TANG LEI DIDN'T ask to run China's most recent rock festival. In fact, she didn't want to do it at all. When a fruit-grower friend from Inner Mongolia called to ask if she could put together an event in the autonomous region on the last weekend of July, she turned him down immediately.
'I thought, 'It's so far away'. Plus, I'd never been there before,' says the woman behind Little Bar, the preeminent rock club in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and one of the most significant live venues on the mainland.
The friend and his contact at the Gegentala Tourist Centre eventually convinced Tang to sign on. But it took a trip from the grasslands to Chengdu and a computer presentation to change her mind. 'I saw the photos of Gegentala, and I was so moved,' she says.
This explains why Tang is sitting in a modernised yurt, gazing over the rolling plains of Inner Mongolia on the third day of the Gegentala Grasslands Music Festival. A pack of horses ambles by and every so often the tent is filled by the roar of a small plane taking tourists on scenic flights over the area. With the grasslands extending as far as the eye can see, it's easy to realise why Tang changed her mind about organising the rock festival.
Over the past few years, mainland rock fans have been treated to a number of large-scale events - often dubbed Chinese Woodstocks - in far-flung corners of the country. Gegentala, 145km north of Hohhot, is merely the latest. In 2002, thousands turned up at the foot of the Jade Dragon mountain outside Lijiang for the Snow Mountain Music Festival. Last summer, the Helanshan Music Festival, held in the desert outside Yinchuan in Ningxia province, attracted an estimated 120,000 people (attendance was apparently bolstered by a popular international motorcycle tour).
The big rock fest is an opportune showcase for emerging bands, even if better known performers are given top billing to boost audience numbers. They're a heartening alternative to the regular 'beer festivals' that are little more than stadium concerts featuring the first wave of rock and metal bands from the 1990s.
