My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.

Michel Foucault (1983, 231–32).

We sense that the world is collapsing, falling apart, and a new conservatism is rising up. People are not happy.

Wallace Kwok (2017, interview).

Tat Ming Pair, Popular Music, and Politics

We will use Tat Ming Pair, the full name of the duo, the first time it appears in the chapter. Thereafter, we will revert to Tat Ming, the name usually and fondly used by fans.

One can trace a clear history of the alliances between popular music and politics, ranging from protest songs and Band Aid and Live Aid to, arguably, the other end of the political spectrum, national anthems (Street 2012). In Hong Kong, despite its overwhelming capitalist logic, as we have shown in the previous chapters, makers of pop music have established a tradition of political engagement, stretching from the post-Tiananmen fury and fear and the anxiety towards the 1997 Handover to the more recent articulations against increasing intervention of the Beijing regime, often dubbed its new coloniser after the old one of the British Empire (Chow 1992). Such articulations are often linked to more indie genres; the local band My Little Airport, for example, preceded the Umbrella protests with their song “Donald Tsang, Please Die” (2009), riding on the popular discontent against the then Chief Executive of the city.

As already discussed in Chapter 3, Tat Ming staged a round of three reunion concerts in the Hong Kong Coliseum in 2017, the TAT MING PAIR 30TH ANNIVERSARY LIVE CONCERTS 達明卅一派對. This was five years after their ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND 兜兜轉轉演演唱唱會 tour. Both the 2012 and the 2017 concerts created a great buzz around the city of Hong Kong and were applauded for their political, musical, and aesthetic standards, as we have shown earlier. By conducting interviews with Anthony Wong and his close collaborators, this chapter explores the production side of massive pop concerts, simultaneously reflecting on the tension between political motivations and commercial considerations, between engagement and entertainment.

As made known during the promotional phase, the concerts took the classic novel 1984 by George Orwell as the linchpin, referring to the increasing influence of authoritarianism in post-Handover Hong Kong and the world at large. More specifically, our preliminary interview with Anthony, generally seen as the main creative force of the concerts, informed us that the performance was structured into three themes and sections: surveillance, brainwashing, and suppression. From suppression, the performance morphs into resistance, then back to the harsh “reality” where the “failure of the Umbrella protests” is featured, lamenting on the people who are defeated, ultimately leading to the evocation of David Bowie’s persona and his songs “Under Pressure”Footnote 1, performed with guest Denise Ho) and “Heroes”.Footnote 2 Footnote 3

While it is too sweeping, perhaps, to claim that their latest reunion concerts were again foreshadowing street protests, the political ramifications of the performances were undeniable. In this chapter, we zoom in less on the aesthetics of the performance and more on the production of that spectacle. We will be drawing on production studies (Caldwell 2008; Corner 1999; Havens, Lotz, and Tinic 2009; Mayer 2011) to grasp the negotiations and tensions that take place behind the scenes in the making of an event that needs to sell 30,000 tickets, the most expensive of which costs HK$980 (US$125). We ask: How is the tension between the political and the commercial negotiated? How can the production avoid politics becoming too explicit (as this would run against the ambivalent aesthetics of the band, becoming too didactic, thus boring)? What kinds of considerations informed the use of costumes, dancers, visuals, and the sequence of the songs? How does such a sonic spectacle come into being in the first place? And what have been the consequences of such a political engagement? Instead of analysing in detail the different aesthetics mobilised to mark these different stages, we probe elsewhere and wonder what considerations, negotiations, tensions, controversies, and compromises underpin such narratives and aesthetics. As such, this chapter aims to unpack the making of a political pop spectacle in a city that is struggling for its future.

Production Analysis

In this chapter, we examine the production of the 2017 Tat Ming concerts, to shed light on how cultural producers negotiate the tension between political engagement, aesthetic spectacle, and commercial interests (see Fig. 5.1), to be read in tandem with the primarily textual analyses in Chapter 3. As early as in the 1980s, Simon Frith (1982) already bemoaned the fact that students would rather sit in the library and study popular music in terms of the appropriate cultural theory rather than conduct ethnographic research which could highlight the complex negotiations involved in making and performing music (Cohen 1993; Frith 1982). Four decades later, the literature on popular music is still lacking in ethnography and production analyses, particularly of (mass) concerts. The lack is especially evident when compared to the abundance of inquiries anchored on textual (e.g., Harsono 2017) and fan (e.g., Jung and Shim 2014) analyses of songs and pop stars, as well as more macro-level industry research (e.g., Shin 2017).

Fig. 5.1
A photograph of the Tat Ming pair performing in a concert.

The 2017 Tat Ming concert (Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Full size image

To analyse the tensions, negotiations, complexities, and compromises that underlie the coming into being of Tat Ming’s 2017 political and aesthetic spectacle, we use production ethnography (Caldwell 2008) as a method. In his book about the Hollywood film industry, John Thornton Caldwell (2008) makes visible how Los Angeles-based film and video production workers negotiate and assess the industry, its politics, and its policies from their own point of view. Caldwell did so by interviewing those involved in the production of film and television: the gaffers, assistants, post-production editors, camera people, and others behind the scenes, which allows for innovative and perplexing perspectives. Caldwell notes that “practitioners constantly dialogue and negotiate a series of questions” (p. 26), which partly determine (the look of) the final cultural product.

In this chapter, we investigate how on each level of the production (Corner 1999), makers and creative workers negotiate the tension between creating an appealing aesthetic spectacle on the one hand while trying to convey a political message on the other. We will engage with the four key production levels distinguished by John Corner (1999), which interlock and together create a specific production at a specific time and place: historical contexts (the socio-political moment), institutional contexts (the media sector and flows of financing), production mentalities (ideological negotiations by makers), and production practices (concrete practices on the production floor—for instance, a designer opting for a particular costume) (Corner 1999, 71). This also allows us to investigate how the context in which the concerts were presented matters. For instance, the concerts were produced by Universal Music alone without any financial sponsorship from the corporate sector—a departure from the usual practice. This was presumably because of the political sensitivity of Anthony Wong potentially causing complications for businesses, which do not want to risk angering mainland Chinese authorities and losing the mainland Chinese market. In addition to Corner’s four levels of production, we propose that there are three additional aspects that play a crucial role in the production of the concerts: the contingent, the personal, and the calibrational.

We draw on interviews with three people involved in the making of the concerts: Anthony Wong (artist), Wallace Kwok (producer), and Duncan Wong (Universal Music). While the former two were known to us as the conceptual drive of the concerts, we included the managing director of Tat Ming’s record label in order to probe the commercial dimension of the production. Given our interest in the concert production, we decided not to interview Tats Lau, the other member of the duo, as he was primarily in charge of the musical side of the concerts. When the duo started producing their first albums, according to Anthony Wong, Tats was already primarily charged with song composition as well as the recording work, leaving the conceptual and visual aspects of their music under Anthony’s auspices. Later, such division of labour extended to concert production, including the concerts in the current study. Semi-structured interviews with Anthony, Wallace, and Duncan were conducted in 2017 in Cantonese and English, here analysed using discourse analysis (Abell and Myers 2008).Footnote 4 We supplement this main body of interview data with autobiographical reflection by one of the authors, Yiu Fai Chow, who, as mentioned earlier, has been writing lyrics for Tat Ming since 1988. Chow contributed the lyrics for the single that served as the theme song for the concerts under study—“1 + 4 = 14”Footnote 5 —and talked with Anthony throughout the concert production process. In this chapter, we do not want to trace the intention of the makers and then check if such intentions are finally realised. Rather, we aim at recuperating the considerations, negotiations, and complexities that underpin the production of Tat Ming’s political sonic spectacle.

In the following, we will first analyse how Anthony, Wallace, and Duncan talk about music and politics. Following this more general analysis, we zoom in on three key discourses that we find salient and helpful in furthering our understanding of a concert production. We call them the contingent, the personal, and the calibrational. They recur in the narratives of the three producers and are interwoven throughout the four production levels mentioned earlier. The making of such a show turns out to be a highly contingent affair in which many last-minute twists and turns affect the final outcome of the show. Second, personal relations, cultivated over decades of working and socialising together, also clarify how and why the show has become what it is. Finally, there is a constant calibration of politics with pleasure, of displaying and hiding a political message, of dwelling in narratives of doom and gloom calibrated with moments of joy, release, and hope. All three discourses help explain the production logic of the show and underscore how complexity, ambivalence, and constant calibration and recalibration define the final stage performance and its politics.

Music and Politics

Not surprisingly, the different actors talk quite differently about the relation between music and politics. Notably, the record company is keen to stress the distance between music and politics. In order to sustain their support for the concert, Duncan would reiterate that for him music and politics are separate domains. In his words:

Many friends and media were like “Wow, Duncan aren’t you scared? Anthony’s political inclination…” I said, I’m running a record company, or entertainment company—let’s put it this way, because we no longer only sell records, so I never claim we are a record company. I think everyone can have his own inclination, or political stance, and this has nothing to do with music. (…) Because I do music, I don’t do politics, so I don’t worry or get scared.

It is this perceived disconnection between music and politics that allowed him to move on with the project. This disconnection can be connected to a “l’art pour l’art” discourse in which art is framed as something outside society. Dovetailing with this discourse is the idea of the artist as an independent and authentic creator, which Duncan indeed also articulates:

But the creative part, we didn’t involve much. Why? Because I very much believe in Anthony, also Tats. I think their team, including People Mountain People Sea, such as Gaybird being the band leader—I never had to worry, because the product must be of quality. Of course, someone said, “Wow, you should watch out! There might be political stuff!” I said, this was a concert, a show, and I always stress: wanting to work with Anthony again, I foresaw all those from the start. On the contrary, I don’t think I should prohibit someone else’s creative work. Again, I say this once more, we Universal do music, we are a record-entertainment company, and we have a firm standpoint that we do not meddle with politics. But I cannot stop artists from having their own inclination, this is unfair.

Throughout this book we show how music is connected to politics. But the perceived incompatibility, which has its roots in a discourse in which art is considered separate and independent from society, enabled the record company to move on with the project, despite its risks. When we asked Duncan if there is anything more he likes to add to the interview, this is his response:

I really do hope—for fans or the media—I hope they can try to be more open-minded. I mean, politics is one thing, music is another. I hope they don’t mix the two together when they go to see Tat Ming Pair. This is my wish.

Which again attests to his strong wish to disentangle music from politics.

For Anthony and Wallace, there is no need to differentiate music from politics. Especially given Anthony’s role in the Umbrella Movement, it would be quite impossible to ignore the connection, just as their 2012 concert series was already profoundly political, as shown in Chapter 3. In their narratives, they continuously discuss how they want to balance the political with other dimensions, which we will return to when we discuss the importance of calibration. For example, Anthony explains:

I had to do a lot of thinking and re-thinking about how it should be presented. How political should it be? How social should it be? And how personal should it be? And I wanted to look different from the others. So it was a long process. So I was very anxious.

Anthony would frequently comment on the importance of Wallace in the preparation of the concert, and how he would also aspire after a clear political narrative; in Anthony’s words:

Of course, he’s the one who also wanted the show to be very political actually. He wanted it to be very political, because I think he had something… I always thought maybe he is not in the front line. He is not the performer, but still he has something he wanted to say too. He was so frustrated by what happened in Hong Kong.

Whereas both Anthony and Wallace, as we will show later, time and again reflect upon the question of how far they could go in articulating a political message without alienating the audience, for Duncan, music is simply not a political matter. The latter position comes with a more contradictory narrative, as Duncan would at the same time express his awareness of the financial risk of the show, given Anthony’s overt political stance. However, as we will show later, he explains his commitment to the show much more in terms of a personal involvement with the history of the band, which enables him to side-track the issue of politics as much as he can. The commercial logic of the music industry helps explain, or perhaps justify, this positioning.

Our analysis thus far presents the more general reflections upon the connection between the Tat Ming performance and politics. In what follows, we are harvesting from the interviews certain salient features that guide us to map the three discourses underpinning the production logic of the show: the contingent, the personal, and the calibrational. These discourses, we argue, present an important explication and extension of Corner’s production practices and mentalities.

The Contingent

We start with probably the most counter-intuitive of the three discourses: the contingent. For a series of concerts of such a scale (catering to more than 10,000 people per show) and complexity (to be entertaining as well as engaging), one might expect a scenario of meticulous planning and seamless orchestration. We did hear that, but we also heard more. While we were impressed, indeed, by the hard work put into the preparation of the concerts, we were also surprised to find out how much was unprepared. Put differently, one logic we learned from the three key persons producing the Tat Ming concerts is paradoxically the lack of logic, and one needs to recognise and acknowledge the importance of the contingent, the ad hoc, in projects like this. How things just happen and rather haphazardly become something that may not appear haphazard at all—this was what we learned from the production interviews. This permeates various levels and stages of the production process. We also see Corner’s (1999) four levels of production interlocking in the production process. Take one major theme of the concerts as example: surveillance, which seemed to be the starting point of the stage design. There was actually no stage as such, but a long corridor, or “a road” according to Anthony Wong, stretching from one side of the Coliseum to the other and serving as the main space for performance to audiences on four sides of the venue. This atypical spatial arrangement (the typical being a centre stage with audiences seated on three sides of the venue) contributed to the panoptical effect of surveillance, that the performers were intensely exposed, extensively watched. However, contrary to our expectation that the stage setting was a consequence of key thematic deliberation, it was first and foremost a commercial consideration. According to Anthony:

Having all four sides open, was because we tried to sell as many tickets as possible. That’s one of the reasons. The second was, because we did three or four shows already in the last years… so how do we make it different this time? If we put the stage at the end of the arena, it will look the same. So, let’s try to do it differently…we did not think about surveillance yet. But I told the producer I wanted a road.”

Universal’s Duncan Wong confirms this when he tells us the proposal to have the audience on four sides came to him shortly after the project started:

I believe it’s based on two reasons. First, they met with the production people and stage designer, and they said it’s possible. Second, they wanted to help the organiser sell more tickets.

The institutional context (Corner 1999, 71)—that is, the commercial logic of the pop music sector and flows of financing—was thus an important factor in the stage setting. Here, we want to clarify that we are not arguing for a form-first or money-first logic in this concert production; what we do want to foreground is the complexity with which a concert, both its form and content, is produced, and contingency is often part of this. Wallace Kwok offered us many instances of such contingency; for instance, regarding the rundown of the concerts. While we, as well as other audiences and critics, may continue to ponder why they opened with a sequence featuring a boy and a girl walking with a uniform(ed) “procession” or “march,” Kwok’s explanation is mundanely pragmatic:

[Anthony] said why don’t we have a little boy and little girl … I think it is ok, so let’s settle it, but we have to make sure that that part is not too late. Because they have to leave the stage earlier according to the regulations of Hong Kong.

It was true that the mobilisation of children—in a sequence generally perceived as a comment on Beijing’s attempt to push forward patriotic education, some would say brainwashing, in Hong Kong—was Anthony Wong’s idea and creatively driven. However, their appearance and its specific timing, and thus the impact on the entire show, was determined by something external and uncontrollable: local laws concerning child labour. Here, four levels of production interlock to create this segment in the concerts: the decision to cast children (production practices), who as participants are restricted by labour laws (institutional context), the ideological consideration of using children to comment on patriotic education in Hong Kong (production mentalities), and all of this taking place and gaining significance in the current historical moment of Hong Kong (historical context).

Another example of contingency comes from the dance choreography. At his earlier performing career, Anthony, and through him also Tat Ming, collaborated frequently with Zuni Icosahedron, an experimental theatre company founded in 1982. Wallace recounts how they would always hang out together in the 1990s, and how Zuni joined their shows. Given their older age, they now opted for a different dance group, but still wanted a similar Zuni-like style, as Wallace explains how he discussed this with the choreographer, with whom they worked for the first time:

We told him, your dancers, they can dance, but make sure that they don’t dance… So we asked him, “Do you have any idea of Pina Bausch?” He said he knew about Pina Bausch, he watched a little bit about Pina Bausch, and also that movie by Wim Wenders. But he never watched a real performance by Pina Bausch. And then accidentally, Pina Bausch’s company came to Hong Kong, for the arts festival performance. I think just one and a half month before the show.

Here, it was the contingency of a Pina Bausch show happening in Hong Kong just before the performance that helped inform the show’s choreographer what kind of style Tat Ming was looking for in their performance.

The parallel, if not paradox, of always preparing and always needing to respond to things that cannot be prepared for is a recurring motif of the three key producers of the Tat Ming concerts. Already the choice for 1984 was ridden with coincidences, as Wallace explains:

When we first talked about the show, we actually talked about how we met and when we met. And then we said, “Oh, 1984 is also a book. This book was published in 1949. What??” Then we talked [more] about it, and it is so interesting. Everything starts to come together. (…) So I talked to Anthony, a real super-state, and a functional one, at the same timing! It is very interesting! Then everything comes to pieces… We start with 1949, we start with communist China, and then George Orwell, and then another super-state was established at the same timing. When the book was written, predicting the future 1984, and then at that year Anthony and Tats met. They formed Tat Ming Pair. And in the year 1984 was the year the Sino–British Joint Declaration was signed, in the same year.

Although Anthony and Wallace thus thought of using 1984 as one major inspiration, they could hardly anticipate the resurgence of interest in the dystopic novel prior to their concerts. As Wallace continues:

We used the book 1984. After a while, after two to three months, after Donald Trump got elected, after 1984 became the bestseller in Amazon…Anthony told me that “Ahh! It is too popular! It looks as if we are just copying…” We were not happy about that, but it couldn't be changed back. We had to continue with what we started. But then Anthony told me something, he said, “Have you read [Haruki Murakami’s] book 1Q84? The Japanese novel?” “Yes,” I said I read the book.

In the end, they kept 1984 in, but with the important supplement of 1Q84. Sometimes, it was not a big international event like the presidential election of the United States that generated additional contingency that the production team had to deal with; other times it was something highly individual. For instance, the dazzling, almost hallucinating four-minute animation accompanying the song “Undercurrents 暗湧”Footnote 6—morphing from different body parts to thousands of replicas of Anthony’s and Tats’ heads—turned out to be less a controlled matter than a last-minute rush characterised by surprises and a sense of helplessness and resignation. The production team only got to watch the rough cut of the clip two days before the concerts began, and, according to Wallace:

The day that we watched [the finished version was] the day of the rehearsal in the Coliseum. So the first time we watched, it's not on the computer, it's already on stage. We were just … WOW … It's more than we expected.

The most dramatic contingency we heard from the producers concerned another central symbol of the concerts: a massive ball hanging over the “road,” alluding to the moon imagery used in 1Q84 (see Fig. 5.2). Like the animation, it almost failed to make it to the stage. As usual, these days in Hong Kong, many props are ordered from mainland China for delivery to the city, for the speed, the lower price, and the wider spectrum of choices. This ball was no exception. It was supposed to be on its way to Hong Kong, but the delivery went missing as late as the night before the rehearsal. The production team was not able to track it. According to Wallace:

Fig. 5.2
A photograph of the Tat Ming pair with a massive ball with lights hanging at the center. The ball resembles the 1 Q 84 moon.

The 1Q84 moon (Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Full size image

The night before the rehearsal, the producer told me that the ball went missing. “We don’t know where it is now.” We contacted the company and the driver, who was supposed to have it delivered to the Coliseum on that day, was missing! Also, the company concerned told us that they were still looking for the driver, they couldn't find him. We were very worried, because the item was supposed to be very important, but it went missing. What could we do? The following day, the producer informed us that they found the driver. Somewhere in the highway of China, the driver was found dead… maybe working too hard or something… He died, with the ball in the back of the trunk.

It took much effort and time to deal with this unfortunate turn of events, to the extent that when the ball finally arrived, it was already late into the first show day. Wallace:

It already passed our rehearsal time. It was after midnight. After midnight we could not move anything inside. So they had to move it early the following day, and the whole rehearsal schedule was delayed. Drastically! Then we didn't have the time to do the right rehearsal and all the sound check and everything! But we couldn't tell people about that, because it was our fault… that someone died…the day the show started.”

This incident attests to the contingent character of the preparation of such a music spectacle; that what seems carefully planned and thought through often turns out the be the result of ad hoc planning and last-minute decision-making.

The Personal

When Wallace told us about the heavy delay of the animation clip, he was not really grumbling about or even upset at the waiting and waiting; at most, he had a hint of anxiety and probably a sense of amusement. To be able to maintain this kind of poise was not only a matter of Wallace’s experience in the pop music industry, but also something personal. After all, he and Anthony had known the animation video artist, Tobias Gremmler, for quite some time; they got to know each other when Anthony performed in Berlin two decades ago. It was not the first time they collaborated, and the production team knew very well that the artist might be late, but would always deliver (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3
A photograph of a screen displaying a video clip by Tobias Gremmler.

Video image of Tobias Gremmler's animation during the show (Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Full size image

This kind of rapport, understanding, and trust, a general sense that something personal counts more than anything calculating, controlling, and managerial, forms another important production logic, what we call the “personal.” When Anthony invited Yiu Fai Chow to write the theme song for the concerts, he hardly needed to offer any more briefing than the simple fact that the concerts would be loosely based on 1984. Knowing Anthony, and having collaborated with Tat Ming for decades, Yiu Fai relied on their mutual understanding to contribute to the creative process. Without further discussing with Tat Ming, he delivered the song titled “1+4=14”. Looking back on the concerts, Anthony reiterates how often he just left the tasks to the production team members concerned. “Perhaps I was right in trusting the right people; they did deliver the goods,” he says.

Even when Duncan, of Universal Music, had to think professionally and commercially about the concerts, he refers fondly to his personal relationship with Anthony and his respect for Tat Ming as the decisive factor in his support for the project. He calls his decision “irrational,” considering all the risks involved, especially the probable impossibility of securing sponsorship given Anthony’s political stance. Duncan admits he would still consider the “P&L” (profit and loss) prospect, but commercial consideration was always secondary. “It’s like seeing my own wish come true, to do the 30th anniversary concerts,” he says, going on to recall how happy he was listening to all those hit songs from the 1980s and the 1990s. As he explains:

I have a bit of emotional connection, I personally really like Anthony, and I think Tat Ming Pair plays a very important role in the entire Cantopop scene. I also knew that 2017 would be Tat Ming Pair’s 30th anniversary, so in 2016 I arranged to see Anthony. It was early 2016 when we began to discuss their reunion, their 30th anniversary concert.

And the personal connection was not only about Anthony or Tat Ming, but also Duncan's own biography in the field he joined years ago. Recalling his experience of the concerts, he says:

All the beautiful memories of the entire recording industry or the music scene suddenly crashed into me. … It came to me that Tat Ming has been around for thirty years, and the fact that they have so many hit songs is touching to me.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that the production process was characterised by trust. “We got to know of the rundown very late, the floor plan also very late,” Duncan says. However, as he has accumulated years of relationship and collaboration with Anthony and Tat Ming, Duncan trusted their creative choices. “I was never worried,” he says. Again, shared history plays a role here:

[The production process] went smoothly indeed. Because firstly, I worked with Anthony before, whether at Polygram or Go East. We knew each other for a while because Wallace was a DJ at Commercial Radio. So it was smooth. Everybody knew each other as hardworking people.

Anthony felt this way too. And the personal trust made it much easier to deal with the political risks involved. When we ask Anthony about Universal’s support, he could only speak of the unspoken, the tacit understanding that things were understood. He says:

[Duncan] knew that I was sort of blacklisted in China. Sort of. Because it is never really official. So he knew that. … And he knew our other concerts or albums are quite political. So he knew that already. So … I didn’t really ask him. He was acting as if … he never mentioned it.

While we are not assuming the importance of the personal in other productions, what we have observed time and again in this particular project—which, after all, was commemorating three decades of making music together—was the intimate way this group of colleagues, of friends, worked together. Sometimes, it was pragmatic, about how best to advance the project. Wallace, for instance, underlines his years of working with, and of knowing, Anthony, when he foregrounds the timing of their initial discussion surrounding the anniversary project. Wallace says:

After what happened in Hong Kong, I first sat down with Anthony like this. It's very late, you know Anthony, usually he functions the best after midnight, we had a heart-to-heart talk before we met anybody else. It's just Anthony and me, we sat down and said “Ok, we got the timeslot from Hong Kong Coliseum, and the Universal willing to invest. But what shall we do? What we want to talk about in this concert?” So we had a few sessions on that before meeting anyone else. We knew it's going to be very difficult.

For Anthony, it is this personal network that makes the show:

I have a lot of meetings with Wallace… It sounds a bit unfair to the other [creative team members]. Of course we had a lot of creative meetings together, but I always…. The final decision always came back to just between me and Wallace. Or even sometimes just myself.

In additional to personal connection, personal interest also drives the show. Wallace, for example, has a strong interest in history. He is inspired by a specific period in Chinese history, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (五代十國—906–979), during which what is known as China was radically fragmented, and war reigned. Wallace explains:

There was a group of people, they were scholars, writers, painters. They were so dissatisfied with what was happening in the country that they chose to escape from reality. So those people just went into deep forest, and they enjoyed a life of their own. They took marijuana or some kind of medicine (…). I also told Anthony not only Hong Kong was in that bad situation, the whole world was really bad. It was before Donald Trump got elected. It was before that. But we sensed that the world was collapsing, falling apart, and a new conservatism was rising up. People were not happy. I think that was after Brexit, before Donald Trump got elected. That is why we can see the new age philosophy is coming. Many people believe in the new age, and they want to do meditation, they want to get inside that.

It is this sense of doom and gloom, emerging from a personal interest in history that inspired the biggest part of the performance.

Sometimes, it is not only through the personal that the production is actualised; it is also through the production that the personal is celebrated and consolidated. The two feed into each other. Wallace is visibly thrilled when he recalls how he and Anthony share the same artistic taste and creative direction:

In the book 1Q84, it talks about two parallel universes. The difference in the two parallel universes is: One, with one moon, but the other one, with two moons. Anthony just mentioned to me, why don’t we put 1Q84 inside the concert too. I was so excited because I liked that book a lot! We talked about 1984, Communist China, and also the parallel universe about the book 1984 by George Orwell… Now we have a book influensed by 1984 written by Haruki Murakami. And then that book is talking about parallel universes, and then we have two moons and one moon… And then I said, “Ok then, the ball can become the moon, and then we can have one more moon in the LED.” When we talked to the producer, he was so excited, because he liked the book too.

And finally, Wallace also got to know more about Anthony. When they were quite at a loss as to how to conclude the concerts, Anthony suddenly recalled he had written a letter to David Bowie.Footnote 7 Anthony found the letter and read it to Wallace. Deeply touched, Wallace told Anthony, “It was so beautifully written.” Immediately, Wallace knew how precious such a letter was.

You know, Anthony seldom writes anything. He is not a man of words. Even though he is very articulate, it is so hard for him to sit down and write something. But he has written this letter with all his heart. … And I think, wow, this is so good.

They knew they had found the perfect “final statement” to end the concerts. The part with David Bowie, as we have shown in Chapter 3, functions as a release, a sign of hope gesturing towards the future. Wallace explains how they connected Bowie to the show, how Anthony read out the letter right after singing “Under Pressure” with Denise Ho:

They sang this song together, and yes, we are under pressure! What shall we do? And then Anthony read out the letter to David Bowie. At that part, the eyeball became the dark planet. Because all through the history of David Bowie, there is always the place called “the dark planet.” We always say David Bowie is someone from another planet, not from this earth. He is not a human being.

And it is David Bowie to whom Anthony turns for help:

That part was so personal because as a big fan of David Bowie, Anthony was singing a song in Hong Kong, and asking someone who just died last year… Talking to the dark planet, that “David Bowie, you are on that planet. You are not on this planet anymore. Bless us!” It is a very emotional and very personal touch of this concert. He is trying to ask someone who just died, the great legend in pop music history, David Bowie, to help us.

It is through a shared personal connection and admiration towards David Bowie that the final part of the concert is given shape and meaning.

The Calibrational

Amidst contingency, and driven by long-term personal connections, the concert came into being. Its political zeal was the result not merely of the personal histories of the producers; it involved, above all, a careful process of checking and balancing pleasure with politics, which we term “calibrational.”Footnote 8 Acknowledging that this was above all a pop music spectacle, the makers were constantly trying to avoid projecting too direct a message in the show. We see here a careful negotiation of production mentalities and ideological considerations. The previous concert series from 2012 was also a point of reference, as the makers wanted to pursue something different, out of a fear for doing something repetitively. Anthony alludes to this balancing, calibrating act, and how he would constantly discuss such matters with Wallace:

He would play different roles. Sometimes he would push, he said “Yeah you should touch on these subjects, these topics.” And I would be the one who said, “Oh no this would be so… This is so obvious. I don’t want it to be so obvious. I want it to be more subtle.” And then we agreed that it wouldn’t be like the one five years ago. Five years ago is more like… It has more satire. Political satire. And you laugh about the current situation, the current affairs. You make fun of the public figures and politicians. This time I didn’t want that. In the end, we both agreed on “okay we won’t repeat that.” It was fun, but it should be done only that once.

After 2014, the situation became more grim, but it was also a manner of expectation management. This subsequently made Anthony look for other ways to express his view, as Anthony explains:

After what happened in Hong Kong, I don’t think we should just laugh about it, and then forget it. No, I don’t just want to laugh about it. I think maybe we should have a… Ok we make it more… how do you call it, introspective? Maybe provoking your thought. You may not laugh, but it will make you think. We hope that is what it turned out to be.

Wallace also refers to the difference from the 2012 concerts, when the choice to be more directly political was triggered by the context:

For the 2012 shows, the creative concept of the concert was relatively… a very direct one, because we wanted it to be very political. Since there was so much happening at that particular timing in Hong Kong, so you could just pick any elements from what’s happening around you. You could just pick any images… because at that time, even you just post a picture of C.Y. [Leung, the then Chief Executive of Hong Kong] on stage, people would respond emotionally. (…) Especially in 2012, you had that anti-national education background (…). So we invited Scholarism, Joshua Wong and thirty secondary school students at the age of fifteen or sixteen, to come on stage and sing “we don’t need no education.” So it was a very clear political statement on stage.

The new show asked for a different approach, both to prevent repetition, and to acknowledge the more stringent political climate since the Umbrella Movement. As Anthony Wong was a key figure in the Umbrella protests, it was expected that he would include the visually spectacular imagery of the movement in the show. Not doing that would have been disappointing to the audience, if not considered an act of abandonment or even betrayal. At the same time, Anthony tells us how hesitant he was about delivering the expected, stating the obvious. From his creative point of view, he wants to approach the movement in a more indirect, opaque, and thus calibrated manner:

You see the occupied areas [of the Umbrella Movement protests]. So we take that back from the fiction to the reality, and then you see the reality of failure. So that part is not the fiction anymore; it is the reality we are facing. The so-called failure we are facing. That part is the failure or the fatalism of the city.

What was shown during the concert was a video of nearly empty streets, devoid of people, and life. Which resonates with our analysis of the images in Chapter 3. For the audience it should be clear these streets signify the end of the occupation, a stark contrast to the time when the streets were teeming with people, when students were camping and studying at the occupation sites, when Anthony was performing on the centre stage of the occupied area. In its indirectness, in its subtle manner of conjuring presence through portrayal of its very absence, the clip clearly avoids representing the protests directly and instead recalibrates them towards a more opaque reference. Nevertheless, to explain this merely by way of politics is insufficient. Such ambiguity is in line with the aesthetics of pop that are characterised by a transient, intertextual, and multivocal opacity, in which meanings are always rendered ambivalent and under negotiation—in contrast to a rock aesthetic where meanings are generally more explicitly and more univocally articulated (de Kloet 2010).

But this choice to gesture towards reality was also borne out of an act of calibration between Wallace and Anthony. For Wallace, he liked the show to be surreal; in his words:

When I talked to Anthony about the book 1Q84, I also mentioned that one thing... In Chinese, it is虛 (xu). It is like reality is實 (shi). Surreal is 虛. I always said I wanted this concert to be虛, to be surreal. I didn’t want it to be實, not something realistic, but something surreal. I thought it was more interesting to play something surreal all the time, but I also asked Anthony, “Can we be surreal throughout the show? Will we have the chance to go back to reality? You want to touch on Umbrella Movement, or not? Do we need to go back to reality?” Then Anthony… after a while and after some thoughts, he told me, “I decided to go back to reality.”

The choices made during the production process are—when they are driven by deliberation rather than contingency—the result of a process of lengthy discussion between the key makers. It takes a close personal connection to make this work.

Another example of such calibration between politics and pleasure related to the timing of the concert series, and thus the historical context (Corner 1999). The concerts took place just before the election of a new Chief Executive in Hong Kong, an election that pro-democracy critics considered a mockery of real democracy, one based on a system of voting so distant from most Western forms of democracy that, three years earlier, its introduction ignited the Umbrella protests. Such a coincidence of timing made it rather inconceivable not to integrate the election motif into the concert, but the production team decided differently, as Wallace Kwok explains:

So when we were first given the time slot, because the last day would be one day before the election, we thought that, wow there are so many elements in the election that we can use for the concert. But after a few sessions, when we kept on talking to Anthony, we thought: it is too easy, it is so boring. I don’t want to see C.Y.’s photo on the screen again.

Again, the producers opted for a more indirect, more opaque approach towards politics. Another example comes from the rendition of the song “Road Angel 馬路天使,”Footnote 9 that was supposed to connect to a protest song during the Umbrella Movement. Again, to calibrate the political with the subtle and the opaque, Anthony and Wallace decided to obliquely refer to the protest song, and to let the tune morph into “Road Angel.” That Tat Ming song is about youth gangs in the street, or more generally young people who do not want to go home, Wallace explains, so they occupy the road and become the “angels of the road.” Wallace recounts:

[Anthony] said, “I don’t want to avoid the Umbrella Movement. I want the song, but it is so cliché to sing the song on stage.” So we rearranged a little, and the song became a rendition of whistling. We only whistled the lead lines, the melody lines of the Umbrella song. Then it led to the song “Road Angel.” So that song was dedicated to all those who participated in the movement. The original version of “Road Angel” is a powerful song, with guitar lead line and everything. But the version we played in the concert, was very slow, with a guitar introduction by Tats. So it was a very moody one. The song was dedicated to all those who participated, and shared that kind of helplessness and hopelessness, for those who suffered that kind of post-trauma syndrome.

This calibration was not only related to the way they navigated through the questions of representation; it also concerned the affective management of the concert. They were aware of the considerably gloomy framing of the concert, with its triple theme of surveillance, brainwashing, and suppression. Some affective calibration was required to make sure audiences would also have a good time. In Anthony's words:

Even though it is very heavy, and you feel very emotional, … I think if you really get what I mean, you will not feel like totally … I hope you get empowered. After seeing the show, you are empowered, and you don’t feel like you are beaten. That’s what we tried to convey in the end.

This process of calibration also explains why, towards the conclusion of the show, it morphed into a somewhat unexpected tribute to David Bowie—it allowed Tat Ming to articulate a more hopeful ending, away from surveillance and control, as Anthony explains:

When [Denise Ho] came on stage to sing a duet with us, “Under Pressure,” it’s like the answer. The song “Under Pressure” was the answer to all those frustration and fatalism. Then I sang another David Bowie song. That part became a David Bowie tribute. It's like David Bowie became the salvation. So it's really funny, it’s like music and art was our salvation.

The tribute foregrounds music and art as a way to escape from the controlling society. In a time when Hong Kong is moving through a gloomy period, struggling with the perceived failure of the Umbrella protests, with the demands posed by the National Security Law, witnessing its freedoms being challenged, music and art are celebrated as possible escape routes.

Conclusion

We have shown how the concert makers talk about the relationship between politics and music. For the music label that sponsors the concerts, music and politics should be seen as two totally separate realms, and connecting them can be harmful for the performance. The discrepancy or incongruity with the actual performances of Tat Ming is telling. On the other hand, for both Anthony and Wallace, the driving question of the show is not whether the two are linked, but rather, how to balance politics with pleasure, gloom with fun. This difference is hardly surprising, as the record company’s stake is to produce a successful show, and the question of politics has become a thorny one in the context of Hong Kong.

Our subsequent production analysis of the 2017 Tat Ming music extravaganzas revealed three recurring discourses—the contingent, the personal, and the calibrational—that help explain the production logic of the show and which we can add to Corner’s (1999) four levels of production as playing a crucial and defining role in how the concerts are produced. First, much was decided in a rather haphazard and ad hoc way due to the contingency of the production process. Video materials were only delivered at the last minute, the truck driver that carried the key prop for the show passed away on his way from mainland China to Hong Kong, children could not perform after a specific time slot—all these contingent factors shaped the end result profoundly. What struck us as a meticulously planned and executed spectacle turned out to be, at least partly, the outcome of a messy and highly contingent production process. Second, personal relations played a key role in the making of the show. It was the long and solid friendship between Wallace Kwok and Anthony Wong that guided them through the demanding fabrication of the narrative, visual, and sonic structure of the show. It was Duncan Wong’s fond memory of Tat Ming, memory that partly defined his past, that inspired him to engage his music company, Universal, into such a risky financial enterprise. Risky given that due to the political sensitivity surrounding Anthony Wong, investors might not want to invest in the show—and indeed they did not.

Such sensitivity became evident during the controversy regarding the concert poster. Modelled on the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it included figures deemed influential in contemporary Hong Kong, among which Jay Chou. The poster was soon withdrawn, and media reports pointed to Chou’s management as the reason. Allegedly—Universal never officially admitted the truthfulness of the allegation—Chou’s management considered the use of his portrait on the poster as copyright infringement and threatened legal action. Although, as Anthony tells us, they had secured all the rights involved in the poster design via proper channels. Universal decided to play safe and stop using this version of the poster.Footnote 10 This incident testifies to how much the show, whether in terms of production or promotion, was like playing a tug of war between multiple interests and considerations.

Finally, we have shown how the show involves a constant calibration between what to show and what not to show, often steering away from a direct articulation of politics towards a more opaque and ambivalent mode of performance. The calibration not only involves issues of representation, but also concerns affective management; a David Bowie tribute to conclude the show helps evoke a more positive, upbeat, and hopeful ending. Salvation comes from music and the arts, culminating into forces of imagination that produce lines of flight out of the society of control that Hong Kong is increasingly morphing into. Such lines, however, emerge, in a quite haphazard manner, driven by personal relationships and involving a constant calibration and recalibration of both form and content. To paraphrase John Lennon, music concerts are happening while people are busy making plans.