The Mysterious Soundtrack Of Pyongyang

A low resonating vibration. A long-drawn-out chord that seems to be coming from everywhere around me. It’s an eerie, ethereal, synthesised sound – like something Brian Eno might have created. I check the clock. It’s 6 a.m. I turn over, pull the blanket over my head and try to ignore it. But there’s no escape. The sound is everywhere. Not particularly loud, but eerily insinuating and impossible to ignore. I swing myself out of bed and peer through the curtains into the pale dawn light.

Across the street are three high-rise blocks. They look grey and ghostly. No lights are on. There is no traffic at all in the street, twenty-five storeys below. No sign of a human being, anywhere. The growing awareness of where I am, in a country that has for so long been on everyone’s hate lists, begins to nag away at me. The mysterious soundtrack, the grey and lifeless buildings – it all seems to fit a nightmare pattern. Last night’s welcome seems a world away.

After a few minutes the music stops. I slip into an uneasy sleep. An hour later it starts again. I throw back the blankets and look out of the window again. The grey walls stare back.

At a quarter to eight I’m up, dressed and ready for work when I hear the knock on my door. It’s the film crew, reunited with their equipment and ready to do a quick introductory piece before our supervisors arrive. To my relief, I find I’m not the only one freaked out by the invisible music. The silence of the city is more easily explained. It’s Sunday and early on a Sunday most cities are asleep. Funny where the mind can take you, building up a sinister scenario based on prejudice alone.

The menace dissipated, we film a piece to camera – a first impression, which rather settles me down – then to breakfast, a longish journey, which involves going down to reception, walking to another lift and riding up to the fourth floor of an adjacent tower. The dining room is surreal: an enormous white chamber of banqueting proportions, lit by a constellation of lights shining from a grid on the ceiling. Size does not necessarily mean abundance. The buffet is thin, we’re limited to one cup of coffee each, and there are only two other guests there.

At one end of the room is a large painted panel of a lake and a mountain view. I shall see this again, many times. It is Mount Paektu, Korea’s tallest and most sacred mountain, hard up against the Chinese border in the far north of the country. One of the only images to be allowed to share wall space with the Great Leaders.

We assemble for the day’s filming. This will be the first test of our relationship with Mrs Kim and her team, and already there is a small problem. Neil wants to film me coming out of the hotel and walking to a nearby metro station. There is much discussion among the tourism team. Yong Un, a slim man in his thirties, with dark hair, dark suit and dark eyes, throws troubled glances. Initially it is agreed that I can be filmed leaving the hotel, but for a hundred yards and no further.

Negotiations are then resumed and a compromise is reached. I can be filmed going out of the hotel, but then there is a part of the street which for some reason is out of bounds. Once beyond that, filming can be resumed. I later learn that a department store is being rebuilt and they were unhappy that the mess of the construction site would reflect badly on the city. Once the store was completed they would have had no problem. An early intimation of just how important appearances are to our hosts.

I can only hope it’s just a matter of getting used to each other. Like the North–South handshakes on Friday, hosting a Western film crew for a fortnight is something new for everybody.

Once past the forbidden part of the street, the camera follows me on my way to the nearest metro station, the first stage of my journey to the spiritual heart of the city, Mansu Hill and the monument to the Great Leaders. My immediate impression is of a clean city populated by tidily dressed people in plain, undemonstrative, impersonal outfits. Their clothes are in subdued colours and inexpensive fabrics, but there are the occasional bright anoraks and Western-style backpacks. A woman passes carrying a huge child in a sling in front of her.

One thing that is uniform is the discreet party badge that everybody, man or woman, regardless of status, wears on their left-hand side, over the heart. The badges carry the likeness of the two senior, now deceased, Kims  – Il Sung and Jong Il  – smiling against a backdrop of rippling red flags. These badges are worn by everyone from the age of fourteen upwards, though it doesn’t necessarily denote that they are Party members. Out of a population of some twenty-five million, only two million are full members of the Workers’ Party of Korea. I notice that one of my two designated, on-camera guides, Li Hyon Chol, wears two badges, one on his jacket and one on his shirt in case he has to take his jacket off.

There are almost no private cars on the streets but there is a wide range of public transport including two-car trams, buses and a metro system. The Pyongyang metro, which first opened fifty years ago, now consists of seventeen stations. The one we are travelling from is Yonggwang (‘Glory’). Above the entrance there is a large and striking propaganda poster depicting a group of idealised citizens – an architect, a soldier, a farmer and a worker with a book held aloft – surging forward, their eyes on some distant socialist horizon.

I have seen no consumer advertising at all. Only ideas are sold here. I go down the broad steps, have my ticket checked by an impassive lady, and step onto the escalator. So far no one has taken a blind bit of notice of us.

It’s a long way down to the station platforms. Nick tells me that the reason for this is that the stations were also designed to serve as bomb shelters, though none of our minders will confirm that. But there’s certainly nothing drab or functional about them.

The platforms are contained within a highly ornate, floral-themed chamber reminiscent of the Moscow subway, dressed with marble columns designed like plant stems and hung with glass and metal chandeliers fashioned into intricate leaf patterns.

Music plays, as it seems to do everywhere  – stirring but not aggressively rousing, the soundtrack of North Korea. Peppermint-green and aubergine coloured trains roll in and out frequently, and I travel a few stops as far as Reunification station. No floral theme here but a more sober reminder of their recent history: a series of bronze relief panels depicting heroic workers, some alongside a tractor, others with drills, and in one a sad-looking group of Koreans beside a barbed-wire fence on which hangs a sign ‘US Army. Keep Out’.

It’s an increasingly warm walk from the station up many long, wide steps to the Grand Monument on Mansu Hill. This is dominated by two seventy-two-foot-tall bronze statues. One is of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, coat open, arm raised over the city, and alongside him his son, General Kim Jong Il, known as the Dear Leader, wearing an unzipped parka. (This was recently re-sculpted to replace a rather more suave three-quarter-length coat. More man of the people?)

These two guided the destiny of the DPRK for over sixty years, from its inception in 1948 to Kim Jong Il’s death in 2011. I’ve already noticed that there are no likenesses of the present leader, Kim Jong Un, to be seen. I’m told that’s because ‘he is still learning’. Maybe it’s just that he can’t be immortalised if he’s still alive.

Behind the Leaders is a mural of Mount Paektu, and on either side of them two intricately carved processions of soldiers and workers: men, women and children marching heroically forward with the red flag of the revolution waving above them. It’s a superbly executed piece of perspective and full of idiosyncratic detail. In amongst the teachers and engineers, I find two women looking heavenwards, one of them carrying a chicken, the other a television.

But it’s the monuments of the Great Leaders which have brought us here today, along with a succession of jolly, smiling wedding groups queuing up to be photographed in front of them.

I learn a number of lessons in the next couple of hours. One is that the Great Leaders must only be photographed in their entirety. It is forbidden to show them in part or in close-up. Another is the importance of getting their titles right, either referring to them as Great Leaders or Great Generals or specifically Generalissimo or President for Kim Il Sung and General for Kim Jong Il.

It’s also essential, at all times, to maintain respectful behaviour in their presence. When I sat on one of the steps I was told to get up again and there were palpable cries of horror when our director was seen running to fetch a piece of camera equipment. After my first, quite complicated piece to camera, there was much head-shaking amongst the minders and I was asked to do it again. Not for any political or ideological reasons, but because I had a hand in my pocket.

It’s in this far-from-relaxed atmosphere that I embark on my first interview with So Hyang. She speaks English well, and is clearly trying to be as obliging as possible, but from the start she is defensive. Not surprisingly, as our five minders are lined up behind the camera, watching every move. I begin by asking So Hyang about the badges with the faces of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il that everybody has pinned on their left breast. Are they compulsory? She shakes her head, dismissing my question. Why should they be? Any of the masses (and she uses the word ‘masses’ quite unselfconsciously) would want to wear the badges because the Great Leaders are always alive in their hearts.

As I press her to enlarge on her feelings towards the Leaders, I sense increasing discomfort. There can be no speculation or elaboration of the role of the Leaders. That would be to question the ‘single-hearted unity’ of the country. I try another tack. The Leaders are dressed very ordinarily. Is this deliberate?

She shrugs off the implication.

‘They don’t want to look special. They are humble and simple.’

And seventy-two feet tall.

The Great Leaders are the heads of the family, she explains.

All the love of the people and the love of the country are embodied in them.

I suggest that even the best families have their disagreements. Might there not be things which the leaders do which other members of the family disagree with? I realise almost immediately that I have gone too far. Quite a long way too far. So Hyang shakes her head and looks away in embarrassment. The interview is terminated. There is no direct confrontation over my impertinent question. No one must lose face. Instead our tour company minders call the director across and they go into a huddled discussion.

The interview is not resumed. So Hyang looks shy and apologetic and I’m apologetic too. I just didn’t expect the curtain to come down so definitively and so early in the process.

It’s hot now, there’s no shade or shelter, and I’m beginning to find this triumphal arena oppressive. I feel frustrated, and regret having unwittingly put my guide into such an uncomfortable position. I hope that the frowns and headshakes from her bosses will not spell problems ahead.