Beijing indie rock band Carsick Cars reform for Shanghai music festival, but jury’s out on permanent reunion
The original line-up of Zhang Shouwang, Li Qing and Li Weisi, who supported US rock band Sonic Youth in 2007, will reunite to play their classic first album at September’s Concrete & Grass Music Festival
Featured on the bill for the mid-September festival are a trio of surprise reunions: the Beijing folk collective Glamorous Pharmacy, Shanghai rock act Boys Climbing Ropes and – chief among them – the original Carsick Cars line-up, playing together for the first time in almost six years.
“It’s not a normal show,” says Zhang Shouwang, frontman of Carsick Cars and until recently the only original member still playing under the band’s name. “It’s very special for us. There’s a lot of history involved in this show.”
It was in late 2011 that Carsick Cars – one of the best-known bands to emerge from the heady days of the mid-noughties Beijing rock scene – announced that they had “made an important decision”. A statement on the band’s Douban page read that “due to creative differences and opportunities for members’ personal development”, founding members Li Weisi and Li Qing had left the group.
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For many fans who had observed the trio’s exciting rise over the previous five years, the announcement left them reeling. Along with acts such as P.K. 14 and Hedgehog, Carsick Cars were a central pillar of the burgeoning Beijing rock scene that had been built around the live venue D22. Songs including Guang Chang (chorus: “This is a square of no hope”) and Zhong Nan Hai (the name of both the Communist Party headquarters and a popular brand of cigarettes) had become bounce-along anthems for audiences across the country. The latter regularly saw the band enveloped in a deluge of cigarettes from appreciative fans.