The members of English post-punk band Killing Joke are veterans of Britain’s Glastonbury Festival — where Kate Moss made rubber boots glamorous with a farm-girl solution to the Festival’s quagmire conditions — so you wouldn’t think a bit of mud would deter them. But when I surveyed the churned-up ground, live wiring, and torrential rain at last weekend’s InMusic Grassland Music Festival on the wind-swept Hebei grasslands, I saw the spectre of defeat.

I’d planned to profile the band and report on their festival gig, but from the moment I joined their tour bus in Beijing I knew the only way to get my story was to turn band manager and Mr. Fix-It to make it happen. And in the end, happen it did: at about 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, the British concert veterans put on a kick-ass show in the paralyzing cold for a 500-strong die-hard Chinese crowd. This is my diary of four days on the road with Killing Joke in China.

Wednesday, July 28,11:30 a.m.

Meet Jaz Coleman (vocalist), Geordie Walker (guitarist), and Bert Neven (road manager) at Beijing Airport. En route to the hotel, Coleman and Walker look for English-language signs and chat about the Chinese music scene. They want to know if it’s been an easy ride for Western acts.

"It depends," I tell them. "Sometimes when promoters mess up they blame the government: it’s an easy target when you live in a Communist country. But control has certainly been tighter since Bjork made Free Tibet statements at a Shanghai concert in 2008. She kind of screwed things up for everyone."

"How did the Chinese fans react when she said that?"

"I don’t think they did. Most people didn’t understand what she was saying."

"Ha! You make a political statement and nobody understands. What could be more embarrassing than that?" 

The rest of the band arrives an hour later, and we have dinner. They drink about a thousand shots of vodka and talk for three hours — they haven’t seen each other for a while. I’m told later that two members of the band go on to Sanlitun, Beijing’s bar district. That closes at midnight and they cruise in a cab for an open bar. They finally find one and pay the cab, only to find that the "bar" is a gentlemen’s establishment.

Friday, July 30,10 a.m.

Pick up the band for the final rehearsal. Beijing traffic can turn to rush hour at any time of the day, but we finally make it to the rehearsal room near the Olympic bird’s nest and buy some concentrated lime juice, which Walker drinks with hard liquor before every show.

The next three hours offer the memory of a lifetime — a private Killing Joke concert. The guys go from polite gentlemen to rock demons: "Love Like Blood," "Change," "Madness," "Eighties" — all those furious tunes come to life right in front of me.

Friday, July 30, 3 p.m.

Waiting for the van to take me and the crew to the festival venue, a small town 190 miles north of Beijing on the Hebei steppe, maybe a three-and-a-half-an-hour drive. I chat with Coleman.

"I have three daughters," he tells me. "They’re all beautiful girls. I spend my time living between Prague, Switzerland, and New Zealand. I live on a small island in New Zealand. There’s no electricity and no mobile phone signal. I go fishing, grow vegetables, and compose."

Spoken like a rock star.

Saturday, July 31, 1 a.m.

It’s been seven hours on the road, during which time I’ve listened to endless complaints, heard innumerable conversations beginning, "You remember [girl’s name]?" and learned the term "shag." The driver got lost, we sat through a major traffic jam at a tollgate, drove forever across the grasslands, slithered through a bog where we almost had to get out and push, and heard Coleman ask "HOW MUCH LONGER?" 11 times (by my count). A Killing Joke lyric comes to mind: "This is madness... madness."Bassist "Youth" Glover seems to be the only one not crazed by the trip.

"You know what?" I say to him, "since it’s raining, I’m hoping to recapture my 2007 Glastonbury memory. That mud changed my life."

Saturday, July 31,7a.m.

After less than three hours of sleep, I go with the roadies to the festival site, which turns out to be a horror show of mud and rain-soaked wiring. Road manager Bert Neven almost slips and then says, "Geordie won’t perform on a stage like this. Too dangerous."

Things seem hopeless, and the organizers are making back-up plans for if the show can’t go ahead. "Did you get your Glastonbury mud?" Glover asks when we get back to the hotel.We brief the band on the scene, expecting the worst. But they tell us they’ll play if the organizers can fix the problems. I relay that to the site, then hang out at the hotel all day, wandering around looking for coffee and milk for the band — not that easy to come by in Inner Mongolia.

Everybody’s mood gets worse as they get hungrier. I have my first moment of tension with Walker in a restaurant when he finds there’s no meat (yet) on the table. "Wang, that looks like a vegetarian meal for girls," he says, standing inches from my face. "Don’t just wait till shit happens. Think ahead!" I try not to brain him with a beer bottle. Finally, we go out to the site, where a one-day miracle has happened. The organizers have thrown a roof over the stage, changed the carpet, set up backstage tents, bulldozed the mud, and built a road to the stage with cobblestones. There’s going to be a show.

We’re sitting in the backstage tent, and we find that Walker’s concentrated lime juice got left in the hotel. For the second time that day, he blows his stack with me.

"I’m not going on stage without it," he shouts. "You’ve still got fucking time. Go back and get it!"

After a day of maddening delay, I lose my cool as well: "You can’t talk to anybody like that! Who do you think you are?"

Of course, I still go back for it. Walker shakes my hand and gives me a strange hug. "Thank you," he said. "It’s my medicine."

Sunday, August 1, 2 a.m.

Killing Joke finally takes the stage. The show is amazing, definitely one of the best sets I’ve seen anywhere. Maybe for a band who’ve been together for more than 30 years, all this on-the-road madness means nothing. For me, it’s been a wild ride, and it’s the first time I’ve had to deal with so many emergencies: no doubt the same was true for the festival organizers.

"It’s like the Czech Republic when it first came out of Communism," Neven said to me while we were waiting at the hotel. "Everybody wants to do everything, but nobody knows how to do it. It’s a learning process."

Sunday, August 1, 10a.m.

Less than three hours of sleep again. On the road for Beijing in the same van. Coleman, Walker, and Neven are leaving for Prague in the evening.

Sunday, August 1, 6 p.m.

Downtown Beijing: We’ve been on the road for seven, no, eight hours, and we’re stuck in traffic. Again. Coleman gets slowly out of his seat and comes over to me.

"HOW MUCH LONGER?" he groans. "I don’t control traffic. I don’t ever want to come to China again." He shakes his head and walks back to his seat. "It’s disgusting."

"Yeah, neither do I," I reply.

When we get to the hotel, everyone rushes to their rooms to pack for the airport. I get a call from Kang Mao, the vocalist for a local rock band called SUBS. "We were in the Killing Joke tent last night," she says. "Jaz promised to sign our Killing Joke vinyl collections if we can make it to their hotel in Beijing. Can you talk to him?" 

Coleman doesn’t hesitate. "I’ll wait for her," he says. Kang Mao and her boyfriend, SUBS guitarist Wu Hao, come racing into the hotel lobby. Coleman gets their address and offers to mail more vinyl to them. In Killing Joke’s last China moment, they receive the worship they deserve.

Sunday, August 1, 10 p.m.

They’re on the plane. The madness is over.