The Fray: A Lesson in Being Nice

Coloradan quartet The Fray gave a performance to warm the cockles on a freezing Beijing night Wednesday. As anticipated, the Tango crowd was made up predominantly of young women (a few mates I spotted in the crowd had been "dragged along by their girlfriends"), and it made for a most pleasant night of mid-paced piano rock, soppy ballads and full-voiced singalongs.

These shows are always the better for the act making the most of it and enjoying themselves. Kanye West made little effort to back in '09. Neither did Westlife earlier this year. But those two played pretty big venues on their visits to Beijing (Workers Gymnasium and MasterCard Center respectively), and it's easy to lose motivation at a big venue in Beijing. It's difficult to get a vibe going with a crowd when (save for a square section of seated VIPs up the front) you can barely see them sitting squarely in the distance. It also doesn't help that there are generally yappy guards dotted around the venue stopping concert-goers from enjoying themselves.

We'll keep our fingers crossed that an old pro like Sir Elton will be able to enjoy his performance in spite of it being staged at the MasterCard Center later this month.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the best shows I've seen in Beijing by visiting Western turns have been in the far more intimate and, in some respects, unforgiving venues like MAO Livehouse, Yugong Yishan, and Tango.

The audience is much closer and generally a lot more interactive in the smaller venues, and this was the case last night. The crowd lapped up the jokes, applauded brave attempts at Mandarin, sang along when asked, and bore the weight of a stage dive. Amazingly they even parted nicely when asked to allow lead singer Isaac Slade to be amongst them for one number.

Of course it helps that they seemed like thoroughly bloody nice blokes. Making the effort to learn more than the cursory "she she", Slade (with the aid of his iPhone) managed to tell the crowd how much he liked Beijing, how much he liked beer, and how much he liked them all in the local tongue.

Slade talked effusively of the Chinese crowd they'd encountered (they played two shows in Shanghai earlier this week), thanked them for the experience, told them he hoped this would be the start of a long relationship and rewarded them with everything they wanted to hear, plus an encore.

Here's a video of the concert (almost) in full. Highlights include game stabs at Mandarin (14:30 & 34:10), full-throated singalongs (22:00 & 51:05) and the stage dive (49:15).

Photos: courtesy of anixiao