Scratching The Surface
Jake Newby on journalism, gig coverage, and chronicling the rise of China's underground music scene
This post is the first in what’s meant to be a series of profiles of music journalists working to bring under-covered scenes to a broader audience. Today’s is a a feature on Jack Newby, a British journalist who has spent almost two decades covering independent Chinese music from both within and outside the country.
2026 might be the year of the Chinamaxxer, but my favorite period for vicarious China-themed nostalgia will always be the mid-2000s. From what I’ve heard, China in the aughts was buzzing with pre-Olympics energy, alive with the excitement of a people whose bright future had moved close enough for them to reach out and take it. Musically, this led to an explosion of underground creativity. This was the time of Snapline and Carsick Cars and the rest of the No Beijing avant-gardists; of P.K.14 and Re-TROS and Nanjing’s unexpected ascent as the crucible of Chinese post-punk; of SUBS and SMZB and the ongoing debate of whether China’s punk capital sits in Beijing or Wuhan.1 When I actually moved to China in 2014, just before the Xi regime became particularly repressive, there was already a sense that I was catching the tail end of a golden age.
But Jake Newby arrived smack in the middle of it. The veteran journalist didn’t know about any of this when, in the early 2000s, he went to a university career fair in Britain and ended up with a one-way ticket to teach English in Shanghai. But the plane he took touched down in 2005, landing him in one of China’s most vibrant cities in one of the most vibrant periods of the country’s contemporary musical history. Over the next two decades, Jake would build a career covering that scene for multiple publications, becoming one of the most recognized English voices on China’s underground music scene in the process. He’s still at it today with his newsletter Concrete Avalanche, providing a gateway for readers outside China to encounter and contextualize a world that has only grown more active since he started writing about it.
“I was very fortunate with the circumstances and the timing in a lot of ways,” Newby tells me over a video call. Sporting a wool beanie and a longish but well-kept beard, Newby’s presence in the conversation is thoughtful and calm. He peppers our discussion with insightfully humble statements like the one leading this paragraph, a real-time display of the quality I’ve come to associate most with good journalists, particularly those covering music scenes they came to from the outside: a willingness to put their ego aside and center the lens on the people they’re writing about. In addition to his love of good tunes, Newby’s desire to bring his subject’s lives into focus has been the guiding force in his career. “It was very much just a collision of my interest in music and my interest in telling people’s stories,” he says.
Hailing from a village in Wiltshire, Newby had always been a music fan. As a child, he would dig through his parent’s record collection and record songs off the radio to make mixes. University provided an opportunity for him to start going to more shows, as well as to hone his skills as an essayist via a writing-heavy degree in politics and sociology. However, Newby’s journey into music writing was, like his journey to China, largely unplanned. “After my first year in Shanghai, I’d sort of fallen in love with the city,” he tells me. “So I went to East China University, took an intensive Chinese language learning course. I was still teaching a little bit on the side, but I also started to pick up a little bit of writing and editing work for various English-language magazines.”
At the same time, Newby was going to more shows. At one early Re-TROS show, where Newby was one of the few foreigners in the audience, a young woman approached him to find out how he’d learned about the venue. In one of those lucky turns that Newby alluded to, that woman turned out to be scene insider Sophia Wang, who started introducing Newby to more bands. This accelerated Newby’s entry into a music scene that he quickly recognized was egregiously undercovered. “I was excited and interested in the scene, but also like, ‘why is there not more information about these kind of acts?’” Newby says. “So I really fell into wanting to speak to them, wanting to find out their stories, but also wanting to try and bring those stories to a broader audience as well.”
Not finding this type of coverage anywhere else, Newby started writing his own, contributing to blogs like the Shanghaiist and Kungfuology, the latter of which he co-wrote with Andy Best. The sweat equity that Newby put into this early writing work ultimately laid the foundation for his long-term career. In 2009, the English-language magazine Time Out, a city guide featuring recommendations for bars, restaurants, and events in places across the world, launched a new publication in Shanghai. Knowing that Newby was well-connected to that scene from his blogging, Time Out’s editor Toby Skinner tapped Newby to head the new publication’s music and nightlife section.
City magazines like Time Out have played an underappreciated role in recording burgeoning music scenes in places like China. Although they’re not usually considered part of the music media landscape, they do have something the more traditional music press has been lacking for some time: staff reporters who are deeply embedded in the places they’re covering. Since Time Out’s raison d’etre is to recommend events and activities that people in the city can enjoy, their writers necessarily have to be present to experience those events themselves. Directly exposed to the energy permeating these scenes, these writers can find and recognize local gems that will never cross the inbox of music writers in New York.
Skinner was especially focused on including local acts. While Newby had the chance to cover several high-profile international artists when they came through Shanghai (Kanye West and Justin Bieber are both in his interview history), he was also given ample space to write Chinese bands that would go on to become scene leaders. Skinner was also a supportive editor, providing Newby with advice on writing about music gigs that stuck with him throughout his career. “He once told me, the thing that you tell someone when they say, “how was it?”—the first thing that you say back to them should be how you open your article,” Newby recalls. “That’s the aspect that really spoke to you.”
Newby’s move to the nightlife beat was another case of fortuitous timing, putting him in the writer’s seat just as clubs like Shelter and Dada—as well as labels like Shanshui and SVBKVLT—were turning the city into a hub for experimental club music in China. Newby would stay at Time Out Shanghai for almost a decade, eventually becoming Editor At Large. He’d move from there to be the Managing Editor of the Chinese youth-focused publication Radii, then spend several years freelancing for the likes of The Wire, Vogue, and The Financial Times. His stretch as a full-time resident in China ended in 2022 when he moved back to the UK, but he still returns at least once a year and continues to cover the scene from afar via Concrete Avalanche.
Throughout, Newby has been conscious of the possible pitfalls of covering a scene he’s not native to. “In a lot of ways I wish Chinese bands were covered and treated like bands from anywhere else in the world,” he says. English-language coverage, he notes, has a habit of presenting music coming from China as a statement on the country’s political landscape, a lens that isn’t always applied in the same way to bands from Manchester or Brooklyn. Newby has tried to counter this in his own writing by focusing on Chinese musicians’ personal background and circumstances, working to tell their stories rather than superimposing his own.
Fortunately, English-language coverage has also improved over the course of Newby’s career. He calls out Bandcamp Daily and The Wire—as well as journalists like Josh Feola—as being particularly good at covering China’s music scene in a way that “treats artists as artists,”. He also points to a growing network of Substacks that are developing thoughtful coverage of Chinese music and entertainment, including Michael Hong (Mandogap) and Emily Liu (Active Faults). Will Griffith still captures much of the on-the-ground energy at Live China Music. And while Newby acknowledges that life as a music journalist isn’t easy, he still sees space for more writers with perseverance and the ability to find their niche. “I still believe there’s audiences out there for a lot of stories that people want to tell,” he says.2
Even within the relatively narrow focus on China’s musical underground, there’s plenty more to cover. As fun as it is to wax rhapsodic about China’s halcyon mid-2000s, it was ultimately a scene very much centered on Beijing. “Now, it’s really kind of diversified,” says Newby, noting that many cities outside of Beijing and Shanghai have developed their own self-contained musical ecosystems. China’s alt-rock scene in general has also been turbocharged by high-profile shows like The Big Band; Re-TROS, the band that Newby saw with a couple hundred other Shanghai fans when he first moved to China, now perform to tens of thousands.
In other words, nostalgia is a sucker’s game. That pre-Olympics energy never dissipated—it was amplified and refracted, seeding a constellation of microscenes as it cascaded across the country. There’s plenty still happening and plenty more to discover, and certainly no shortage of stories to tell. Newby himself is looking ahead, meeting the future with his signature mix of curiosity and humility. “I am just very excited about what’s going on in terms of alternative music,” he says. “I’m not sure Concrete Avalanche does more than scrape the surface.”
For more of Jake’s writing, check out his profile of Chinese Football for NME or his feature on Wuhan post-rockers Hualun for The Wire. And of course, if you haven’t already, give his newsletter Concrete Avalanche a follow.
Although having been through the freelance grind, Newby is also pragmatic, noting that a steady paying job can be a huge boon for anyone pursuing the writing life. He himself stays busy with a full-time job at an international NGO.