Vietnam is a country I spent a lot of time in some years ago and I miss it dearly. It’s a phenomenal place with an incredible amount of character. It’s also hugely different in of culture and attitude to the UK, and I think this is what drew me to it.
A friend who settled there pointed me at a twitter post by a BBC journalist who was spending the afternoon at an outdoor metal gig in Hanoi and this caught my interest. I’d not heard of anything like this taking place in Hanoi when I was there and pretty much assumed that metal was a virtually non-existent genre in the country.
I'm having a great party congress in Hanoi. Watching a thrash metal band in 7 degree freezing rain. pic.twitter.com/NXKW07NwV6
— Jonathan Head (@pakhead) January 23, 2016
The original tweeter, BBC’s Jonathan Head, pointed me toward the band’s facebook page and I’m hoping to follow this up with them. In the meantime, the video interview he published is well worth a watch. From a political viewpoint, it asks a lot of questions regarding youth and freedom in a communist country. From a musical perspective it demonstrates that you don’t need a heaving, enclosed venue to stage-dive!
My thanks to Jonathan for his original post and being kind enough to point me in Windrunner’s direction, and to Steve Jackson for tagging me in his retweet.
Windrunner: facebook
