When local electro trio Minuit headlined a music festival in Hanoi last weekend, Scott Kara went along to see the Kiwi music flag being flown where it's never flapped before
It's not every Thursday night you find yourself on the back of a motorbike hurtling through the nutty streets of Hanoi. With total disregard for personal safety, TimeOut is in a race across Vietnam's chaotic capital with the three members of Minuit - New Zealand's leading exponents of electropop - to see who can get to the restaurant first. Helmetless and holding on for dear life we barrel through intersections as swarms of scooters come at us, horns tooting incessantly. We roar to a stop outside Bia Hoi Viet Ha, a grubby sprawling street-corner eatery where the crowd sit on small plastic chairs around low tables already groaning with beer.
"That was the coolest f****** thing ever," beams a triumphant Ruth Carr, Minuit's singer and victor in tonight's race. She was riding pillion with Christchurch-raised Giles Cooper who has lived in Hanoi for 10 years.
Cooper and his three other bikie mates - also expats from Australia and Britain who visited the city, fell in love with it and ended up making it their home - are the organisers of the MAG Music Festival which is on in Hanoi in two days time. Minuit is headlining the day-long gig staged in the grounds of the old American Embassy in the city centre. Cooper saw the band play in Christchurch a few years ago and liked them so much he's invited them a number of times to play in Vietnam.
"We've made an interesting little in-road with Giles," grins Minuit's Paul Dodge as he tucks into some stringy watercress-like weed, fish cakes, and another glass of beer. "And it's great after two years of invitations that we could finally make it."
Also on the festival bill are bands from Thailand, Canada, Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, and local up and coming Vietnamese acts.
It's a rare event in a country like Vietnam where there is little - if any - live music. So Cooper says the idea behind the festival is to work towards establishing a music scene in Hanoi and at the same time raise awareness and funds for MAG - Mines Advisory Group - an organisation that clears unexploded mines, bombs, and grenades left behind following the Vietnam War which ended in 1975. These still pose a threat to the Vietnamese people, especially in remote rural areas.
Plus, the festival is also an excuse to have a big party.
But putting on a concert in Vietnam is not easy with the Government providing many hoops to jump through. While the country is starting to open up to change, the grip of communism and the rules and regulations that go with it means people are still a little reluctant to let their hair down.
Even before Minuit arrived here they were caught in the bureaucracy. They had to provide a set list of the songs they would be playing and supply the lyrics to Except You and new song 25 Bucks. There's also a strict curfew of 11pm to adhere to at the festival - although an after-party at a secret venue has been arranged.
"I hope we actually get to play," jokes Dodge.
Not that they will be playing much during this visit. It's more like a holiday - they are here 10 days, play two shows, and the rest is about sightseeing (they head for Ha Long Bay after the festival and then south to Ho Chi Minh City where they play the second show).
Then of course there's eating and drinking to be done, of which everyone does a lot of tonight at the Bia Hoi. Good evening Vietnam, where the beer flows freely and the food just keeps on coming.
The next day, over a long lunch on the rooftop of Koto cafe, Minuit tell TimeOut that they are happy with their lot. They're happy making the music they make and "flying the flag for doing it our way" - and flying the flag for New Zealand music while they're at it.
They would rather spend their money playing in a country like Vietnam - with no music scene - than at an industry showcase like SXSW in Texas.
They say their "business model" has always been if there is someone in a country who likes their music then they'll go and play there, which is how they came to be in Vietnam.
"This Vietnam thing is so typical of how Minuit have always done things right from the start," says Ryan Beehre, the band's most unassuming member.
They started out back in 1998 in Nelson - where Beehre still lives while Carr and Dodge, who are partners, live in Wellington - when Minuit recorded a demo tape to get themselves on the bill of now defunct outdoor dance music festival The Gathering.
Since then they have released debut album The 88, with songs like the cheeky and threatening Menace and sing-a-long favourite The Boy With Aubergine Hair, and in 2006 they followed up with The Guards Themselves, which featured the excellent Fuji.
And they've played many shows around the world and in countries not on the traditional band tour circuit like Finland, Kosovo, Czech Republic, Russia, and now, Vietnam.
"Yep, we're clocking up the communist visas in our passports," laughs Dodge. "But our goal is to just play music."
The release of third album, Find Me Someone To Love Before I Die A Lonely Death dot com, out at the end of June, signals a brighter outlook both personally and in terms of sound.
In short, the past four years have been tough - in 2005 and 2006, Carr underwent treatment for a rare form of cancer which temporarily paralysed her left vocal cord. "They had spent eight hours trying to save my life and the first thing I said to them was, 'just kill me', because I was in so much pain."
The ketamine she was given helped alleviate that a little - "I had a stuffed-up brain. I wouldn't do K recreationally," she jokes - but she still finds the experience hard to talk about. She didn't know if she was going to be able to sing again and she is still unsure about her prognosis.
"I don't really want to talk about it," she says.
"We didn't know what was going to happen. It's a really rare [cancer], so they just don't know much about it. So for me personally it was just really hard and sometimes [on The Guards Themselves] I didn't even know what I was singing. I feel displaced from the songs.
"It's a really strange album in that I was so conscious I didn't want it to be the cancer album, and I tried so hard for it not to be, that it became that. Whereas the new album's more about the music again. On the last one I was trying hard to be strong but this one is strong," says Carr.
Musically the album uses more live instruments than before and while Beehre and Dodge have made a name for themselves as electronic knob-twiddlers they are also fine musicians.
On occasion Minuit have an acoustic part to their live set where the pair play guitars.
"And they look so cute because he [Beehre] plays left handed and he's right handed," hoots Carr.
"On the second album we had done everything inside my laptop," says Beehre.
"We'd just been stuck inside a computer. This time round it was about getting gear and using instruments that meant we were satisfied with the sound. The songs just felt bigger and it needed to be physically bigger."
One issue inciting some debate, especially between Beehre and Carr, is what to call the song with the working title Aotearoa. She's fine with it being Aotearoa, even though she never sings it in the song ("'I couldn't get it to work without it sounding contrived."), whereas Beehre prefers NZL. Although I point out that it could possibly be a little too like an America's Cup yacht.
The whole idea and sentiment of the song has also been playing on Carr's mind.
"I really didn't want to put the words New Zealand in it. I was embarrassed that it was cliche and twee. But I just kept coming back to it and I was just censoring myself.
"I mean how many songs do we sing that have American city names in them? I am allowed to say the name of my country and not feel a cringe thing. The first few times we started doing it live though I did a disclaimer."
Elsewhere on the album there's "skippy" first single, Wayho, which entered the top 30 singles charts last week, and standout track 25 Bucks which has a bouncy and twisted synthpop bent.
"In true Minuit fashion I like how it mixes chirpy with apocalyptic," says Dodge of the songs' menacing lyrical content about breaking someone in two and then kneecapping them.
It's 25 Bucks they open their set with at the festival. Many of the punters stand around looking a little confused by this odd-sounding band many would never have heard before.
They're odd looking too, with Beehre a stoic yet stylish figure who will light up a fag as he "plays" his sampler; Dodge is more active, doing everything from dancing, to moving the foldback speakers into a better position; and Carr is a mix of beautiful, flighty, and unhinged as she bounces and bounds around.
But once they crack through Menace ("This song is dedicated to all the people who made this happen.") and end with a frenzied and foul-mouthed finale, a stage invasion ensues. What would the authorities make of this?
Earlier in the day representatives from the Ministry of Culture turned up and the bands had to play one song each so their lyrics and, one supposes, the mood of their performance could be vetted. But there were no problems and the festival was given the official stamp of approval.
"Let's do this again next weekend," shouts Carr to the more than 2000-strong crowd made up of an equal mix of Vietnamese and foreign residents.
Minuit are invited back for an encore and strangely enough it's the deep, smouldering groove of Aotearoa, which they had vowed not to play in Vietnam.
It turns out to be a fitting, touching and unifying end to the festival and what a way to fly the flag. Now where's the motorbike to take me to the after-party?
LOWDOWN
Who: Minuit
What:Taking local electro-pop to the world
Line up: Paul Dodge, Ryan Beehre, Ruth Carr
New album: Find Me Someone To Love Before I Die A Lonely Death dot com, out June.
Past albums: The 88 (2003); The Guards Themselves (2006) Playing: The Montecristo Room, Auckland, June 19
