Can Hong Kong ever be Cool?

I’m writing this early in the morning with the Beatles playing in the background, listening to some of their earliest originals and wondering how they wrote and produced all the music that they did and swept many of us up in a groundswell of awe and joy while also asking us why we couldn’t write a song like “Girl” or “I’ll Follow The Sun” or the very much overlooked “I’ll Be Back” or, well, just something that came even close to what they were doing before Strawberry Fields Forever took them to unworldly other worlds?

I will always live and breathe and love music and it always, always, always comes back to the Beatles.

Sure, there have been the side trips where, when in London, there was the adventures of discovering the songs and artistry of Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, Matthews Southern Comfort and a gangly American singer-songwriter named James Taylor, and being a free man in Paris and falling under the spell of Joni Mitchell and the sounds of Motown and the Ronettes, but the Beatles were different gravy.

How? Why? Did producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick make such a big difference? Not all the difference though Sir George was I’m sure their Merlin.

I was also thinking about Steve, below far right, my best friend in school, switching from drums to guitar and writing an original he called “Suspended Love Affair”. He was barely fifteen, so what the hell was that mature title and very good first song of his about?

One of our other friends from those days- Peter Holbrook- wrote something folkie and excellent called “Fragments” and one of my first originals recorded was “Suicide” that had Alan Merrill, who was passing through Hong Kong, on bass guitar. Alan, a fabulous musician, went on to form the Arrows and write “I Love Rock And Roll”.

Maybe we had the talent then- and here- but no one to take songs with potential and make them more than the sum of their parts? Maybe.

When coining the phrase “Canto Pop” for Billboard magazine, couldn’t I have come up with something better?

Did we miss the boat or did the boat already have a hole in it?

Before my twelve years of managing the Happy Wednesday brand, which I created for the Hong Kong Jockey Club were up, I was extremely bored with what it had become, because I didn’t think anything about it being cool enough, especially the ‘live’ music. But then again, neither was Hong Kong.

Was Hong Kong EVER cool? If not for the years when there was Disco Disco, Canton disco, Manhattan, perhaps JJs etc, why was this?

Did it have something to do with the different schools we attended-some of us in transient and international secondary schools and others going to local schools?

Maybe it was knowing we were in colonial Hong Kong at a time when those of us privileged enough to be going to KGV, we were absorbing and being influenced by the music from the Byrds and the Small Faces to the Kinks and Dylan whereas on the other side of the fence were Cliff Richard, the Bee Gees and Herman’s Hermits? I don’t know.

Was this cultural difference also to do with those who we were dating and the different lifestyles we were leading including what we were discovering through inhalation and sexual experiences?

Was Canto Pop, the best we could do or was this and Happy Wednesday safe and acceptable enough for Hong Kong and a racing club, whereas the real partying in Hong Kong started after the last race had been run and there was the choice of going to dragon-i, Players, Escape, Spicy Fingers, Carnegie’s, or Stockton’s etc?

As I have always said, people make anything- a city, a club, a restaurant.

The trendy Sheung Wan area was so important to giving the city its own international creative community.

When this community who were Happy Wednesday regulars and brought such a cool and different vibe to Hong Kong left during those awful lockdown years, and with me having visited Copenhagen with my then Danish girlfriend Kristine and seeing the city’s brilliant bands like Nephew and so many others often influenced by the music of a band like Depeche Mode, and only to return to Hong Kong and Wanchai copycat bands, I would go through Silent Scream therapy and creative withdrawal symptoms.

When Kristine decided that Hong Kong was not for her, and returned to Copenhagen, I was cut adrift and pushed out to sea where I would lose myself with lethal nocturnal cocktails of weird company and taking in strays that I didn’t need.

Music: It’s the magic elixir of life and every city needs some form of A&R Directors to guide the sampan through choppy waters.

This is by listening to what the music inside of you is playing to wake up inspiration that’s been lying dormant for too long and follow what you know to be right- and has been proven to work and not who and what goes through the motions of pretending that it is.

And right now, Hong Kong is kidding itself by trying to be “hip and cool” by never ever having been even close to being hip and cool. It’s no one’s fault. But it is owning up to it instead of more time wasting.