The year's Beijing Pop Festival features big names, such as Supergrass, Placebo and Heavy Metal artist Sebastian Bach.

Music promoter Jason Magnus wants to make Beijing's annual pop festival as famous as Glastonbury in UK or Woodstock and Coachella in the United States. The young Hong Kong-based Harvard graduated started working on the project in 2003.

Last year he founded the Rock For China Entertainment Ltd and forged a partnership with the Beijing Music Festival to present the first Beijing Pop Festival at Chaoyang Park. A dozen bands from the US and UK, including Ian Brown, the frontman for Stone Roses, thrilled locals with a fresh experience of live rock music.

Magnus then promised the Beijing Pop Festival would be developed into a full-blown, non-stop, weekend festival featuring more headline artists.

If the line-up of next weekend's pop festival is anything to go by, the Hong Kong entrepreneur has delivered again.

The second Beijing Pop Festival will be staged again at Chaoyang Park on September 9 and 10, and features 28 bands from all over the world belting it out on three stages. Chinese fans will enjoy a diversity of genres from the glam rock of Placebo to the British pop of Supergrass. There is the heavy metal sound of Sebastian Bach, garage soul of DHAT (Japan) and the retro electro rock of Don Juan Dracula (Norway).

In addition to these big names, who headline many of the major festivals, this year's Beijing Pop Festival will also present many rising artists from around the globe including New York's Johnny Hi-Fi, Detroit's Mozella and Swedish starlet Karin Park.

 "The major international music festivals always present legendary bands and artists, so we try to bring more and more bands of high international reputation to Beijing Pop Festival year by year," said Magnus.

"But it does not mean that we only invite the established foreign bands. We also invite the rising local bands and provide them stage to show their talents and communicate with their counterparts. We hope to make the festival a window through which the world outside China knows more about Chinese rock and pop music."

When it comes to the latest trends in music, the majority of people from the Chinese mainland would first think of karaoke, or pop songs from Taiwan and Hong Kong. However, there are many young Chinese who are fascinated by rock, punk, rap, heavy metal, jazz, hip-hop, reggae and others genres.

Meanwhile, rock and roll has developed in China for some two decades. Some rock bands are rising to the mass market scene. But the current situation is that most of them can only perform at the pubs or at small events and are limited to small audiences.

In past few years, a few rock festivals have been held in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Helan Mountains in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Yulong Mountain in Yunnan Province.

"It's a shame that the urban community, which appreciates rock and other genres of music have very few live concerts except for Hong Kong and Taiwan pop, while the rockers have few public stages to share their talents," Magnus said. "As China's cultural centre, Beijing, which is surrounded by top universities, hosts a diverse of cultural events every year except for a large scale rock/pop festival."

Before he established Rock For China Entertainment Ltd, Magnus considered staging the pop festival in Shanghai or Hong Kong. He finally chose Beijing, because he believed Beijing had the best public ground for rock music.

(Chinaculture.org September 2, 2006)