THE NEED FOR HONG KONG TO HAVE STYLE AND THE REBIRTH OF COOL AND CREATIVITY

Once upon a dim sum 

We heard the bells 

go Ding Dong

We knew we were back 

And chilling in the Kong

The city called

Hong Kong 

There was music playing 

And people singing 

There were beats 

out in the streets

Music was heard everywhere 

This was the soundtrack 

to our being and lives 

And living the coolest 

Cheongsam life style  

Copyright ©️ Hans Ebert, 2026

It’s tough growing up, and, sometimes, when having to grow down to fit in with others and “network”, which is a strange dance that’s crept into doing business and part of keeping up pretences.

There are then those days when you wish you could have called time during your late teens and stayed in the Hong Kong you might have thought you knew and maybe thought you might even miss.

It’s easy to miss Hong Kong, especially when it’s home and often the only home you know even if an “ethnic minority”. 

Growing up is often not much fun, because with this comes different responsibilities and figuring out priorities in life, which is another waste of time, because one has no idea what the future holds, not only for you, but for the world and with everything being so much in disarray and disconnected.

The iconic photo above from a fashion shoot in 1962 by the great Francesco Scavullo captures such a cool and stylish picture postcard Hong Kong that brings back a tumbling dice of memories of maybe how we wish our home to always be remembered.

Those days might have had moments like this, and probably when Hong Kong had style makers like Kiki Fleming, adman Peter Thompson, the hotelier Brian Bryce, June Dally Watkins and her models from Australia who would fly in for fashion shows at the Hyatt Regency in Kowloon, photographers Robert Lam, Dinshaw Balsara, just some of the brilliant work of Kevin Orpin shown below, graphic designer extraordinaire Henry Steiner, real writers and journalists in Hilary Alexander, Jack Moore, Nene King, Harry Rolnick and the outrageous San

Most of us, well we were school kids at that time waiting to taste all the coolness and creativity of this forbidden fruit and, after a pause, bring back a Rebirth of the Cool through David Tang and his Shanghai Tang brand and the China Club, the movies of Wong Kar Wai, actors like Tony Leung, Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Leung, Leslie Cheung, the always fabulous Faye Wong, award winning advertising campaigns, movies like “Chungking Express”…

Hong Kong has always led a paradoxical life full of sliding door moments, empty promises from those who really wanted everyone to believe they could make something happen, and those who really did mean what they said and perhaps didn’t see their ideas go the distance because the baton was passed to morons or else they keeled over and passed away too soon.

In their place? A void full of shallowness and the plastic fantastic wannabe people.

These early days of 2026 are often like listening to that beautiful song by Jackson Browne where he looks back at what once was and reminisces.

There’s nothing wrong about reminiscing as long as you allow this to lead to where you might have been the happiest, or somewhere that you might need to revisit to remind one’s self about what really happened and who and what fell through the cracks…and why.

Wherever we are, and whatever we’re doing, the music from those times back in the day is always playing in many of our minds and forming the soundtrack to our lives- and which is why music must always be supported and given the room to grow.

Music and especially creativity gives any city character and needs nourishment to give it its very own USP and brand personality.

While wondering about what the soundtrack to my life might be as a musical compilation of life spent here here for the past number of decades, a little bit of history…

There’s been plenty written about the barren rock, the “resilience” of the city to “bounce back” from adversity, and just to keep things at ground level, what once was “the Hong Kong pop scene”, which was back in the Sixties when Hong Kong was a British colony and things were trying to sort out what everything actually was and meant.

Looking back to those times today, I sometimes feel that the Hong Kong I was trying to figure out could have been “Twin Peaks”, and where I might have been tasting different layers of chocolate cake with Agent Cooper while sipping a damn fine cup of David Lynch’s hot coffee.

Depending on where and who one was at any particular time, not too many, for example, in Hong Kong, got to meet Lou Reed and his friend “Rachel” at the old Kai Tak airport on a stopover and who asked if I could take them to buy some syringes.

Compared to where we are today, it’s important to understand that many of us were taking baby steps, and, as always, music being tiny but important young steps that somehow and magically brought us together, and created a sense of community, and when we laid down the foundations for whatever it was that we were building for what might be ahead.

Of course back then, and with most of us still in our teens and in secondary school, we didn’t know where the hell we were going except perhaps for band practice at someone’s home on a Saturday morning.

This was because they had a drum kit and a domestic helper who would make us sandwiches for lunch and to do with them having parents who tolerated our noise.

It was having this band practice that led some of us to play at tea dances at the nightclub called the Golden Phoenix or maybe even the Bayside with older bands who knew more chords.

We weren’t much good, but no one was- not really- and no one cared. It was a chance to impress the girls and perform somewhere a few steps up from playing at a Friday or Saturday youth club night at St John’s Cathedral or the Christ Church youth club in Kowloon.

Hong Kong was happily growing up and the city’s original entrepreneurs were making their dreams come true while we were watching and listening and learning and going for the ride while thinking about what and who might be in our futures.

In our pre-teen and teen years, our schooling meant that we got to see the legendary mime artist Marcel Marceau and Shakespearean touring groups perform at school for us students, whereas even before attending secondary school, we were able to see the great Frank Sinatra in concert at the City Hall auditorium for HK$1.

Hong Kong had helped do the groundwork for our futures and for which we would be eternally grateful.

During the same time, and with Hong Kong having its first international hotel when the Hong Kong Hilton opened its doors, visiting the city regularly were Hollywood stars like William Holden, Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr, Eartha Kitt…and Hong Kong becoming the location for quite a few films.

The Beatles arrived in Hong Kong in June of 1964 and performed a short perfunctory show at the Princess Theatre with Jimmy Nicol deputising for an ill Ringo and with me far more impressed with the opening act Sounds Incorporated. Still, we had the Beatles in Hong Kong at the height of Beatlemania.

In our own loose, young and meandering ways, we were creating a cosmopolitan Hong Kong- “cosmopolitan” not being a word used much these days. I wouldn’t even know where to use it, but the British colony of Hong Kong was probably more “cosmopolitan” than “international” and maybe “cosmopolitan” was the “colonial” way of saying “international”?

Whatever it might have been, music from those times have stayed with many of us and offered some direction of home and the home that was created and maybe even preordained for us.

Right now in the here and now, one is left wondering whether Hong Kong was also much more dark and weird than we ever thought it was with its local triad societies, the squalor and degradation of the Walled City, police corruption at the highest levels and different young ladies dancing in the dark and their mothers looking for wealthy husbands for them and what was then the red light district of Wanchai inspiring a certain lifestyle and films considered scandalous at the time.

It was a fabulously stylish, mysterious, decadent city finding its feet and moving in different directions to different music and an ever changing cast of international characters blowing through the city like a crossfire hurricane while Hong Kong battened down the hatches for the onslaught of typhoons, the riots of 1967, water rationing and the sounds of mahjong tiles being shuffled.

We probably expected much, but would have settled for Okay whereas today there’s an ugly greed factor with too many having ravenous appetites for wealth and which often leads to scattered Oliver Twisted thinking and empty plates.

Back in the sixties and seventies, all we could do was try and be in a band because “chicks dug it”. Somewhat interesting is that all these bands sang in English and covered the hits of the day by British bands like Manfred Mann when Paul Jones was lead singer, Herman’s Hermits, the Hollies with very very few attempting to tackle the songs of the Beatles or the Stones.

This might have been because we couldn’t figure out the chords and the clout of the late Radio Hong Kong disc jockey known as “Uncle” Ray Cordeiro. 

Ray produced and controlled the most popular programmes for teenagers in Hong Kong which were largely request shows, had a small but loyal following with names like Elvisiana Beatle Pauliana Wong etc and had his own hit charts.

Being on these hit charts meant nothing, but it also meant something because it was us marketing and promoting ourselves without knowing it.

When the Beatles grew moustaches and beards, “Uncle” Ray took it upon himself to proclaim that this made the Fab Four look “dirty”, and the fledgling Hong Kong music scene audience listened and embraced the clean cut cutesy pop of groups like Herman’s Hermits.

It was like being told what to do by the middle aged leader of a teenage cult.

Singing in Cantonese and Mandarin to cha cha rhythms was almost cool and adult and film noir though we didn’t know it then.

These were where fabulous looking Chinese female singers in tight cheongsams and slits showing more than a little leg performed at nightclubs for an older and more affluent crowd at places like the very popular Blue Heaven.

It was only when with EMI Music and meeting up with Morton Wilson, below, someone I knew from my days in advertising when he was part of the music production house called Schtung Music and brought to us the wonderful Shanghai Divas project that featured original recordings on the EMI owned Pathe label in China, that I heard such sensually chic cinematic music. 

This led to me working with Morton on some exceptionally good and very well received East/West remixes for EMI by artists like David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Placebo, Duran Duran John and Yoko and others.

Thanks to Yoko Ono, I was even able to get permission to produce an album for this region comprising demos and outtakes by John Lennon. 

At one time or another, most of us were in pop groups, including myself and best friend Steve with us having different degrees of success and failures and no one making any real money. It was something to do to pass the time and maybe even perform at various pop concerts mainly at City Hall. A few groups were okay and the others were kinda crap, but it was a little bit of escapism.

What about the girls who aspired to be Pop singers? There were very few except for the stunningly beautiful and tragic Irene Ryder, below, who went to hell and back.

Those girls with pretty faces and a sense of rhythm became television pop show go-go dancers- and which was how Irene started her career in showbiz in Hong Kong.

These then were the early days of popular music in Hong Kong, and without going through its history including the Levi’s Battle Of The Bands concert at the Hong Kong stadium that was won by Danny Diaz and the Checkmates and boring everyone including myself, Western pop gave way to what I termed Canto Pop. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantopop

This was when writing for the American trade publication called Billboard and giving something a label for a Western pop based instrumental backing over which were colloquial Cantonese lyrics sung by Sam Hui in the Seventies for a Cantonese movie with his two brothers.

The Canto Pop of Sam Hui was clever and catchy though when he took a break from Hong Kong, this upbeat and fun music genre became something rather bloated and greater than the sum of its parts and made some people extremely wealthy.

Even today- and we’re now in 2026- Canto Pop concerts by artists who were not on the same level as the “Four Heavenly Kings”, shown above, are sellouts.

Why? Nostalgia, perhaps, familiarity, no real music scene, zero understanding of A&R in all aspects of entertainment, and how difficult it is for anything new to get a look in with Western music pretty much an endangered species and relegated to hotel lounges.

The Western music heard is nostalgia driven and karaoke led and why certain international acts with a couple of big hits will always sellout in Hong Kong.

If the Bee Gees, ABBA and the Carpenters were still around and touring like Air Supply is, they would very probably be the hottest ticket in town.

What does this say about Hong Kong and the future of music in the city? Not much.

From where I am watching some things unfold and most other things fold up, if Hong Kong is to ever get its mojo back, much must change though I really don’t see anyone presently here capable of ushering in this change.

Sometimes, I think about those days way back when and wonder if we were all in some weird David Lynch movie that was starting to take shape, and if Laura Palmer might have once lived here and had gone to Hong Kong International School in Repulse Bay?

One can only imagine what might have been if we had gone right through those traffic lights and created a David Lynchian Hong Kong? We’ll never know.

Here’s an interesting almost footnote: The best friend of the girl I married and who both went to HKIS, married Fred Elmes, one of David Lynch’s favourite Directors Of Photography and who worked on “Eraserhead”, “Blue Velvet” and “Wild At Heart”.

What once were neighbourhoods are now falsehoods and the division between the extremely wealthy and those who can’t even get their foot in the door and others who bathe in the brands named Superficial and La Pretentions are everywhere and nowhere.

I have watched the “evolution” of these species in Hong Kong from when I was very probably part of them until deciding that this wasn’t making me happy and how I preferred to live rather than to merely survive by living a lie.

To avoid both, there’s a need for a personal tool kit that one needs to keep under lock and key because there’s a sense of quiet desperation out there and many speaking with forked tongues and chopsticks.

This is why I carry my very own Truth Kit with its adjustable mirror wherever I go in Hong Kong- and going out in the city being something kept to a minimum as there are so many different worlds out there looking for a new generation of storytellers with something positively inspiring to say.

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ABOUT HANS EBERT

When he arrived by ship from what was then known as Ceylon to the British colony of Hong Kong, the Dutch Burgher- it’s a long story-thought he had arrived in Melbourne because that’s what his parents had told him- it’s an even longer story- until he saw all the rickshaws, women wearing cheongsams with slits up to their arse, and was given a pair of chopsticks during his first lunch in the city.

He had never eaten dim sum, but then again, no one told him that as a fledgling journalist, he would meet and interview everyone from Peter Sellers, Roman Polanski and George Harrison to Billy Joel, Norah Jones, Gorillaz, David Bowie and Quincy Jones, create the Happy Wednesday brand for the Hong Kong Jockey Club, win the Gold Award at the London Advertising Awards for his “Right Of Abode campaign, coin the term “Canto Pop” when writing for the American trade publication Billboard, and when in advertising not only helped launch McDonald’s in Hong Kong and work on the business as Director of Creative Services for over two decades, and was very much involved in the launch of STARTV, MTV Asia and PCCW.

He has written hits for some of the biggest names in Chinese popular music and wooed and married the model who was the Wrangler Girl. 

These days, he is rewriting his journography and working on introducing the world to his imaginary friend Muzi and their search for everything that leads to positivity by leaving the dullards behind to pursue nutworking.