Two years ago, I posted a couple of entries on the nightlife of Kunshan based on my meanderings around the city at night. These are now quite dated, and it’s high time to offer an updated account of what’s been going on in our fair city.

In my earlier account of nightlife in Kunshan, I pointed out that the expat population, which had driven the rise of the live bar scene since around 2000, was on the wane. I don’t know if this is entirely true or not—I would have to see some statistics and I don’t know if the government keeps such records, but it does seem that over the past few years the number of expats on packages, with family and kids in tow, has dwindled here in Kunshan as it has elsewhere in China. This situation has led some of the expat-oriented bars to go belly up. Some of the bars I covered in my previous entry on Kunshan nightlife are now long gone. On the other hand, local bars catering to a largely Chinese customer base are on the rise, while existing expat-oriented bars have had to readjust in order to stay alive.

As of now there are four live music bars with which I’m most familiar: Whales, Eagle, Wonderful, and Bayern. Three of them feature Filipino bands, who perform covers with striking accuracy of canonical western rock and pop songs. They occasionally throw in Chinese pop songs (Mandopop and Cantopop) to please their Chinese customers, but I believe that the Chinese customers go there mainly for the renao and don’t like it when they play too many Chinese songs. Just enough to keep them hooked and included is all it takes. 

Whales, which used to have a kickass Russian rock band, now features a lineup of four Chinese karaoke crooners who sing to a soundtrack. They do the opposite to the Filipino bands: they mainly perform Chinese pop tunes with an occasional sprinkling of western pop tunes, such as “Hotel California” by the Eagles, which can be heard in just about every live bar in Asia. Whereas the Filipino band bars tend to have a mixed clientele of Chinese, Asians, and Westerners, Whales’s customers are now pretty much entirely Chinese. Usually when I go there I am the only foreigner in the bar. The social scene at Whales is that of a typical Chinese bar or club: Small groups of partiers, men and women, sit around small round tables filled with bottles or a keg of beer or whiskey and sodas, playing dice and hand and finger drinking games, and drink profusely. There is no dancing (at least none I’ve seen), and no space for it either. True, I usually go there on a week night, so things might be different on a Friday or Saturday evening. 

As for the Filipino band live bar scene, that’s changing too. Eagle Bar was always my favorite haunt. Last March, we bid a sad farewell to Marvin and Ama, the reigning king and queen of the Filipino music community in Kunshan. Marvin got his golden ticket to migrate to the USA and headed to San Francisco. Ama returned to the Philippines to take care of their daughter and to have another child. We miss them both dearly, and the scene will never be the same after their departure. Still, life goes on, and the band that replaced them is damned good too, if different in substance and style. Boby and his band came to Kunshan from Cambodia, where they played in Siem Reap for a few years. They are adjusting to life in China now and learning a few Mandarin pop songs, but mostly they play covers of hard rock (their favorite genre). They are great harmonizers and they can do some numbers by Queen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their lead guitarist knows his chops. And they have a female singer, Melody, who can really carry a tune and rocks as hard as anybody.

As for the bar itself, it has moved recently from its original location east of the Swissotel on Qianjin Road to the sunken mall area near the Lamborghini Hotel that houses the Parkson dept store, which I see as ground zero for downtown Kunshan. The new space is cleaner and somewhat less homey than the original space with its red painted interior and warm wooden features. The stage is now literally in the center of the bar. I have a lot of nostalgic feelings for the old Eagle Bar, which had a run-down Bohemian flare with its back alley location, but I have to say the new bar isn’t bad, and for me at least the location is more convenient. It’s just ten minutes drive down the main drag of Kunshan from where I live near the Poly Theatre, Qianjin Road, which is now being dug up to build a new subway line that will connect Kunshan to Suzhou and Shanghai. 

The Wonderful Bar is still in the same location it has occupied since it first opened back in 1999, according to the Chinese owner Wallace. It is located on a strip of restaurants and bars in a back alley off of Heilongjiang Road just east of where the Eagle Bar used to be. Charles and Mark, the drummer and bassist for Marvin’s band at the time he and Ama departed, moved over to Wonderful in spring to back up a band fronted by a lovely singer named Al Dheyne and a guitarist named Chris. Mark and Chris have since left town, but Charles and Al Dheyne are still there with a new guitarist. This is a small, cozy bar with two floors, which was renovated last year before reopening as a live band bar (previously Al Dheyne had one musician accompanying her). It’s a lively spot at night and it attracts a mixed crowd of Chinese, Koreans, Europeans, Americans, and possibly Africans (though they may be African American, at least the group I saw there the other night). The manager Coco is Wallace’s wife, and she lets the place get loose and happy. The waitresses are free to fraternize and drink with customers, adding to the merry-making, and alcohol pours liberally into customers’ gullets in the form of tequila shots and the usual whiskey table sets and beer kegs. When the band isn’t playing a mix of rock and pop tunes (more on the contemporary pop side than Marvin’s classics-oriented band) the bar  plays sets of dance music and people get down on the dance floor and up on the stage.

Bayern is the other Filipino band bar in town that has so far survived the diminishing expat scene. Located in the basement of the Golden Eagle mall, with its conspicuous tower dominating the Kunshan skyline just south of the main waterway in town, it is a fairly dingy spot that serves as a German-themed bar and restaurant, serving up steins of lager to a largely Chinese yet somewhat mixed clientele. Led by Abraham, a slick singer who used to work in the Middle East, the band features a hard rocking guitarist whose chops are almost up there with Marvin’s. Denis, who used to play with Marvin’s band, handles the keyboards, providing a panache to songs like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious.” When I went there last week, there was a new member of the band, a bassist named Snooky (I think that’s what she told me). There’s nothing more exciting than watching a female bassist, unless it’s a lead guitarist as it is so rare to see women in roles other than singer, especially in the Filipino band scene. And she can really rock the bass.

Last week was my 50th birthday. I celebrated it on the night of the 18th by heading with an old mate from Beijing and some colleagues to have dinner at the Indian restaurant in the Golden Eagle complex, which is quite a decent place. Afterwards, we found ourselves hanging out at Bayern, where I got to catch up with the band and meet their new members.

Denis generously gave me a spot on the keyboards, and I sang the old standard “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” with the band. Over the past few years of researching this scene, I’ve been taking the anthropological route of participant observation and occasionally playing sets singing and hitting the keys with the bands, which is always fun and it’s a great learning experience to play with folks whose chops are so much more polished than mine. 

That night we ended up at Wonderful Bar, after Charles and Al Dheyne pulled me over there by sending me happy birthday wishes on wechat. Sadly, Charles and Al Dheyne both told me they were leaving Kunshan soon. Al Dheyne is heading to Wuhu for her next contract, and Charles may be returning to the Philippines eventually.

My hope is that in the future we can get a live band going in a bar near the DKU campus, which is growing in size and population rapidly. Our community desperately needs some good live music, and the bars in downtown Kunshan are too far away to serve the needs of the folks at DKU.

Finally, returning to the theme of nightlife, I’ll complete this update with a few words about the Kunshan dance club scene. To be honest, I don’t patronize these clubs much at all. Usually if I go, it’s to showcase the club to a visiting friend or colleague. My go-to club for this purpose is King Mix, located not far from the district where our fair university is found. King Mix is a rollicking dance club with a large set of young ready-to-party people and some high rollers who pay thousands of RMB for lounge spaces and champagne trains. It has a hydraulic elevated dance floor slash runway in the middle of the club, where you can bounce around to the tunes spun by the resident DJs, who always keep the place pumping with generic house-trance clubbing music and fabulous light and video shows. This is interspersed with live song-and-dance shows featuring provocatively dressed or undressed young men and women from China and abroad, who occupy the runway and the bar tops as they perform songs and gyrate to the music. When an especially large order is consummated, the whole place celebrates with a shower of confetti pumped out by air guns toted by the wait staff. It’s easy to get sucked into the frenzy of a night at Mix and suddenly realize it’s way past your bedtime, which is why this is a rarity for me. In addition to King Mix, there are also clubs Phoebe and Arena, both of which have similar clubbing models, which are now standard across China. For more detailed analysis of the VIP clubbing model you can see our article “China’s Party Kings”.