger says. “It’s hard, too, because we want to keep it open for new bands, but people really want to play here.”
Of course they want to play there: the place gets slam-jam-packed on the weekends, and even some weeknights, and it is home to one of Beijing’s best sound systems. If you want people to hear your band, and you want it to sound good, you play at Temple.
It’s gotten easier to find bands who will play, but Berger says it hasn’t necessarily gotten any easier to find good bands. “I used to say, like, 90 percent of local bands were shit. Now I say, like, 80 percent are,” he says, only half-joking. “Maybe I’m getting soft.”
Around the time that Berger was hunkering down over Hanzi textbooks, Jean-Sébastien Héry, also known as Djang San, was shuttling back and forth between China and France for work. He had first come here to visit his sister who was studying in Beijing in 2000. He visited the now long-gone River Bar, located around South Sanlitun Road, which was “probably the center of all rock and folk music” in Beijing at that time, and the music stirred up something inside him.
“I felt that it was the beginning of something in China, and I wanted to be a part of that as well,” he said, adding that there was also something important in “the feeling about being in a completely different world.”
Listening to Radiohead’s “Creep” on his headphones on the school bus in France is what prompted a young Héry, a self-professed “kind of depressed kid,” to start taking music seriously. His English wasn’t very good during those early Radiohead listens, so he was really just letting the music hit him.
That experience ended up proving useful later, when he wasn’t yet fluent in Chinese, but was falling in love with Chinese folk musicians like Wan Xiaoli and Wild Children and deciding to write his own songs in Chinese. “Learning Chinese through music would be easier for me,” he explains. “There’s some idea about speaking straight about what you think.”
By 2006, he had quit his job to be a full-time musician in Beijing. Since then, he’s started up The Amazing Insurance Salesmen, one of the city’s most reliable live shows and enduring groups, and gone through a couple of name changes for his solo projects.
Right now, he’s doing the Amazing Insurance Salesmen; Djang San, a “one-man electro-folk orchestra;” Djang San and Band, a trio built around the Chinese instrument the zhongruan; the jazz band Maix; and DJ 3San, the DJ persona he occasionally busts out.
He also does experimental video projects, which he shows at his experimental “one-man electro-folk orchestra” shows, and other projects as they pop up, often related to either something unusual and experimental or something the French Embassy asks him to participate in.
”At first you think, ‘What is he trying to do? That’s weird,’” Berger says of Djang San’s more experimental stuff, “then later you say, ‘Hey! That’s f**king good!’” Héry’s mess of chestnut curls can often be found in Temple or the Gulou area at large, either playing or checking out the bands who have come after him, possibly inspired by all he’s done.
But is he worried about other people copying his style? “No! I’m the only one who has all this stuff together. It’s my experience talking.”
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