For a few years around the handover, a shabby commercial tower block at the end of Gage Street in Central was the unlikely locus of a minor nightlife revolution that helped shape Hong Kong’s modern club and music scene.
At the time, nobody who frequented CE Top’s bars and rooftop patio thought it was anything but a loud, grubby second home for the ravers, pill-poppers, dealers and flotsam that wanted more from their night than the confected mediocrity of Lan Kwai Fong or Wan Chai’s sleaze pits. CE Top occupied the top floor of the nine-storey Cheung Hing Building. The worn-down edifice’s location, overlooked by the Mid-Levels escalator, lent the club its name: Central Escalator Top.
The fact that the name still reverberates among the city’s long-time clubbers and DJs is testament to the inadvertent impact this tiny dive had on the city’s nightlife. CE Top was more than a handful of dance floors in a building that also housed a gay sauna. It was a testbed for DJs who wanted to play something different from the mainstream sounds that the established Wan Chai clubs had monopolised.
In their drive to forge something new, they set a few firsts for Hong Kong nightlife. CE Top went on to host the city’s first regular genre-based club nights. It introduced new genres to a city whose dance floors had got used to drab house-by-numbers dirges. And as its tentacles spread further than clubland, it sowed the seeds for what became Hong Kong’s hugely successful and internationally renowned music festival, Clockenflap.
CE Top came at just the right time. Local big-name DJs such as Christian and Lee Burridge had cut their teeth in Wan Chai in the mid-1990s. But as they began to make a name for themselves on the international scene, they left a void that nobody and no venue seemed able to fill. Tired old banker bars and pick-up joints like Joe Bananas and, a little later, Dusk Till Dawn, competed with the revolving door of tepid theme pubs and clubs that emerged and withered with increasing rapidity. And when the first Neptune closed its doors in Wan Chai, the night owls who didn’t want to be seen dead in Post 97’s faux sophistication, or the sleaze of The Strawberry bar, looked elsewhere. I had been in Hong Kong for a couple of years working as a journalist and, having spent the early 90s in London dance venues like the Gardening Club and Pushca, was in that tribe. I loved the sense of camaraderie that the club scene brought, although I had no intention then of going behind the decks.
CE Top was waiting to embrace us.
As one of the venue’s long-standing DJs, former South China Morning Post writer Jason Gagliardi, remembers: “When Hong Kong’s summer of love exploded, ecstasy arrived and the rave parties began, the main after-hours action was centred on Wan Chai, in spots like the Neptune clubs and the Big Apple, but, as the handover loomed, the real underground action drifted up the MTR line’s spine to the weird and arcane lanes behind Central.”
High Rise, Low Life
It was a minor miracle that CE Top caught on at all: the place was not easy to find. And it’s no exaggeration to say it was a threat to health and safety. Besides CE Top, there was at least another club or two in the building served by the erratic lift, a shuddering conveyance that after dark stopped only on alternate floors, forcing visitors to use the flights of rubbish-strewn stairs.
It was probably inevitable that CE Top would become the focus of newly disaffected clubbers around the handover. Its operator, the wonderfully camp Mr Wah, had run a gay karaoke lounge in the cramped top-floor space and was always encouraging others to make use of it. (Inappropriately for a venue with a faulty lift and blocked fire escape, Mr Wah was a former fireman.)
For most who can remember the era, the first successful CE Top club nights were the flamboyant Phase events, which had a different theme each month and attracted a crowd that was dominated by the late Greg Derham and his dog, Astro. In his obituary in Hong Kong Magazine, now part of the South China Morning Post, Greg was called Hong Kong’s first drag queen. He brought with him the beautiful crowd from the nearby Petticoat Lane bar and other fabulous hidden hangouts. The Phase nights’ predictably camp motifs included a jungle night with dozens of Tarzans and Janes, and—my favourite—an airport night, replete with faux destination board and 70s-garbed air hostesses.
A club night organiser of the era, Robert Luxton, encapsulated the essence of those nights in a piece he wrote for his own magazine, one of the many artistic endeavours of his Robot design project. Luxton remembers travelling in the lift—attendees packed like sardines—to the top floor: “Low frequencies penetrate layers of concrete, reverberating against the flimsy steel of the lift. All eyes follow the linear movement of tired light bulbs, providing a rough idea of altitude. Finally the doors screech open and scarlet light flashes sardines from their temporary home, enticing them to pay a minimal door charge and enter the frenzy that is CE-Top.”
A New Scene
The handover provided what many still regard as the city’s clubbing high point: the Unity event. Memorable and huge as it was, nobody managed to capitalise on its massive success. At the time it felt like the city was champing at the bit for more. The failure among venues to forge an identity for Hong Kong clubbing post-handover combined with another force of the time to bring people to CE Top. The handover sent thousands of foreigners rushing back home, leaving those that remained in ever-decreasing friend circles. Once-disparate groups of ravers literally clubbed together in search of something new.
“This was a time when people still bought CDs and records every week. They were engaged with their music and wanted to hear or play it loud in a club,” remembers one of CE Top’s DJs who still lives in the city and prefers to remain anonymous. “There would be a big-name DJ from overseas maybe once a month and, for the other three weeks, we had nothing. We’d have to go to the Flying Pig and that sort of thing.”
The Phase nights were packed, sweaty and hugely fun, and soon CE Top was being booked by a younger crowd of would-be DJs eager to play the new genres of dance music that twisted into shape from those early house and rave days. And for most of them, it was the first time those sounds had been heard at a club in the city.
“Musical genres were erupting, mutating, cross-pollinating,” says Gagliardi. “CE Top had space for them all. Progressive, house, hard house, French house, jungle, drum and bass, big beat, breakbeat, trip hop, ultra lounge.”
Now living in his Australian homeland, Gagliardi was inspired to take to the decks himself.
“If you waited long enough, eventually you got a turn,” he says.
Many of the regular club nights were genre pioneers. The Mash-Up night brought drum and bass to a Hong Kong dance floor for the first time, courtesy of DJs Steve Ellul, Ben, Digby, Big Teak, Little Teak, Chris, Arkham, Richard, Mark and Sarah. Beat Suite—another club night, this time with DJs Bodhi, Adam AKW, Maggie and Mick—introduced breakbeats. As DJ Top Ginge, I was part of a crew that brought lounge music and swing to CE Top on a Thursday night. DJs Wild Westy and Gagliardi’s alter-ego Love Handles also pulled in crowds for Velvet Friday, a genre-hopping affair. Brown Sugar and Funky Belly were, as the names suggest, funkier events, with Oakey, Sean, Ben and Teng Boon in the booth.
Pioneers and Designers
Probably the wildest club night of them all—and the most influential—was Robot. Luxton and his partner Jay would decorate the club with all manner of garniture and stage sets. On one memorable night, they draped the venue in elasticated webbing that divided the dance floor into zones separated by practically impenetrable walls of gauze.
Robot was more than a club night. Jay and Rob created a full-on tech-centric concept that extended into publishing and commercial design. The events side of the organisation developed into what we now know as Clockenflap.
“Robot really did push the idea of club nights into a different realm,” remembers a UK-born DJ who remains in Hong Kong and prefers to remain anonymous.
But the good times couldn’t last. The anything-can-happen-now excitement of the immediate post-handover period, and the fin de siècle anticipation of the end of the 90s gave way to darker days in the new millennium. The party drugs that had kept the dance floors heaving gave way to zombie kids on ketamine. The fabric of the Cheung Hing Building began to deteriorate further. When vandals attacked the lift and junkies hung out in the stairwells, the writing was on the wall.
The music also deteriorated.
“Specialised and often themed nights gave way to brainless activities,” wrote Luxton. “Design and decoration were abandoned in favour of relentless consistency. The scientists who conducted the early experiments hung up their goggles.”
Briefly, it seemed that a new club would be handed CE Top’s baton. At Yellow Frog, Richard Meunier, Eric Byron and Yeodie provided a tiny room with big tunes, but it closed in its second year. Liquid, another club in the area, briefly became a CE Top alternative, but its ambitions were too grand and it didn’t last long either.
CE Top closed in 2001 for reasons nobody can explain with certainty. The grand experiment had died an ignominious death.
“CE Top was the only really independent and far-sighted club that Hong Kong had,” says the British DJ. “It was a golden period. After that came the boring high-glitz corporate clubs like Dragon-I and Drop and the fun went out of clubbing.”
CE Top’s legacy lives on in the continued DJing careers of many who got their first taste of life behind the decks at the club, and most tangibly in the continuing success of Clockenflap. Traffic thrives on social media pages dedicated to CE Top, and reunions of clubbers from those days are commonplace in London.
“It’s all just a blur of gurning good times, banging tunes, group hugs and wide smiles,” remembers Gagliardi. “Sure there were dark times too. People who pushed it too far, got too messy, paid the price. I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. It was of its time and place, and there was no time or place like it.”
