As frontman of SMZB, Wu Wei has been at the forefront of Chinese punk since the scene first started – and he’s got the tapped phone lines to show for it

Wu Wei is not your average punk rocker. For a start, he’s one of China’s first ever punks, and formed the band he still fronts – SMZB – in the mid-90s when the genre was only just being discovered there. For another thing, he’s had to deal with things rather more challenging than most western punk bands face: tapped phone lines, curtailed festival sets, and general confusion from the public as to what the hell the racket he’s making on stage is all about.



Being a punk in China can be a risky experience, but it’s a thrilling one too, as I found out when I caught up with Wu Wei at the bar he runs, Wuhan Prison.



“I started SMZB in 1996, after hearing the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Clash,” he says. “I felt like I had finally found a way to express myself. Before punk I had listened to other types of rock – the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the Doors and Pink Floyd. But when I heard punk I realised that this was the music for me.”



Wu Wei was studying the bass in Beijing’s Midi school when he first came across punk and, along with Zhu Ning (who you might remember from a previous Inside China’s Alternative Music Scene blog), moved to Wuhan to form SMZB. Given that there were no other punk bands in Wuhan (and only a couple of others in China full-stop), audience reaction was a mixture of bafflement and sheer energy. “They were crazy, pogo-ing … we tapped into something that let people express themselves.”



SMZB’s songs deal with “life, the city, and society”, but their more political manouvres – for instance, Wu Wei is a signatory of Charter 08, the human rights manifesto that led to its key author Liu Xiaobo receiving the Nobel prize and also a lengthy jail sentence – have caused the band difficulties.



“We were trouble-makers, so we would be banned by the big music festivals in China,” he recalls. “Of course, the government didn’t like it either. Even now I have two cellphones … one is more private, because the other one was being monitored from 2008 by people from the government. The same goes for my internet account.”



Three years ago, the band were invited to play 10 songs at a festival in Nanjing. As the day of the show approached, they noticed that their set was being increasingly curtailed until they were left with only five specific songs that they were allowed to play. “We weren’t happy about that,” says Wu Wei, “so we insisted on playing a sixth song. Our manager tried to stop us but we insisted and finished the song. Afterwards, our manager told us that he had been urged to stop us playing by a government official, and when he failed the government official slapped him!”



Wu Wei is proud that Wuhan is regarded as a punk city and believes the city’s music stands out from that of China’s other punk hub, Beijing. “The audience feel that our lyrics and our work is more sophisticated, deeper. Some call me a punk thinker,” he says, smiling.



It took a few years playing with SMZB before other punk bands in Wuhan began forming, and Wu Wei says there was a lull in the scene until relatively recently, when new groups such as Sharp Pills and Loafer started making waves here.



Has this revitalised scene emerged as a result of, or despite, China’s recent, rapid economic expansion?



“It’s a big question,” says Wu Wei. “The influence of the economy is in everything, but in punk rock music and music in general, not so much. Or at least not in a meaningful way. Sometimes it can even be in a negative way. Many people have lost their ability to think independently; the only thing they think about is getting more money.”



As I go to leave, I notice a picture of Shane MacGowan on the walls of Wu Wei’s delightfully scruffy bar and ask if he is a big Pogues fan. He is, and what’s more, SMZB’s recent releases have been incorporating the Irish sound – tin whistles, fiddles, the lot. A Chinese punk band with a decidedly Irish flavour? Only on this country’s brave new musical frontier would such a thing seem plausible.

