On my show this month:
There are two shows from me this month. In the regular show, Hong Kong Garden takes in a wide arc around the Pacific Rim. First we take in the latest electronic dub from Los Angeles, we then head north to Portland OR and the city's current favorite underground band. Then a hop over the Pacific to Hong Kong and mainland China for My Little Airport and 24 Hours. Then it's time for our latest discovery on Maybe Mars Records, Traveller, who manage to sound like a contemporary Chinese version of Traffic. We then head down to Sydney via a couple of quick stops in Thailand and Bali for some 70's funk and nineties chilled house respectively until we end up in the harbour city for some of the best new electronic music around at the moment.
As a bonus there is an extra show - Sean Hocking's Nuggets. Around the same time as I started listening to Peel, in mid 1977, I heard rumours about this amazing double album by the guitarist of the Patti Smith group (in those days I had no idea that he had a name! Lenny Kaye) where there was all this music from the late sixties that sounded not too dissimilar to punk rock , or so the rumours led me to believe. There then followed 2 years of fruitless searching for this most mysterious of records until i eventually tracked it down at a tiny record store hidden at the point where the North End Road meets the Fulham road sometime in 1980 and I spent the huge sum of 40 pounds on the Sire double album re-issue which to this day is still worth every penny spent on it. Since then my early days of listening to Peel and this album have somehow been intertwined in my musical brain although to my knowledge he never actually played any of the album on his show. So .. by a hop skip and a jump I have decided to create the first of my nuggets shows which tries to re-create what Kaye did with his collection by applying it to what I heard on the Peel show but also what I dug up in local record stores around the south of England in the late seventies and early 80s. Some of these songs are bone-fide Peel favourites and some are just music from the period that i feel has been sorely ignored.
Biography: Sean Hocking is the founder and owner of Metal Postcard Records and based in Hong Kong.
An avid Peel listener from the late 70’s onwards he discovered the true breadth of music available between 10:00pm and midnight for many years. Metal Postcard Records follows the Peel/Tony Wilson philosophy of play it, release it, and don’t worry about other people’s opinions too much; they all come round eventually.
"My first DJ experience aged 15 was being asked by older schoolboy Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins/Bella Union) to play a six form dance in the dim distant days of Dexy’s Midnight Runners and a three-piece Cure. Since then I have played Sydney warehouses, West Sussex fields, Brooklyn Bars, Cambodian restaurants, Vietnamese Riverbanks, Hong Kong rooftops and too many empty houses with dodgy fuse boxes to mention.”
“Mentioning favourite recordings would be pointless as they change from day to day but I can tell you that amongst my favourite gigs has been Black Flag at the lyceum in 1980 something, The Cramps on their Psychedelic Jungle tour, The Triffids final Sydney concert at the Paddington Town Hall, Julian Cope’s main stage sunset set Glastonbury in 1987, any Ed Kuepper performance over the last 30 years, Konono No.1 in New York a few years back and The Stone Roses at Spike Island was, without a doubt, a great day out. Oh and the three times I was lucky enough to catch Melbourne’s Morning After Girls who should all be considered for sainthood.”"
Most recently the launch party for the Cambodian Space Project’s debut single on Metal Postcard Records in Phnom Penh was a revelation as the band was joined on stage by various musical survivors of the Pol Pot genocide who sang and played their hearts out for hours on end. Couldn’t remember feeling such musical joy... Well not since Peel played The Dodgems’ ‘Lord Lucan Is Missing’ for the first time."
