It has been five years since they worked together but tonight electronic sounds duo, Tat Ming Pair, will be electrifying their fans again with an anniversary concert at the Academic Community Hall.
It was a decade ago that a long-haired amateur musician named Anthony Wong Yiu-ming strode into a seedy studio, to answer an advertisement for a 'good singer'.
Inside he found Tats Lau Yee-tat, with his rock guitar, claiming to play electronic tunes. 'I can't recall what songs I sang in the audition. But none of them were very electronic, even though it turned out that Tat Ming Pair would be very electronic,' Wong, 33, said.
The chemistry that sprang up between the two was intense enough to convince Lau to drop his aspirations for underground projects and to focus on crafting Tat Ming.
A good friend, Winnie Yu - then veteran DJ and now head of Commercial Radio - gave them her blessing by naming the duo Tat Ming Pair and introducing them to record companies.
Eventually, a contract with PolyGram was signed. The deal shocked not only the duo but also the local Canto-pop scene - a mainstream label teaming up with an underground group was unusual.
'When we signed with PolyGram . . . it was simply that we didn't like to hear much of the music in Hong Kong. So we made our own music to provide an alternative for Hong Kong and ourselves,' Wong said. 'The influence that Tat Ming brought [to Hong Kong] was that our music captured Hong Kong's collective ideology in the 1980s and it's quite a unique Tat Ming feature.' They produced 14 albums and the gutter-to-glitz trend they started gave rise to the 'band boom'.