Thermals Oppose Censorship, Try New Foods in China

As the Thermals recently learned, there's no tweeting in China. When Spinner talked to frontman Hutch Harris back in February, he was hopeful they'd be able to keep fans up to date during their Chinese tour, but once the Portland trio got there, things were pretty much shut down.

"No access to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube," Harris tells Spinner. "Someone told us that they used a proxy server to look at our videos, and the next day it was shut down. One day people will revolt because they can't see videos of kittens doing stupid s---!"

In Shanghai, the band played a club called Mao Live. "There was a huge silhouette of Mao painted behind the stage, which I know was a dream for Mao that he never got to realize in his own lifetime," Harris jokes. But he was surprised to find the crowds were filled mostly with expats from the US and UK. "I thanked them for coming and then went into a 20-minute rant that ended with me shouting, 'And I did not fly 6,000 miles to play for a bunch of white people!'" In the two "smaller" ("only around eight million people") cities of Chengdu and Wuhan, it was far more of a Chinese crowd. "But honestly, all the shows were so much fun," says Harris. "We were playing in China! We could hardly believe it."

Of course, what little time the band had between gigs was spent in search of food. Harris didn't care for chicken's foot ("too greasy and cartilage-y"), but drummer Westin Glass proudly scarfed down pig's throat and stomach at a hot pot restaurant. "That might have been the best single meal we had," says Harris. "You cook your own meats and vegetables at your table in a pot of boiling water and hot peppers. [Otherwise] all the best food we ate was from carts: delicious meat and vegetable skewers, pineapple, corn and baked yams, sugar cane"

The Thermals are now back on tour in the US while simultaneously doing final mixes with Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla on their next album, 'Personal Life,' which will be out until September. In the meantime, they've teamed up with the Cribs for a split Record Store Day 7" -- the Thermals' contribution, 'Separate,' was posted to the band's MySpace page this week.