Post-punk band The Chameleons’ singer on their Hong Kong debut, 37 years after they started out

“There must be something wrong boys,” frontman Mark Burgess sings in the 1983 track. “[They] sit at their tables and throw us the scraps/ For Christ’s sake leave us something/ Now they can erase us at the flick of a switch.”

It was atmospheric, rallying songs such as this that made the band a cult favourite around the world in the intervening years, but the band never made it to Asia. Until now, that is. Burgess will finally be making his debut here this Friday, performing with the latest incarnation of the band, which for the Hong Kong gig will be called Chameleons UK.

Fighting off a cold, yet still riding high after the band’s “fabulous” pre-Christmas hometown show only a few days before he spoke to the Post, Burgess is excited at the thought of performing in Hong Kong for the first time.

Despite having seen it all in the music industry as part of various musical projects in the 1980s and ’90s, Burgess admits he relishes the challenge of entertaining a new crowd of foreign fans in uncharted territory.

“We don’t know what to expect; we’ll just do what we do and see how it goes down,” he says over the phone. “When you’ve been doing this as long as we have, it’s always a thrill going somewhere you’ve never been before to do something you’ve not done before; something completely new.”

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Seem now as one of the genre’s most overlooked acts – their peers include Joy Division, The Smiths and The Cure – the Chameleons’ influence can be heard clearly in the songs of many post-punk groups active since the genre’s revival in the early Noughties.