If you were around on the blogs in 2009, you might remem­ber Top Floor Cir­cus as being a con­tro­ver­sial band. They wrote a song called Shang­hai Doesn’t Wel­come You in their inim­itable par­o­dy­ing style dur­ing the run-up to the Expo, which promptly got their fol­low­ing shows can­celled, forc­ing them out into neigh­bor­ing Hangzhou for a lit­tle while. The scan­dal blew over, though, and the ironic folk-punk band has had time to regroup and come back stronger than ever. This is the first time I’ve ever seen their name pop up in Bei­jing, and despite the myr­iad amaz­ing things going on last night (oh, the many other gigs I could have been with), I made the com­mit­ment to see them because I knew it would be a once-in-a-Beijing-lifetime event. I was not disappointed.

To start off with, SUBS opened the show in full Hal­loween getup. Kang Mao was dressed as a mummy, which slowly got unrav­eled as she thrashed around the stage in her usual weird danc­ing rou­tine. I know I’ve spo­ken about SUBS before, and men­tioned how beau­ti­fully intense and spec­tac­u­larly per­for­ma­tive Kang Mao is, but it always bears repeat­ing. It’s a true tes­ta­ment to this band that despite the fact I really am not a fan of high-pitched squeal­ing or ear-splitting vol­ume or almost any other part of SUBS’ sound and act, I always really enjoy myself. Of course, I always wear my earplug because seri­ously, I’m not kid­ding about that ear-splitting thing. If you haven’t seen these guys yet, get a good pair of earplugs and catch them next time they perform.

Between the sets, and help­ing to assuage a rest­less crowd, VeryRock.net put on a (twenty minute) video of other musi­cians’ impres­sions of Top Floor Cir­cus — and the music scene in gen­eral. Every­one was there — from exper­i­men­tal folk artist Xiao He to jazz sax­o­phon­ist Li Tieqiao to punk vet­er­ans Misan­dao — and they all had good sto­ries to tell. There were par­tic­u­larly long seg­ments about the lead singer get­ting drunk and get­ting into fights, as well as his habit of tak­ing his pants off… Nev­er­the­less, it was a great video, and really helped to pass the time as the stage hands set up for the main event.

Now I didn’t know this before the show, but Top Floor Cir­cus sings almost exclu­sively in Shang­hainese. So for their pil­grim­age to Bei­jing, they brought along a pro­jec­tor and a charm­ingly DIY slideshow with the lyrics so that every­one could under­stand what was going on. I’ll admit, it was a lit­tle bit of a dis­trac­tion (for every­one, not just my inner lin­guis­tics nerd), but with a large part of Top Floor Cir­cus’ appeal being in their won­der­fully sar­donic and satir­i­cal lyrics, it was impor­tant to get the mes­sage across. They were all great songs, but par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable were the fol­low­ing: an ode to “hailuo ayi” set to Knock­ing on Heaven’s Door, a KTV-style trib­ute to the Suzhou River, a song about monks accom­pa­nied by pic­tures of our robed friends at McDon­alds, and one of their few songs in Man­darin about the girls at pink-window “hair salons”. But really, the whole show was mem­o­rable, and I hope they make their way back to Bei­jing some­time soon.

And he really did take his pants off.