The Rolling Stones will finally play in China this weekend after a three-decade battle to win censorship approval, but there are few frenzied fans here awaiting the arrival of the British legends.
The veteran bad boys of rock — the biggest music act ever to play in China — have chosen to play their one-off concert on Saturday at a tiny 8 000-seat theatre in Shanghai rather than a 100 000-capacity soccer stadium nearby.
The Shanghai Grand Stage is a far cry from Rio de Janeiro where 1,2-million fans gathered in February to see the iconic group play as part of their ”A Bigger Bang” world tour.
But even in such a small venue, the Rolling Stones, who arrive from Japan on Thursday, have not yet been able to engineer a sell-out.
Tickets, which cost 300 to 3 000 yuan ($37 to $370), are almost gone, according to Gina Krane, sales manager for Emma Entertainment, the band’s local promoter.
”In the next three days we will definitely sell out,” Krane said on Wednesday.
The price of the tickets is exorbitant compared with the average monthly salary of around 1 700 yuan in Shanghai.
But a bigger reason behind the relative lack of interest appears to be that rock and roll — long regarded as ”spiritual pollution” by China’s communist rulers — remains on the margins of Chinese popular culture.
State-controlled radio and television have played a major role in stunting the music’s popularity, refusing to promote rock and its image of rebellion and anti-authoritarianism and forcing it to remain underground.
Even though pirated albums of most Western bands can be easily picked up in China, treacly-sweet love songs from Hong Kong, Taiwan and local stars continue to dominate the airwaves and thus popular tastes.
Rock and roll also comes second to largely lyric-less electronic dance music, which has made inroads over the past decade on the local club scenes in Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu city in the southwest.
Zhou Jing (28) an unemployed Rolling Stones fan from the capital who intends to travel to Shanghai for the concert, confirmed the band was not very famous in China.
”Most Chinese know they are a band but they barely know their music or listen to it,” Zhou said.
So far is rock from the mainstream that few other big bands have bothered to make efforts to play in China.
Among the stars to have played China recently are British stalwart Elton John in 2004, rockers Deep Purple, who brought their heavy metal act to Beijing in 2003, and pop diva Mariah Carey, who played here in 2003.
One of the most famous groups to have ever played China was Wham! — George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley — who garnered honours in 1985 as the first Western pop gig in the country.
Meanwhile, after finally winning approval from China’s Ministry of Culture, which overseas all foreign acts, the Rolling Stones look set to conform to the government’s more prudish values.
A song list for Saturday’s show in Shanghai has yet to be released, but Emma Entertainment said the band would toe the line.
”We will obey any rules or regulations from the government,” said Amy Gu, a marketing executive at Emma. ”In China, the Ministry of Culture has the right to say what you can or cannot play.”
The Rolling Stones had been scheduled to play in Shanghai and Beijing in October 2003 but the dates were cancelled soon after the start of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) health crisis.
Under the conditions for the 2003 concerts, four famous Stones songs known for their raunchy lyrics — Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Woman, Beast of Burden and Let’s Spend the Night Together — were banned. – AFP
