One Day in May…

So, Mayday is still on tour. Not earth-shattering, I know. But if you were looking for Mayday news, you’d have to start there. So, I have yet to come up with specific Beijing news, but I’ve got a report on the concert in Harbin, and seriously, how different could it be? (Oh, how cynical one becomes after three years of Mayday-blogging. Shame on me.)

On August 1st, the band brought its DNA show to the lovely northern Chinese city of Harbin, which so far is the least friendly place I’ve been to in China. Apologies to Northeasterners, but that city seems to have really taken the whole Russian heritage thing too much to heart. Everyone acted like we were standing in the way of them and their vodka bottles and therefore could not help us. And yes, that’s me playing on some gross stereotypes about Russians which are totally unfair because a.) every Russian I’ve ever known personally has been *fantastically* good fun (though most were also rather outstanding drinkers) and b.) it was actually a Russian friend who first introduced me to Mayday, waaaaaaay back in 2002 when I was studying in Taiwan.

Wait, where were we?

The DNA tour stop in Harbin was an unforgettable evening for local fans, who jumped, sang and cheered along with the band, an unusual sight for Harbin concert goers. (See? It’s a weird place.) (Lovely ice palaces in winter, though.) They sang songs like “Loneliness Terminator,” “Star of Perseverance” (I feel like I haven’t typed that one in so long that I actually had to think for a minute what the English name was), “Life is Troubled Times” (totally arbitrary English name given by me), “Love-ing” (I am so ready for this song to be off the playlist already), and even Fish Leong’s “Swallowtail Butterfly” and “Can’t Hear,” though how are they really Fish’s when Ashin wrote them?

As the article notes, their own songs, others’ songs, new songs, old songs, played live they all became Mayday songs, and it seemed like each one was sung by the 10,000-strong crowd in unison. (This reporter has a bit more flair than most of the concert reports do. I wonder if she is secretly working on a novel.) With three encores, the three and a half hour concert became a little piece of Mayday and Harbin concert history.

Now looking back to Beijing, the best I can do is this (I forget that the papers only leave the stories up for a few weeks. This really should teach me to stay on top of things, though I still don’t always. Ever. Whatever.) But that only reminds us about the Mass Mutual Mercuries Life ads, which I did manage to write about somehow.

Now, I have on the schedule that they performed in Kaohsiung on August 8, but I’m skeptical about that because a search for news containing “Mayday” and “Kaohsiung” does not seem to turn anything up. I did, however, find a funny story from Victor Wong’s Taipei concert last month. Guanyou attended, but as he wandered into the stadium some fans apparently mistook him for the performing artists and asked why he isn’t on stage yet. The amused Victor Wong heard the story, and teasingly asked Guanyou if he could give him a ride home from the concert, because “I hear you don’t have a car right now.” Heh.

I went looking for the concert schedule on the Mayday or B’in Music websites and naturally could not find it (this was my greatest pet peeve during the Jump! tour as well), but I did notice one thing worth mentioning: how cool is it that B’in Music is organizing and promoting the Tizzy Bac concert in Taipei this October? Love that.

Edited to add: I just noticed, while typing up another news item, that the big typhoon was on August 8, so even if there was a Mayday concert scheduled for Kaohsiung, it would have been cancelled anyway.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 6:20 am and is filed under Mayday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.