Saturday Night in Shanghai: We fought the law ... and won

For a city notoriously lacking in live music, last night Shanghai rocked. While we (along with headliners Another Kind of Light) weren't able to make it to the opening of Yuyintang's Music Warehouse, we did manage to catch local rock-with-Chinese-characteristics band Three Yellow Chicken at Shuffle before heading to Tang Hui's pre-re-opening party, Electro Town.

Co-organized by Tang Hui and Shanghai Real-Live Entertainment, Electrotown was the second in a series of events combining DJs, VJs, and live bands -- this time featuring Beijing electro-rock band Supermarket (超级市场) and the Antidote DJs. Shanghaiist arrived as the band was starting and was surprised to see a decent number of Chinese faces in the crowd of about 500, unlike Supermarket's 2004 show with Ladytron, where Fuxing Park felt like Shanghai Center during a workday lunch hour. Like that show, though, the band's computers crashed halfway through their sixth or seventh song. Fortunately Zooma (Tang Hui's owner) was prepared, and took the break as an opportunity to promote the new and improved Tang Hui ... and inform us that the police had arrived.

We were originally hopeful that this was just a publicity stunt by Zooma -- showing us that even though he's opening a huge club in an expensive location he still has what it takes to fight the power, but as the crowd filtered outside it looked less and less likely that the show would go on. In the process of photographically documenting this all too common occurrence, we were apprehended and detained by one of Shanghai's finest. Mental note: no flash next time. Aside from the threats of jail and deportation and a couple of struggles over our camera, the harrassment process was relatively painless, and thanks to a brief distraction by some of the concert-goers we were able to slip away unnoticed and unscathed.

Shanghaiist would like to give a special shout-out to our Dazhong wheelman, who tried his damnedest to make that Santana peel out as we fled the scene.