Hong Kong’s disco era, when Madonna, Rod Stewart, Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung danced the night away in Lan Kwai Fong, was glamorous, camp and outrageous while it lasted
- Disco fever hit the city in 1978, with clubs like Disco Disco and later Canton Disco, where Kylie Minogue made her debut, drawing the cool cats – and the police
In 1977, Saturday Night Fever exploded onto cinema screens across the globe. Many a teen swooned as a young John Travolta dressed in front of his bedroom mirror, preparing for his Saturday night burn across the dance floor at the 2001 Odyssey nightclub in flares, polyester shirt and with an era-requisite gold medallion nestled in a mound of chest hair.
New York’s Studio 54 flung open its doors that same year, in an old Broadway theatre in Midtown Manhattan. Celebrities, designers and socialites flocked to its altar of sex, drugs and disco. John Lennon, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, Cher and Diana Ross were regulars, and the only way a non-luminary could gain entrance was to dress like they belonged inside, or were there to supply cocaine.
What had been an underground trend in the United States since the early 1970s – mainly a Hispanic, black and gay thing – disco was by some accounts already on its way out by the time Saturday Night Fever arrived, but once Travolta started strutting to that Bee Gees soundtrack, those syncopated bass lines were suddenly mainstream, even arena rockers like Kiss feeling they had to get in on the act.
Hong Kong at the time, despite holding the world’s top spot for ostentatious neon, was a mix of Chinese nightclubs, from high-end hostess bars with live singers to seedy Wan Chai joints that primarily served British military and visiting allied warship troops docked in Victoria Harbour.
There were just two television channels in Hong Kong at the time, TVB and Rediffusion TV, and most programmes were several years out of date. It was a time when people still listened to the radio, and Canto-pop was in its infancy.
While the rich flaunted their Rolls-Royces and diamond-studded wrists and necklines, the poor lived in squatter villages dotted around the hillsides. But with ever more hopefuls from China arriving to find their fortune, a middle class was quickly emerging.
