Steven Bishop, songwriter to the stars, is excited about his Hong Kong debut

Back in 1976, not many aspiring singer-songwriters recording their debut albums were lucky enough to have Eric Clapton turn up at the studio to contribute a couple of guitar solos. According to Stephen Bishop, who is due to perform at Kitec in Kowloon Bay on July 28, his manager at the time was also managing Clapton's friend, Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones, and swung the session by telling the guitarist that Bishop was "a funny guy".

Bishop is certainly funny, and he proved it a couple of years later in John Landis' 1978 classic comedy National Lampoon's Animal House. As well as singing the theme tune, Bishop plays the folk singer, serenading a girl at a frat house toga party, and having his guitar smashed by John Belushi. "An iconic moment," Bishop chuckles over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. "I've been very fortunate in having been associated with a lot of movies. Sometimes they use me as a singer, sometimes as a songwriter, and sometimes they ask me to do both."

In addition to his Animal House role, Bishop contributed cameo appearances to two other Landis films, Kentucky Fried Movie and The Blues Brothers, but it's with movie songs that he found his niche.

He sang It Might Be You, the theme to the 1983 film Tootsie starring Dustin Hoffman, and wrote Separate Lives for the soundtrack of 1985's White Nights, which became a huge hit for Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin.

Bishop wrote and performed One Love as the theme for 1984's Unfaithfully Yours, and has contributed to many other soundtracks, including The China Syndrome and The Money Pit.

Separate Lives was nominated for the best original song Oscar in 1986, but lost to Lionel Richie's Say You Say Me — from the same film. But he has just been invited to become a governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which he says is "kind of neat".