Nico Pocalipse

I'm Nicolas Pocalipse, a musician and music teacher in Hội An. I've been here twelve years now.

I arrived in 2014, and there was literally no music scene at all. We started with a bunch of friends. The first live music place was Soul Kitchen, back then. The owner, Frankie, sadly passed away, about ten years ago now.

We were a bunch of travellers, hippies, backpackers. Frankie would gather us and make sure we stayed around. He bought me a piano, I'd arrived with just a small pickup. Some friends got a camera, and we gathered into a little artist community.

We started doing a lot of jams, pure jams, no covers allowed, collective creation. For our first tours, we'd gather some bands and go from here to Hà Nội, booking a whole train wagon. We were always on it, it was fun.

Yeah. I knew a guy from the squats in Paris, I was living there. I don't really remember him, but we were friends on Facebook. I was backpacking in India at the time, and he told me I should go to Hội An one day. I was out of money, so I just came the next day. It was a good match, we started playing music and made it into a living scene here.

Kind of, yeah.

It's been a long time, so... in the beginning we did a lot of operatic, cabaret style stuff. We were playing covers, operatic renditions of songs from the 1920s, Prohibition style, or rock, David Bowie, Beatles, plus composing our own stuff.

We have a band, La Belle et La Bête, that's been going for 10 years now. We don't play much, maybe twice a year. We're actually touring South Africa next month, and they're inviting us to Namibia too, though Daniel, who's part of it, isn't joining this time. Not really relevant to the local scene here, but exciting.

From here, I've had a few different projects, some Latin bands. Lately I started a Celtic outfit, mostly Irish with some Scottish. I'm from Brittany, western France, which is also a Celtic region, the music is connected to Galicia in northern Spain too, also Celtic. So we did this Celtic thing, and with the same people we also did an Arabic and Middle Eastern project, and a Balkan one. Lots of traditional music from everywhere, trying to play some Vietnamese traditional too. I love that, trad influences from around the world.

I was practicing with Souhail just before this, he runs the drum circles here.

You have two different things, jams and open mics, and for me they're different. Open mics are more: I come, I play a cover of an existing song, or some people do originals. Jams tend to be more no covers.

The longest running one is still Soul Kitchen, used to be every week, now it's one Thursday a month. Less of a crowd now, but still the best sound system in town. Usually free form, even when it drifts into classic blues form, we try to push people out of the box.

Then there's this Wednesday jam. Open mics: Roots on Sundays. Eight Days a Week on Mondays, people really love that jam. Tango used to run on Tuesdays, that's gone now. "Tango's dead." And there's one at the Bungalow on Thursdays, open mic.

There used to be some stuff in Đà Nẵng too, but it's been a long time since I went, I think Thursdays. And there used to be one on Tuesdays at Heaven, that's gone too.

I have to be positive about it. There are a lot of musicians now, that's cool, more than before, and a lot of them are genuinely talented. I'm surprised, honestly.

The main change is there's a bit less opportunity to play, fewer places to do it than before.

Maybe fewer venues, fewer places doing regular weekly events.

As far as I'm concerned though, I've had some really exciting projects going on this year. It's always changing, hard to put in perspective, a bit selfishly, I'm just thinking about my own band. This year was cool, I've had this Latin duet with Anna, that's beautiful.

As musicians there's always a weird thing about covers, I'm a bit weird myself, I've never liked the classic "band on a tourist beach" thing. The name of my first band here, 12 years ago, was Wish You Were Knocking on Tears in California, literally a mashup of the names of songs we refused to play. But they were always requested: Tears in Heaven, Hotel California, Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Wish You Were Here.

We just said no, we don't do that. There was already a thing back then, fellow musicians saying "but you know how it works, we need to play Hotel California, we need to play Wonderwall, it's just the way it is." And I was like, no.

Actually, I think I got more gigs playing niche, random, obscure, absurd stuff. I spent years always trying to go out of the box for jams, not falling back on the cliché of someone showing up and playing the chorus of Wonderwall. No, no, no, it's not a wedding.

Yes, if you get up and play that, you connect with other people in the jam who also don't want to do the covers thing. We'd gather easily around the music, like, "oh yeah, you're one of them."

It's different from somewhere like Hà Nội. In the collective I was part of there, it was kind of half and half Vietnamese and foreigners, you didn't really notice anymore. I had Vietnamese musicians in my band, and it wasn't a "cultural exchange" thing, it was just, we play our music, that's it.

Here, it's different. When I arrived, Hội An was still basically a fishing village, there were some Vietnamese musicians, more than before now, but the tourist development brought people who weren't necessarily into playing music or music gear.

There's Dung from Roots, very good musician, now playing in the Tom Waits tribute band. I was playing with my friend Olivier too, known him for like 25 years, we've played a lot of music together. And there's Dang, one of the craziest musicians I know, used to be at Roots.

There's also a Vietnamese guy from Đà Nẵng, incredible guitarist and singer, one of the originals, used to bring a lot of weirdness to the jams ten years ago. He goes less now. Extremely talented, always pushing for something wilder. He's a bit of a secluded character now, but lovely.

I played with traditional Vietnamese musicians here in Hội An in the early years, Đàn Bầu, Đàn Nhị players. We put on a show and made some recordings, I think I lost them, not sure. They're still around, sometimes they come to the jam at Soul Kitchen. To interview them you'd need a translator, they've been playing in town for a really long time.

What do I borrow? I have a kind of trad band called Tetra UQ, with Daniel, I sing one Vietnamese bolero song, trying to anyway.

Bolero is the core of modern Vietnamese music since the 50s, Vietnam is bolero. The music from the 60s is incredible, all these love songs. I composed a couple of things in that 60s and 70s Vietnamese style. I was briefly part of Saigon Soul Revival, they're actually quite successful, based in Saigon, playing all this 60s music. I was their replacement keyboardist for a bit, because their regular guy was stuck in Europe during COVID.

I've heard some new wave stuff with a Western flavour, more of it lately, but I don't know if that's Vietnam gaining international popularity generally, more media talking about it. I have no idea really. I think a lot of Vietnamese people here aren't necessarily fans of the old music, it can be a "grandmother's music" thing for them.

I'm actually trying to set up a band with Thư, she's a great singer, doing jazz now, and I wanted to try some of this older stuff with her. Same issue though. There's a generation gap here, a long time culturally between generations. Their parents lived through the war, which ended in '75, so they'd be around 60 now, a totally different reality of living compared to someone in their 30s.

A bit, I have friends in some electronic projects, like Âmnimal. But mostly what I've been into is the new trad leaning stuff. I used to play with MOM sometimes, they're a Vietnamese hip hop group from Hà Nội, I did keyboards for them occasionally. They're all about 24, twice my age in energy.

My band, La Belle et La Bête, is the craziest stuff I do right now. It's our own music, very cathartic, for us and for the audience. Usually quite wild.

We played a show with Halcyon, a really good psychedelic surf rock band from Saigon, we played after them, quite a wild night. Usually with La Belle et La Bête it's pretty intense too.

Honestly, not sure, my percussionist is leaving, so I don't know what I'll do without him. Right now I'm mostly playing with Anna. They want to do something with the sunset, maybe get me set up in the treehouse just on keys, something like that. I'm just the pianist, I'll go with whatever they want.

Otherwise, when our violinist gets back from Europe in a couple of months, we'll probably get back to our Balkan project, Sabina.

A lot of people are leaving this summer. I was just talking to Tom, Jungle Lily, about a project, we had some bands together a long time ago. It's a small community, everyone knows everyone, everyone ends up playing together. Sometimes I end up in five bands at once and have to say no to things, try to stay more centred. Other times I'm happy to play less for a few months. This year I played in some reggae and rock folk stuff I don't normally do.

Drummers, they're all leaving.

A proper music venue, not just a bar or restaurant that happens to do music, but a real place built for gigs. Like Rock City was in Hà Nội.

Yeah, 15 years ago, I was there when Rock City opened. I actually filmed it, I do 3D capture work, so I recorded it the day before they knocked it down. I have a digital version you can walk through as an avatar. Sad day.

Maybe smaller, a big place is hard to manage, hard to fill. Not that I'd want to be a venue manager. But something designed for music, with a proper stage that just stays set up. There's a place in Đà Nẵng that's built for music but mostly does resident cover bands, that kind of space, but used properly.

Yeah, it's tough, hard not to play with four people when you want to. But I think that's just the reality now. For venues, make cool events. Don't be scared of that, just do good promotion, not an AI flyer, something that actually looks nice and different. When we did the Celtic night at Halcyon, 150 people came, our first gig. A bit of organisation goes a long way.

A bit, there really aren't enough people doing that here. Just a handful who can properly mix sound. Sometimes you get a gig and there's no sound engineer, you end up dealing with a bad system yourself. I come with the band and try to sort out their technical issues, not my favourite part of the job. But some places, Soul Kitchen, for example, have a genuinely great sound guy, and you can tell, it's a totally different experience. They're really there for the band.

Don't be too much of a crowd pleaser. Don't play the cliché overheard things. You can explore, people are actually more eager than we think to listen to something strange and surprising.