On this rock I stand

Brand members of Second Hand Rose Yao Lan (above left) and Liang Long (above right) performing at a show. [Photo provided to China Daily]

There are probably few people who know as much about Beijing's music scene as Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau. In fact, as a student of Chinese at Leiden University in his hometown in the Netherlands, his master of arts thesis was about an underground rock band from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region called Tongue. As a follow-up, for his doctoral dissertation, he looked at mainstream Chinese musicians such as Faye Wong and Second Hand Rose.

At the end of the 1990s Groenewegen-Lau, now 35, played drums in a band at college, which soon broke up, but he continued drumming as a hobby.

He first came to China in 2001, he says, and before that, what he knew about the country was distilled mainly from Chinese ancient poems and essays he read in Chinese textbooks at university.

In 2011, after obtaining his doctor's degree, he returned to China and started to play the drums in several bands. At the end of 2012 he joined the local rock band Second Hand Rose and had his first show with it, which made a deep impression on him, he says.