Foreign music has been making headway in China since the first Turkic lutists strolled along the old Silk Road. Now the trendy urbanites of the new China are already used to the sounds of Boston blues bands, jazzmen from Rotterdam and Filipino-inspired Beatles jams. But there is another kind of foreign music-maker that plays in the halls far from the comfy confines of the Cotton Club: The Promo Band.

In recent years, as marketing and branding have become more familiar concepts in China, some companies have taken a cul-tural approach to self-promotion. Music, being the international language, has been a central theme of this tactic, which aims to identify a product with certain lifestyles and values. Usually the product is alcohol, and the lifestyle is Rock 'n' Roll.

Budweiser, Bacardi, Carlsberg and Coors are some of the beverage companies to employ bands and DJs to travel around China performing in clubs, bars and discos, in what musicians refer to with relish as "the Tour." The performers are mainly foreign, though many acts include Chinese as well.

"We performed at a managers' retreat for Coors Light Asia in Kunming, as a one-time thing, and then a week later they called us back and wanted to sign us to a three-month tour," recalls Sam DeBell, a Londoner who has been living in Kunming for the past eight years. "We went all over the place - Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu, Kunming, Fuzhou, Xiamen - you name it," he said.

For that particular tour, Coors brewing company was willing to pay the band a good salary (each band member's take was equivalent to that of an experienced foreign English teacher in Shanghai), plus hotel rooms, air tickets, and hired vans for the quartet, dubbed Fang Bian Mian ("Convenient Noodles”) Blues Band. It seemed like any wannabe rock star's dream come true. But there were a few missteps along the way.

Bright lights, big city

"For one, the places they booked for us to play were not designed for our style of music," said Elijah Kislevitz, Fang Bian Mian's guitarist. "We would be in this dungeon-esque disco club, with the flashing lights and blaring techno, a hundred or more people throbbing on the dance floor, and then they would cut the music and ask everyone to return to their seats to enjoy the foreign music show. What a disaster." Most times there were problems with locating the necessary equipment, noted bassist Sandro Cagnin. "We would tell the club managers we needed five microphones for a proper show and they would only come up with two. Or they would have all five, but no mic stands. One manager told us the waitresses could hold the mics to our faces as we played. I said to him, 'For sure, you are not serious.'"

There were triumphs, however. At the Cobra Club in Kunming, a venue the size of a small high school auditorium, the band was greeted enthusiastically, with great cheers and cries of "Ganbei! Ganbei!" accompanied by much downing of Coors Light, provided to the band gratis at every show. Audience members who offered the band other drinks had to be denied, however. It's all about the branding, after all.

Bai Ren Yue Dui

At times it seems the foreignness of the musical acts chosen for these promo-performances is their only qualification. At the grand opening of the first Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits in Chengdu several years ago, a trio of laowai billed as an R&B outfit had "less soul than a saltine cracker," according to one audience member. Fortunately, Popeye's had scheduled some pre-teen tap-dancing protégés to keep the crowd from moving along and completing their Saturday morning shopping.

Back on the Coors Tour, Fang Bian Mian soon realized why they had been awarded such a fruitful contract: they could sing songs in Chinese.

"About a month into the tour, our worst fears were confirmed," as DeBell tells it. "We happened upon a media kit the company had put together without consulting us at all, and found that our main selling point was that we were 'foreigners who could sing Chinese songs.' They had even listed our name as 'Bai Ren Yue Dui' - 'White Man Band.' It was embarrassing."

Some artists can't stomach such unabashed commercial tactics. Wang Lei, the semi-famous Chinese dub reggae artist who has toured all over France, Finland and China, once quit a lucrative tour with Carlsberg because, "they didn't understand my music." One wonders if the marketing men can be bothered with such sentimentality.