TOUR REPORT: King Ly Chee Asian Tour 2015 – Medan

Morning of our third show of the tour – Medan – DIY show at Amaliun Food Court.

We all woke up well-rested because unlike our regular tours we have never played the same city more than once. So it was nice to already be in the city that we were going to play in later that night…nice sleep in. After I woke up the first thing I had to do was track down our merch bag that we gave to Sonic Fair to help sell for us at the festival the night before. It was a couple hours of contacting one Sonic Fair staff member after another until finally the awesome Putri got back in touch and said that the merch bag was downstairs ready for me to pick up. Before I went to get the bag I was able to go hang out with the Sonic Fair production crew in their hotel room and talk metal for about an hour which was a lot of fun…such nice people and no wonder Sonic Fair is run so well when the crew truly enjoys their work and are proud of what they do.

You guys are AWESOME!!!

 Our homie Yagi was the main man in charge of coordinating our pick up from the hotel lobby to get to our new hotel that Dolly – promoter for tonight’s show – had set up for us. The location of the new hotel was perfect – right across the street from the venue tonight which literally was ABOVE a foodcourt 🙂

That big green box above the food court was where the show was going to be held

We checked into the hotel and then took all our merch over to the venue to set that up. Dolly organized a super nice dude to help us sell merch the entire day which was very helpful for us to then get some food, check out the city and check out the other opening bands…the venue itself was a MASSIVE hall and all the equipment/stage set up was great…definitely couldn’t wait to get on stage that night and especially watch bands like Martyr and No One Cares! I have been promoting both those bands on UniteAsia.org for the past couple of months and it was so cool to get a chance to share the stage with these phenomenal Indonesian hardcore bands!

Promoter for Medan show – Dolly 

Venue being set up…

Yagi took us downstairs for food at the food court which we THOROUGHLY enjoyed…then his buddy Anes also showed up who plays in a killer band called Trap. Both Yagi and Anes quickly felt like old friends that we hadn’t seen in years but the reality was, we just met these guys for the first time right then and there…that’s the power of something that runs deep like punk and hardcore. After food they told us about some tourist sites that we could check out and so we got to walk around Medan checking out a beautiful mosque and another tourist site where Indonesian royalty used to stay. It was just nice to be walking around with our Indonesian brothers talking about life and learning about each other’s cultures…Yagi and Anes are the best hands down. It was nice to be taken care of like that…

Chillin’ with the villain Anes  

  Traveling and meeting people is the best…here we’re chilling with Keep The Faith…SUPER GOOD BAND!!!

We brought so much merch on this tour…some of the best merch we’ve ever had!
 After that we went back to the hotel to chill for a bit and rest up for the show. We knew what time No One Cares was playing so Ivan and I made sure that we got back to the venue in time to see them.

 Yeah…me and my dog Ito of No One Cares

When we got back to the venue the place was PACKED…there had to be a few hundred kids in there. And when I mean “kids” I literally mean that the audience seemed to be made up of mainly 13-14 year olds which was SUPER cool! I mean seriously, if you want hardcore to be long lasting you gotta get to the youngest of the youngest – the ones that are most easily influenced…now, these kids could be influenced by negative people and ideas OR influenced by powerfully positive ideas and people like those found in punk and hardcore.

No One Cares KILLING it… 

 The only problem with playing to a room full of 13 to 14 year olds was of course – how are these young kids going to be able to buy our merch? There is no way. And we brought SO MUCH merch and paid so much extra baggage at the airports because people kept telling us “Wait til you get to Medan! They’ll buy all your merch…” They must’ve been talking about a whole different type of a show…I think we sold 10 shirts that night…we brought 400 for the tour. Hahahahaha…our huge mistake unfortunately…

Dude – when No One Cares got on stage the place went OFF! Holy shit…my buddy Ito is the singer for this band and he also plays in Martyr (the other band that set the place off tonight)…he didn’t have to sing a word basically because the room of at least 200 to 300 kids were singing along, clamboring on stage, diving, head stomping, EVERYTHING you could imagine for a good STRONG hardcore scene. That’s what I was witnessing in front of my eyes and I immediately thought – this might be the best hardcore scene I’ve EVER seen in Asia. It was that breathtaking a spectacle to watch…No One Cares totally killed it with their brand of Leeway influenced hardcore – but that audience TOTALLY destroyed it…the same thing happened later that night for our buddy Yagi and his AWESOME band Martyr.

By the time we got on we were dealing with some issues about our transportation to Dumai later that night. Dumai was the next stop on our tour and we just found out that the drive was 12 hours AND that we would have to leave right after we played tonight to get there. Not really a problem at all until they told us that there were only 2 cars available and the two cars need to fit 5 King Ly Chee members and 4 Keep The Faith members AND all our baggage…did I already tell you how many bags we had? There was no way that was going to happen…so poor Yagi had the horrible responsibility of trying to figure out at least one more car for our trip to Dumai. When I mean “poor” guy – I REALLY mean poor guy…I can’t imagine how stressful it was for him to have to handle all this AND play a show that night…but there he was with pencil, paper and calculator in hand trying to figure out the cheapest way for us to rent one more car for our trip since we had to pay for this extra ride. But in the end…he totally came through and saved our lives because the trip turned out to be 15 hours – imagine 15 hours stuck in two small cars with all your bags all over your laps.

Us on stage – photo taken by local hardcore heroes Fingerprint…SUPER FUCKING NICE GUYS!

We cannot say it enough – THANK YOU YAGI FOR ALL THE STRESS WE GAVE YOU!!!!!!!! You are THE man! Any time any place, we will do whatever you need.

When we got on stage it was a good time…it was so cool to see so many Indonesian hardcore kids losing their minds to our music and lyrics. We are not a big band in Asia…not many people know us but we try our best to get our music out. For this tour we even made our songs all FREE downloads so people could check them out. It definitely helped especially at this show because songs like Lost in a World, Overcome, Time Will Prove all went off…

We ended the show and had to go quickly change, get food and start packing the cars to leave on our 15 hour journey. It was around 1 or 2am when we finally got packed up and in the cars leaving Medan…next thing I did was sleep…