Pet Conspiracy: Electro Cabaret

Beijing outfit Pet Conspiracy recently completed their Grand Tour, playing 13 European shows in what lead singer Helen Feng describes as “one of the most successful tours I think a Chinese band has ever done.” TALK spoke with Feng ahead of the band’s first public show in Shanghai, a baptism of beats for new venue Mao Livehouse.

For a recent performance in Beijing, Pet Conspiracy had an elaborate, expensive stage built. During their last song, they shredded it to pieces, throwing bits of it at the crowd. According to singer Helen Feng, such acts of creative destruction  are “a counterpoint to this 'back to the audience' performance style that for some reason has been breeding in China – ‘I’m gonna do a fixed set where we don’t look at the audience and play one long song.’ That’s not for us.”

For Pet Conspiracy, playing for audiences, not in spite of them, means feeding the eyes as much as the ears. In fact, Feng says, “we do get a lot of influences for how we do the show, present the show, and even write the music, partly based on the visuals that are in our heads.”

Both sonically and visually, the band embraces strangeness. “What we do is definitely meant to be over the top,” the singer says. “It’s meant to be exaggerated, it’s meant to be surreal, it’s meant to be a little bit controversial, it’s meant to be a bit disgusting at times, and very danceable at other times. It’s meant to make you think. And people are kind of faking their existence on stage. We have two people who are straight men who like to kiss, and it’s for no particular reason other than, oh, that seems to work at that particular point of the performance.”

In some respects, the band’s identity is unabashedly contrived – Pet Conspiracy even started as an art project – but that doesn’t diminish the “dangerous energy” Feng says they put into their performances. During their recent European tour, she often struggled to find a comfortable position to sleep due to the amount of bruising she’d sustained during shows.

When she returned to China she got herself into even more trouble. “In Tianjin I somehow had the urge to charge the VIP seats of the Tianjin government, and luckily wasn’t stopped by the armed security guards,” Feng says. “The government officials were surprisingly nice but the chairs that they were sitting on were not so nice to me, and when I was stepping on the chairs like little stepping stones the last one decided to break a leg, and so I broke my arm.”
When they’re not causing grievous bodily harm, Pet Conspiracy’s onstage antics, along with their spooky, sexy sound, have been winning over fans both at home and – rare for Chinese bands – abroad.

According to Feng, “I don’t wanna sound like I’m bragging but I really do think that from an audience perspective [theEurope tour] was one of the most successful tours I think a Chinese band has ever done, and I owe a lot of that to just, frankly, good placement and my boyfriend doing a lot of work on booking us, probably because he’s afraid of getting s**t from me at home.”

Good placement meant finding parties to play where audiences were into music similar to Pet Conspiracy’s, not Asian Studies majors. “It wasn’t geared towards people expecting us to bring out an erhu and sing some Mongolian folk songs. Unfortunately that’s what’s happened to a lot of Chinese bands when they go on the road – people are expecting more Asian-ness and [bands] show up singing an English song and they go 'what the f**k?'”

Downplaying their Chinese origins only backfired a little. Feng says that because the idea of electro coming out of China is so foreign, the band was asked in interviews: "What part of Japan are you from?" The west part was our first thought, but Feng put it better: “the ghetto part.”

Mao Livehouse has the privilege of hosting the first show by an electro cabaret act from the ghettos of western Japan. Regarding the venue, Feng says, “I’ve heard that it’s probably one of the best live houses in China right now so far as equipment and size and sound.” We think Pet Conspiracy might be the best show the venue puts on all year.

Pet Conspiracy with Boys Climbing Ropes, Antidote DJs, Baijiu Robots and B6. RMB 60. 9pm. 6 November. Mao Livehouse. Building 32, 570 Huaihai Xi Lu, near Hongqiao Lu (inside Red Town). Tel: 6227 7332