Funky town: How disco fever in the late '70s changed Hong Kong’s nightlife forever

Another Saturday night and Lan Kwai Fong is in full swing: girls in skin-tight dresses shoulder past a harried waiter carrying yet another tray of champagne. Revellers shout to be heard over the din of indistinguishable dance numbers while hip young things move to the beat and the older, more jaded among them sit back, necking overpriced tipples. It is a familiar scene, and for most of the people in it, just a typical night out.

"Most of Hong Kong's nightlife is boring," according to Zaran Vachha, director of events company Fresh Off The Boat Asia. "It's the same every night. Drunken escapism lacking creativity, and the number of bottles you order justifying your existence."

But it hasn't always been that way.

who danced their way through them, the boogie nights of the late 1970s/early 80s burned brightest. The scene in Hong Kong embodied the spirit of Asia's biggest financial boom and was fuelled by a devil-may-care attitude towards the impending end of colonial rule. It was an era of outrageous disco-mania and it opened the floodgates to cultural abundance and integration on the dance floor.

"It was a time when people were focused on absorbing everything from music, culture and fashion. There was a sense of hunger for everything that was new and different," says Tedman Lee Pui-ming, executive producer of Night of the Living Discoheads, a 2012 Cantonese-language documentary that attempts to recapture the essence of the "golden era".

Before this explosion of merrymaking, Hong Kong's trendy stomping grounds had been almost exclusively in high-end Kowloon hotels. Fashion designers and businessmen frequented The Peninsula, the Sheraton and the Holiday Inn, whose bars and clubs also catered to the visiting elite. The only other form of mass nighttime distraction could be found in less-salubrious Wan Chai, and its pockets of Suzie Wong-style action.