'Looking back, it did feel a bit like the end of an era, the end of the connection with Britain,' Wong says. 'Suede, plus other forms of British pop culture, from fashion to football, were the emotional attachments that people wanted to hold on to before the handover.'

The indie rock band credited as one of the key inspirations for the Britpop movement earned unprecedented popularity among indigenous youngsters. Nigel Peters, of concert promoter Midas Promotions, witnessed the rise of Suede here. He recalls that, in general, the ratio of local Chinese audience members to expats at a show by a foreign act was about 50-50. Suede crowds were different.

'Suede always attracted a strong local audience, which I would 'guesstimate' made up 70 per cent of the attendance at the band's previous shows in Hong Kong,' says Peters, whose company has promoted three local shows by the group.

Many have attributed Suede's prominence to the unusual amount of media attention the band received. Journalists, radio disc jockeys and television show hosts were not shy when it came to professing their passion for the band. In 1994, Suede's front man, Brett Anderson, graced the cover of the inaugural issue of local rock magazine Music Colony Bi-Weekly. Commercial Radio's Quote Zone music show aired five nights a week and featured mostly British indie groups. Star TV's Channel V and Cable TV's now defunct YMC ran seemingly endless loops of Suede music videos and interview clips. Music stores HMV and Tower Records opened in Hong Kong in the early to mid-90s, exposing local music fans to a much wider selection of international bands.

Suede's Hong Kong debut came in 1995, after the release of their ambitious second studio album, Dog Man Star.

'Most of the audience at Suede's first Hong Kong show were expats,' recalls Yuen Chi-chung, founder of Music Colony Bi-Weekly. 'Their fan base here wasn't that big at the time.'

That changed, however, when the band relaunched themselves as five 'beautiful ones' instead of four: Anderson on vocals, Richard Oakes on guitar, bass player Mat Osman, drummer Simon Gilbert and his cousin, Neil Codling, on keyboards. Sales of their third studio album, Coming Up, were strong and the band were presented with a platinum disc at a jam-packed press conference when they hit town for the second time, in 1997, shortly before the handover. Local teenage groupies wearing the band's iconic 'GayAnimalSex' T-shirt showered them with gifts and tailed them around town. That year, they played two gigs on consecutive nights and British music paper New Musical Express, which had followed the band to Hong Kong, was apparently stunned to see the group's popularity here.

The band returned in 1999 and again before they split, in 2003. Since then, Anderson has come back to Hong Kong to perform in The Tears, with ex-Suede creative partner Bernard Butler, and as a solo act.

While the catchy pop of Coming Up was a seductive foil to Canto-pop, Yuen believes the band 'Hongkongised' themselves, by adapting to Canto-pop-style stardom.

'You could see fans holding up banners,' Yuen says. 'The band just went with the flow, acting very friendly, posing for pictures and autographing fans' treasures. Later, they attended RTHK's music awards as guests. No other foreign band would've done that. They were even featured in fashion and lifestyle magazines. Suede was not just a band, but a style icon to many hip Hongkongers.'

'Towards the end they were almost like a Hong Kong band,' says Wong Chi-chung, music critic, radio DJ and university lecturer, who was a co-host of Quote Zone and a YMC chief.

Michael Wong was among Wong Chi-chung's listeners. 'This amazing new sound caught my attention,' he recalls. From then on he devoted his pocket money to collecting Suede's music. He has seen the band live at least 10 times. 'The craziest thing is that I have 10 different editions of Head Music [Suede's fourth studio album] from 10 countries.' That's not all; Wong and his friends formed a band that covered Suede songs as well as other Britpop tunes.

Playing bass guitar in an amateur local band provided insight into the local music scene. 'There was a time in Hong Kong where supporting anything foreign made you feel superior. There could be local bands playing music [similar to that of British bands], but they still didn't gain any support locally.'

Having an emotional connection with the culture of a previous regime is common among people living in former colonies, says Daniel Vukovich, a comparative literature professor at the University of Hong Kong. And, with the Suede reunion concert approaching, fans are becoming nostalgic.

'It's not necessarily related to any political or governmental issues. They want to keep some kind of identification with Britain,' says Vukovich, who teaches postcolonial studies.

Hong Kong people have complex identity issues, he says. They identify with Chinese culture but also, because the colonisers weren't particularly disliked here, with the West and British culture.

'People are proud of that,' he says. 'They believe they are part of the West, part of this global trend of Britpop, making them different from Shanghai and Beijing.'