Min-G Yao/Shanghai Daily news

Despite facing continuous accusation of producing fake rock music, the pop rock band Mayday still played their largest concert to date in front of a capacity 80,000 crowd at Shanghai Stadium on Saturday.

Fake rock or not, the five-piece band from Taiwan certainly has a lot of fans in Shanghai, mostly teenage girls and university students. Fans started lining up hours before the concert.

They occupied all the restaurants, shops and markets around the stadium.

As with all Mayday concerts, fans stood for the entire three-hour duration. Those in the VIP area were standing on the arms of their chairs in order to get a view of the performance.

Luckily, nobody fell or was injured.

"I'm just so happy to be here, although I don't know where to go and what to do after the concert," noted Linda Zhou, a university student who had traveled all the way from Wuhan, Hubei Province.

Like many others who flew to Shanghai just for the concert, Zhou planned to spend the night on the street and take a train home the next day. Zhou was one of the luckier ones, many who couldn't get tickets had to make do with listening to the show from outside the stadium.

The band performed all of their popular songs, covering topics from Chinese legends like the Monkey King to the girl next door.

While their early songs have a more vibrant edge with a greater variety of subjects, the more recent ones are increasingly emotional and love centric.

These were apparently the more popular judging by the audience accompaniment levels.

Saturday's Mayday concert attracted the biggest audience of any musical concert so far this year in Shanghai.

The duet "Shui Mu Nian Hua" (Flowing Time) comprised of Luke Lu and Miao Jie, both in their middle 30s, was founded in 2001.

Lu and Miao have rather similar experience even before they joined the same group - they both graduated from the prestigious Tsinghua University; they both enjoyed a few years pursuing elite careers, respectively as an architect and a project manager for IBM; and they both abandoned the attractive compensation package and stable life to sing, at the age of 30.

When the group was formed in 2001, their once popular folk songs about campus life were largely drowned by the then newly rising hip-hop.
At the age of 30, long after graduation, Lu insisted on writing his folk songs but nobody thought he could make a career of it.

"I know our music is not for everybody. Many people might listen to it once and think it's not their thing. But if you can somehow catch the cultural depth in it, you will absolutely love the music," notes Lu.

"I hope our music could accompany people for 10, 20, 30 years, even for their lifetime."

True, the group's music might sound old-fashioned and out-of-date for many young adults who are used to the fast-food mode of big cities.

The melodies are slow and the lyrics are so complicated that many people might just skip their songs for something that's more accessible.

Nobody thought they could make it.

But the group has released seven albums in the past six years. None of them have had extremely high sales volumes, but they are popular among more introverted university students and young adults.

"Our fans seem to be the calm and introverted types, instead of the crazy screaming ones," says Lu.

"I believe they are passionate inside. They truly love music and are willing to spend time to enjoy the culture."

Date: 7:30pm, December 24
Venue: Shanghai International Gymnastic Center
Address: 777 Wuyi Road