This gig was orig­i­nally billed as Hot & Cold’s final show in Bei­jing, with some great spe­cial guests from the world of exper­i­men­tal elec­tronic music: Fat City, Soviet Pop, Zhang Shouwang, and The B-Side Lovers. What it turned into was some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent. It was, of course, still Hot & Cold’s final show in Bei­jing, and all of the peo­ple who promised to be there were (though I missed Fat City). I saw Soviet Pop first and set­tled in to believe that every­one in the place was there to catch the expat group’s final show, as they’ve been in the city for a long time and have undoubt­edly amassed enough peo­ple to con­vince to come to a show. How­ever, it slowly dawned on me, as I looked around at all the other peo­ple who didn’t seem com­pletely enrap­tured or even very inter­ested in Soviet Pop’s set, that the lit­tle secret I knew wasn’t really a secret at all.

I’d got­ten an email for­warded and then for­warded again from a friend of a friend ear­lier in the week that said that Hedge­hog and Car­sick Cars were play­ing a secret show. It didn’t say where or when, but given that pretty much every­one involved in both of those bands was going to be at D-22, I sur­mised that they would be play­ing instead of their exper­i­men­tal alter-egos. It was a great lit­tle secret for a while, but when I over­heard a for­eigner talk­ing about see­ing Hedge­hog for the first time, I real­ized with­out a doubt that I wasn’t the only one who had heard.

In a way, it was a good thing. It got lots of peo­ple to the show, and more impor­tantly lots of non-committal peo­ple who were more than happy to mill about out­side rather than all cram in expec­tantly for each set. On the other hand, those non-committal peo­ple weren’t really there to hear bands like Soviet Pop, who were the bands that Hot & Cold seemed to be more in touch with dur­ing their time in Bei­jing. Still, the place packed out for Hot & Cold, so I can’t say that the other bands entirely stole the show, though they did slightly over­shadow the point of the evening — to farewell one of the bet­ter exper­i­men­tal groups in Beijing.

At the end of the day, though, it was a great show. Hedge­hog put on a great show as usual, and invited exper­i­men­tal vio­lin­ist Yan Yulong onto the stage for a song or two. Hot & Cold for their part rocked the place with their melodic brand of music cou­pled with the wild antics of Simon Frank. And of course, Car­sick Cars did a reli­ably good job at pump­ing up D-22, even if it was already past mid­night. The only thing about the night that was a real sur­prise was that Car­sick Cars opened with a song that they haven’t played in a really long time — Zhong­nan­hai. Arguably the anthem of D-22, if not of Car­sick Cars’ gen­er­a­tion of punk rock in China, it hasn’t been heard in a while but it’s just as great as ever. I man­aged to catch it on video, so enjoy!