Live Report: Clockenflap 2023
“Because we [use] foul language,” Nan Yang Pai Dui’s bassist, Chau, jokes to me when I ask why since I had landed in Hong Kong three days earlier, all I had heard from anyone orbiting the region’s music scene was you have to check out NYPD. “The bands in Hong Kong are a little bit more conservative,” the band’s lead singer, Jon, adds as he carefully rolls a cigarette, lighting it, and letting the smoke slowly fill the press tent. He takes a drag, adding only that “maybe there is a reason why”.
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Lighting up Central Harbourfront, NYPD takes the stage at Clockenflap – Hong Kong’s biggest international outdoor music and arts festival – restless, Jon’s voice searching its way through a wall of sound, not so much pacing across the stage as he is patrolling, looking for something. I can’t tell if he’s using foul language. Their lyrics are in traditional Cantonese, though I’m told they’re a satirical middle finger dipped in the ink of working-class slang weaving stories of dessert dates and surreptitious liaisons with drug dealers. It seems to be more blues than punk, though scored by NYPD’s psychedelic-rock-electronica, it reveals a raw but familiar frustration backed, in this case literally, by a city drowning in political and social turmoil. In a twist of fate, at the same time on the main stage, Caroline Polachek breathlessly sears sprawling narratives of luscious, aimless yearning, ecstatic romance, and a blissful casting off of all categories set against her own startlingly different electronic production.
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Out beyond the festival gates, amidst the aroma of dim sum and roast pork steaming from open-air Dai Pai Dong stalls, and the fragrant harbour breeze, the city grapples with its own dualities, torn between the seduction of liberal ideals and the looming embrace of the mainland. One country, two systems. Glass-and-steel skyscrapers form a glossy façade of progress, casting shadows over a significant portion of the population struggling below, seen on the weekends dancing in the streets, sharing food, and playing cards – shirking the city’s central tensions, a scene played out on the doorsteps of luxury brands like Tiffany and Cartier. In the midst of this chaos, the arts and culture scene of Hong Kong grapples for breath, suffocating under the weight of this political tension. Galleries can only whisper dissent through careful brushstrokes, and the city’s musicians strum quiet protest anthems in underground venues, but censorship and self-censorship cast a pall over the creative spirit of a lot of Hongkongers, leaving artists dancing on a razor’s edge with the red lines that threaten to completely erase their expression. But where there is a chill of uncertainty, there is also the scent of opportunity.
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Left disappointed by New Labour’s disastrous workforce schemes and formed among the wreckage of a space age that failed to take off (especially in their cut-off northern marchland, Sheffield) Pulp have managed to age better than any of their Britpop partisans. Half-swaggering and half-stumbling onto Clockenflap’s main stage, frontman Jarvis Cocker explains that he had fractured two of his ribs earlier that day, before telling the cheering audience (a melting pot of local Hongkongers and Western ex-pats) to “follow my lead and something magic will happen.” Pulp’s catalogue of frozen representations or objectification of wants and aspirations that remain unfulfilled or thwarted seems to provide another one of the week’s stark juxtapositions, as the next evening Swae Lee – the better half of Rae Sremmurd – takes the same stage, filling in last-minute for Joji, who fell ill. Swae comes out dressed in an outfit by bespoke clothing brand ThoughtWeFriends, stripping himself of his 1-of-1 coat and flinging it into the crowd, later on in the show he rips the matching trousers while dancing with fans. It’s such crazy, fun, and it’s impossible not to see the appeal of what this side of music represents. I admit, it might have been the most fun I had performance all weekend.
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However, the crowd favourites were – by far – the kaleidoscope of J-pop acts. “We are here to give people a real experience,” opening night headliners Yoasobi – Clockenflap’s first-ever Japanese headlining act – tell me ahead of their performance. Their presence on stage is a magnetic communion, weaving together a whirlwind of influences from electro-pop to Atlanta hip-hop shot through a vast sea of neon and pandemonium, Ikura’s vocals split into multiple tracks halfway through one medley, as choirs collide with a dizzying piano rhythm—one that hundreds of fans who missed out on tickets for the sold-out festival performance desperately tried to listen to, pressed up against the festival’s fence. The next day, over at the Orbit stage, Atarashii Gakko! proved a more rebellious vision of J-pop’s rising popularity. Their manifesto? To defy a narrow-minded society by embracing individuality and freedom. They are an idol-parody novelty group that outclasses and outperforms the corporate cuties they’re satirising, all while making genuinely infectious music. Any way you want to define pop, Atarashii Gakko! are that; as gloriously eclectic as they are engaging, and perfectly captures the festival, and Hong Kong’s, central tensions – torn between tradition and the relentless pulse of the new.
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Words: Bryson Edward Howe
Photography: Chris Lusher
