Filth and fury, Chinese style

In the unlikely context of the world's largest, most populous dictatorship, power chords can be heard in the night air. Heavy metal music has been reborn in China, birthed in the fires of the Beijing bar scene. The symptoms of its presence are slowly cropping up across the city. The tight black trousers. The leather. The almost-there facial hair.

Bars like The Old Get Lucky or the Nameless Highlands serve as venues. Most of the people who show up at these remote dives look and dress the way they would in their daily life. It's the thrashing maniacs onstage who give it away.

The lack of an 'alternative' media in China means young people have to discover the scene for themselves. Stumbling across something in its infancy, something which, by China's standards, is so far left-field as to exist on no field, feels quite thrilling.

A refreshing variety of people attend the gigs and the atmosphere is like the demented euphoria of the acid raves of 1980s England. Bands such as Regicide and Suffocate have built up sizable followings, by simple dint of being different from everything else in China.

The music, at the very least, is compelling, with the standard ranging from shambolic through to standing-in-a-wind-tunnel levels of brilliance. Foreigners with no interest in the music come along just for the spectacle; the performers and audience unraveling with abandon.

Young people in China live out their lives under the overbearing scrutiny of an intrusive government which has a very real control over what they see and hear. The boys and girls who turn up to these fire-hazard venues have fought to be there. "When he sings," says Wang Song, gesturing towards the tiny stage, "I feel it in my heart!" ·