China Bears

This week, Bridgewater four-piece China Bears had a chat with our friends CLOSEUP for Wednesday’s Artist Spotlight feature for a casual chat as the virus pandemic puts plans on hold.

China Bears, it’s great to have a chat! We love your music as you well know. You take on a huge Southampton headline show at Heartbreakers, what should we expect!?!

We’re glad you enjoy the music, thanks very much! We were very excited to be playing there this month but we’ve now moved the date to Friday, August 28th due to the Corona Virus. We can’t wait to play, it’s going to be our first rescheduled show back after many months so it’s going to be a jam packed set of old and new China Bears songs!

What part of the musical process do you enjoy most, and why? is it performing live, creating your tracks or..?

The journey of a song can be quite a lengthy one for us full of many highs and lows. The feeling after you’ve written a song that makes sense of how you’re feeling can be very addictive, and then being able to release and play that to people who also take something from it is very special. It’s a real pleasure to see something we’ve collectively made go from an idea to a finished piece, and we’re so lucky to be able to meet lots of people up and down the country who connect through music.

Your tunes have been listened to hundreds of times across the world as Spotify informs us, Spotify is now such a big player in the industry, how important do you think it is for acts?

Spotify plays a big part of how people discover our music. We’ve been lucky enough to be featured in a few editorial places over the years which means people who can’t necessarily see us at a show have found us through those playlists, so for new bands like ourselves it can be a huge help in exposing us to wider audience.

If you created a China Bears Festival, and could pick three headliners, who would you go for?!

I think we’d all have a slightly different answer for this but I would say: Abba, Bombay Bicycle Club and The National.

Tell us a little about how you, as a band, plan to deal w/ COVID 19’s delay on the industry? We know you were affected by SXSW, but any other factors?

We had to cancel our trip to SXSW and reschedule our Spring tour which was a huge bummer but definitely the right call given how the virus has unfolded. The safety of our fans and the band always take priority. A lot of festivals we were scheduled to play have also been cancelled which is also a huge shame as festival season is always something to look forward to.

But we’re all in this together and we’re trying to do our bit by donating to venues and buying band’s records when we can. We’ve also enjoyed playing some streaming shows over social media which has been a really fun way to connect with everyone. We’re also trying to use this extra time to be as productive as we can and finish off a batch of new songs.

Rescheduled show dates

28/08 – Southampton – Heartbreakers
10/09 – London – Sebright Arms
17/09 – Brighton – The Hope and Ruin