Joey describes the incident to an interviewer in the documentary Sleeping Monster: “Ten white, six foot loser white men, and we had Jäger shots, and then we just went out for hot pot and just became insanely angry at each other. And, um, it's just piggish, and then, um, me and Cavs have an insane fight then Stu is trying to interject and then it just exploded from there.”
After being asked by the interviewer “did Ambrose have one as well” he responds: “Ambrose had one, yeah, and Eric, yeah… Everyone, literally Jägermeister, we were arguing over nothing.” When asked how long it took to recover, Joey said “A couple… I don’t know, probably a week? But also it was fine.”
This story gives us the outline and the timeframe, showing that Eric was still in the band at this point. This narrows it down to around the date of their gig at the Modern Sky Lab on 2019-11-21. Joey later talked about that night before a performance of the song on 2023-02-25: “This song’s about a fight that we all got in in Shanghai… I wanted more Szechuan tempeh and Cavs didn’t want any and unintelligible this led to a fist fight. It was mainly because we had gotten fucked up on Jäger. And I got food poisoning and then Cavs got… burned, I guess.”
On 2023-06-08, Ambrose explained the origins of the track from his point of view. “We almost broke up this night. Got a little bit too tongue click in China.” Joey interjects, “we had too many Jägerbombs in Shanghai.” Ambrose continues: “we had hot pot and everyone was absolutely maggoted and everyone started arguing about the intensity of how spicy the hot pot was.”
Stu’s recollection of the event is a lot more vague, though he explains the song itself in a Stereogum interview: “We had this one night/day in Shanghai, where we got the classic Szechuan hot pot and got really drunk and all went insane, basically. It was just a bizarre experience that makes sense to anyone who was there. But I suppose the song is also about that transformative element of travel — again, written from the perspective of becoming a butterfly or changing or having a singular experience that feels like you’re hatching from your cocoon. Shanghai felt like that to us. It was our first time there. I want to go back.”
The interview confirms that the events took place in November of 2019. Another interview from December of that year says “We had actual fights with each other on the street, it was some kind of enlightening out of body experience where you, like, wake up the next morning, ‘Oh, I’ve changed, I’ve become a butterfly today’.”
Butterfly 3000 came out of attempts to make music for the concert film Chunky Shrapnel and Stu said that “Shanghai” was one of a few songs that made it clear that there was a possibility to make these electronic experiments into their own album. In fact, an Instagram post from January of 2020 shows that the lyrics “bye, bye Shanghai” were at least thought of at the time, as Lucas comments it under a photo of the band alongside Sam Joseph and Gaspard Demulemeester eating hot pot. It’s unclear if the photo was taken the day of the incident.
The final version of “Shanghai” was recorded by Stu (synthesizer/vocals/acoustic guitar/bass/piano/Mellotron), Ambrose (percussion/vocals), Cavs (drums) and Cook (synthesizer). The melody would later be used in “Interior People.” The song appeared in two promotional videos for Butterfly 3000. In Gizz goes to the zoo, Stu jokingly sings Ambrose’s part while taking photos for the album’s sleeve. Joey wears a shirt that says “Shanghai” throughout. It also appears in the background of the Gizz with the program vlog. “Shanghai” was released on June 11th, 2021. It appeared in a full album video filmed at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles on the 24th.