Figure 1. The stairs to The Shelter. Photo credit: Andrew Rochfort, used with permission.
Finding Shelter: Recollections of Shanghai’s Underground Music Scene in the 2010s
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (Austria)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.09>
The Shelter was an underground club in Shanghai which, during its 9 years of operation from 2007 to 2016, transformed Shanghai’s underground electronic music scene.[1] The club is named literally, as the underground space is a former bomb shelter. One has to walk downstairs after opening the unimpressive door of Yongfu Lu No. 5, then pass through a long tunnel, to be finally immersed in the music.
The Shelter, Shanghai (Wang 2009)
The Shelter’s co-founder Gareth “Gaz” Williams explained in an interview with Resident Advisor when the club opened in 2007: “it confused a lot of people. It’s not nice at all. It’s just a sweaty dark box. There’s no lights, there’s no dice or cognac—there’s nothing to do but dance” (Fernandes 2012). Due to the bad cellular reception inside plus the not-yet-advanced camera of mobile devices, footage found on YouTube when searching “the shelter shanghai” is of a lo-fi aesthetic—blurry, dark, loud, yet at the same time energetic (see Wang’s “The Shelter, Shanghai” from 2009). Media coverage of The Shelter established the venue’s role in the local scene as transformative, with headlines like “Cutting-Edge Music Finds a Home” or “Shanghai’s Grittiest Nightclub” (Williams 2016; VICE Thump 2013). According to these articles, The Shelter not only fostered a music-based creative community, but has also become a repository of memories for visitors of various social and cultural backgrounds—from university students from different countries, to professionals of various industries and nationalities—as an intimate social space. This article presents conversations with three DJ/producers who experienced The Shelter. Their memories reveal some of the city’s bygone underground scene attached to the infamous club.[2]
Figure 1. The stairs to The Shelter. Photo credit: Andrew Rochfort, used with permission.
Tianyu Jiang: Could you tell a bit about your experiences at The Shelter?
Lee: I was still working towards my Bachelor’s degree at a university in Nanjing at the time, so in 2013 and 2014. I had limited knowledge of the scene and the culture. When I entered The Shelter, I thought the place was quite ye (“wild”).[3] It was very dark, you couldn’t see a thing. The mentality of the crowd seemed to be different back then. Whenever I went there, it felt like people were talking about music, about the content of things. I would take a train from Nanjing to Shanghai and go to several venues the same night. So it would be checking some famous headliners first, then switching to venues like DADA and Shelter. Elevator was not open yet. The next morning, my classmates and I just took the train back to school so we could save the accommodation expenses. Back then, the emotion surpassed other things. You had that energy when you were young.
Tianyu Jiang: Have you partied at Shelter? I assume the answer is “of course”.
Mau Mau: I went to Shelter a lot and I really liked going there. I got to DJ and be involved with some of the events. It was a hard place to get into, because Gaz was very picky with bookings and parties. Especially when my friends and I were more on the slightly silly and fun side of party music at the time, which was not really what he was about. Shelter is generally kind of more serious…
Very experimental?
Either experimental, or… . Shelter is interesting because it was good the way that the booking was half Gaz—so experimental, dubstep and these things—and the other half was hip hop, because his partner V-Nutz was like a scratch legend. Maybe because labels like SVBKVLT or Genome came out of Shelter and kept reinforcing the story of Shelter.[4] People don’t talk so much of the other part, the hip hop side. Some of the biggest nights I’ve been to were underground American hip hop nights.
Battle of the Beats in Shanghai, Didjelirium (2011)
How was the crowd during that time?
Messier? For me, one thing that was cool about Shelter is that it had more of a mix of expats and locals than most places that were doing underground music at that time. Clubs with nights doing house and techno, which was what I’m really into, tended to be mostly expats. Shelter was a place where you felt more like you were actually in Shanghai. There were some parties at other places with international bookings from Europe or the US, where you would almost feel like you were in Spain or France. The vibe of those parties could be great, but it could also be a little bit sad.
Why?
Just being in Shanghai and having these weird bubbles disconnected from local people.
Then Shelter was discovered among the locals. It seemed that the club became popular among people in the fashion and creative industry rather quickly. Maybe because it was a “hip” place?
I never really thought of Shelter as fashionable or a place of fashion. Just because it was so dark, you couldn’t really see anything. The toilets were horrible. It was pretty much an underground feeling. But definitely in terms of the creative community, out of all the clubs Shelter was the one that most consistently also did things with various visual artists. So, it definitely felt like a place with a creative community. One thing that’s been pretty rare in general in the scene here, is that the staff could also be the people partying at the place. Compared to most cities, Shanghai generally tends to have this divide between the staff and the customers. Shelter, I think, was the first place where it felt like the staff would be the people who also hang out there. That helped to give it a more relaxed sort of community feeling.
There is the narrative that people talked more about music back then when going to Shelter and nowadays the clubs are more like a social space.
Interesting. I definitely hear people talk about this now as clubbing is becoming more fashionable and there’s a little bit less … direct engagement with the music. I definitely went to some parties at Shelter that were really focused on the music, but I think in general this place gets mythologized, like, is this place all about art? When for a lot of people it was a party and the party was really the core.
When Shelter closed in 2016, it was still mostly commercial clubs in Shanghai. When you imagined a Chinese nightclub it would be like with bars and seating areas… .
Like a Yedian (“mainstream nightclub”).
Exactly. Like the clubs in Xintiandi.[5]
I read some work on the early clubs, like M2. I was lucky that I was here in 2006 so I saw the end of some bigger commercial clubs before Shelter, which used to also have some more underground music. These places were like Bon Bon which is where System is now, or like DKD. I guess you can compare them with Potent, so with different rooms and they got a big dance floor. It would be about dancing. But then what I understand from people talking is that basically at the time when I was away after finishing school the really intensely commercial table-serviced clubs opened and killed those clubs. When my friends and I were students, we went half the time to LOgO, which was the closest to a Shelter vibe. Less clubby but more DADA-ish bar/club but also with a more DIY, creative community vibe. We went there half the time and then we went to these big crazy clubs half the other time.
There aren’t many academic works on the scene after Shelter closed, but there has been a lot of media attention.
I think the fact that it closed at the peak of its influence and popularity meant that this pioneering place quickly became legend. I remember I tried to go on the closing night on my way to Elevator, just to say hi to the friends there. The line was already around the block, also because it was on New Year’s Eve.
I remember that night because many posted about it on social media. It was the time when people started to engage more with WeChat, which was not that big around 2013 and 2014.
Interesting. It was more like Weibo at the time. I wonder how much the fact the city is so transient—out of the people that were really core in Shelter, so few of them still live here—I wonder if that has played much of a role in the fact that academically these stories don’t get told so much. I was thinking about this with DADA the other day when I was playing at their closing party. I used to do, for three or four years, a party every month at DADA so that was like the home base for me. At that time I was also partying at Shelter a lot. And I’ve realized all the people I was organizing parties with or going to their parties at DADA, none of them are still in Shanghai. It made it weird to think the thing is closing and all the people that in my head are so strongly connected to it are not around. Maybe that makes it harder to have an in-depth focus on things.
Maybe most clubgoers back then were university students then they graduated and just went elsewhere?
Maybe. In the end, when it got really popular, it was more students. I never thought Shelter was a student-ish crowd. Like DADA to me was a very student-based crowd. Shelter felt a bit older in general. Not a lot older, but it felt more like people in their mid-20s.
So they just started to work, got a bit of money to party.
Yeah exactly, a little bit (laughs).
Tianyu Jiang: Could you share some of your experiences at Shelter?
Eloise: The first time I went there probably was in 2013 or 2014, I was still with my ex-partner. I followed him to Shelter since he would go there often. He’s into music. My understanding of electronic music back then was the many old tracks introduced to me via Douban Radio. I actually resisted and disliked that place. One of the reasons is that many people there were high. You see, I didn’t like the place and my ex was there so often, so I felt very strange. I would mock him as having to “crawl through a rat hole” since the club space used to be literally a bomb shelter under the ground. That feeling of aversion lasted quite long. I didn’t feel a part of Shelter even until it closed. Nevertheless, Shelter holds many memories because of my personal relationship, which also ended around the time the club closed.
How would you describe the music played at Shelter?
The British genres, experimental and some avant-garde stuff. It was also when people like Tzusing, Osheyack, Pan Dajing started to emerge.
What was your impression of the crowd?
It was mixed, all sorts of people. I think at the beginning, there weren’t many who dressed in ya-aesthetics as they are today.[7] One could also see the afterwork suit-and-tie type.
I recall an interview about the club ALL when it opened, that ALL doesn’t want to be the new Shelter. Would you say there’s much difference between Shelter and ALL?
They are completely different. Shelter, as I said earlier, was a hole hidden from sight. ALL—we both have been there—is quite a fancy place, almost like a commercial bar. It had that vibe from the beginning: the choice of the locale, the size of the space, the overall interior. On these aspects, it does a better job than Shelter [did].
You mentioned that people were rather casually dressed at Shelter.
My impression during the early days was that people who had a rather individual style were those who work in the fashion industry, or have experience from abroad, or those who have professional relationships with art and fashion. Or people who might own a vintage store, so they’ve got the outfits. For the ones whose identity already embodies elements of art and fashion, it’s perhaps habitual for them to dress up. But in the latter stage of Shelter, the ya-aesthetics also became popular.
Many would say Shelter is where underground electronic music scene begins in China, which seems to mythologize the club.
After hearing what I just said, would you think that I mythologize the place?
Not at all (both laugh). Yet the media coverage has made it a starting point of everything.
I think to mythologize something in the meantime will stifle that exact thing.
Are the people you used to go clubbing together with at Shelter, still in the scene today?
I think my friends all had something to do with music, either as DJs or promoters. Most of them are not in the scene anymore. Only a few stayed. The famous ones I mentioned earlier are, of course, advancing their careers in the scene. Gaz continued to work with SVBKVLT after returning home. I think people who are at the core of the scene, or who have certain privileges, will keep working with it and getting involved: people from Shanghai, the locals as well as the expats. As for the consumers of the night, their configuration has shifted many times already. For Shelter or ALL, they are just passers-by. And for them, the club is also a place that passes.
Just as a place of choice to spend the weekend.
Yes. I guess most people won’t attach anything “heavy” to the scene.
Figure 2. The door of Shelter after the closing day, with a paper saying “Closed Forever”. Photo credit: Andrew Rochfort, used with permission.
Tianyu Jiang (they/she) is a PhD candidate at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Their doctoral project is an ethnography on the recent years’ proliferating underground queer and women-centered music scenes in Shanghai. Their main research interests include urban space/place, underground creative scenes and digital literacy.
Fernandes, Sanj. 2012. “Clubbing in Shanghai.” Resident Advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1568>, (accessed 21 December 2023).
Hawthorn, Carlos. 2016. “Shanghai Club The Shelter To Close After License Renewal Rejected.” Resident Advisor. <https://ra.co/news/36800>, (accessed 21 December 2023).
VICE Thump. 2013. “How A Bomb Shelter Became Shanghai’s Grittiest Nightclub.” Vice. <https://www.vice.com/en/article/gvnpdx/nightclub-shelter-shanghais-grittiest>, (accessed 21 December 2023).
Williams, Gaz. 2016. “Cutting-Edge Music Finds A Home In Shanghai At The Shelter”. Electronic Beats. <https://www.electronicbeats.net/club-feature-shelter-shanghai/>, (accessed 21 December 2023).
Didjelirium. “2011-05-12 – Battle of the Beats in Shanghai”. YouTube,
22:01. Uploaded on 4 July 2011.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEvT_a7gDgQ&t=35s&ab_channel=Didjelirium>,
(accessed on 21 December 2023).
Oliver Wang. “The Shelter, Shanghai”. YouTube, 00:46. Uploaded on 6
July 2009.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw73iiTqaF0&ab_channel=OliverWang>,
(accessed on 21 December 2023).
[1] The club was closed on the 31 December 2016 due to a rejected lease renewal (Hawthorn 2016). The names “The Shelter” and “Shelter” were used interchangeably in the interviews.
[2] The interviews were conducted in person from July to September 2023 in Shanghai and were a part of my doctoral project focusing more on the post-Shelter underground music scene. Interviews were done in Chinese or English, depending on the interviewees’ native language. Names of the interviewees are pseudonymized either with no relevance to their professional activities, or their chosen names are used with permission.
[3] Some words have been retained in Chinese because it is terminology difficult to translate, so it is more useful to include the original language. These Chinese words are in italics followed by an explanation of the meaning in brackets.
[4] Browse SVBKULT’s discography at <https://svbkvlt.bandcamp.com/>, (accessed 17 October 2024). Browse Genome’s discography at <https://genome666mbp.bandcamp.com/>, (accessed 17 October 2024).
[5] Xintiandi is an upscale residential, cultural and entertainment district in central Shanghai with a cluster of shopping malls, fine restaurants, bars and commercial nightclubs.
[6] Browse Scandal’s discography at <https://scandalsounds.bandcamp.com/music>, (accessed 17 October 2024).
[7] In recent years, the single character of ya (“sub-” as used in subculture) has become a frequently used adjective in colloquial Chinese to describe a particular fashion and make-up style, which, to some extent, resembles street fashion, as in “Harajuku scene.”