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Your guide to gigs, concerts and music festivals in Hong Kong
Central
The Western world is waking up to what Beijing has known for 12 years: disco-punk stylists New Pants are awesome. Following a six-week tour of Australia with Regurgitator last year – cutely, for one show in Perth, the three members all wore Regurgitator t-shirts on stage – the band have just returned from another trip to the world’s smallest continent for Queensland’s Andy Warhol Up Late art festival. Last year they headlined Beijing’s Modern Sky festival with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and they wowed a small crowd at the Fringe Club in Hong Kong. In June, they’ll be heading to London for the massive China Now festival. But we’ve got ’em first.
When they formed a band as bored teenagers back in 1996, the New Pants boys looked to The Ramones as their music gods and played like them too (they still do a mean cover of I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend). Over the years, however, they’ve created a style they can convincingly call their own; one that harks back to the heady, cheesy excitement of ’80s disco and electro, which they bind with rock and a fair whack of self-deprecating camp humour to produce a music that is infectiously bouncy, boisterous, and brilliant. That combination won them Best Rock Band and Best Rock Album for Dragon Tiger Panacea at last year’s Pepsi China Music Awards.
They’re joined at Grappa’s by our own stars in the making, The Yours. Now in their third phase of reinvention – having dabbled in shoe-gaze and new rave – Jack Leung and Nicholas Wong play guitar- and bass-driven post-punk with buckets of attitude and the best dress sense this side of Harajuku. The Yours are one of Hong Kong’s most imaginative bands. Plus, they’ve got a super-cute girl on tambourine.
Hamish McKenzie