Any rock fans who made it to the remarkable Guns N' Roses concert on Wednesday night might have noticed, amid the spinning wheels of flames and Axl Rose racing the length of the stage with his triumphant squeals of Paradise City, a woman standing at the rear of the audience with an enormous grin concealed under a baseball cap. Alex Ng was enjoying one of the few live concerts she has not worked on in Hong Kong over the past decade. The hard-edged production director for Hong Kong's leading event production and creative services company, International Fixer, is the unrecognised force behind Hong Kong's live-music scene, as well as many fashion shows, films and corporate events.
'I've not had a day off since the recession hit,' admits Ng, the day before the Guns N' Roses gig in her company's eccentric building on Aberdeen Street. The three-storey headquarters houses stylish graphic designers, a tattooed costume designer perched on the first-floor balcony, and a trapeze swinging invitingly from the high ceiling. ('A girl walked in off the street one day and said 'Here's a problem for you to solve',' recounts Ng. ' 'I have a trapeze and nowhere to practise.' It became quite clear to me that evening as I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling . . . ')
The 36-year-old Eurasian, dressed in combats and cap, stares at me with a deadpan expression. 'We've been so busy,' she continues. 'It's kind of embarrassing because people around here are scraping for work. But we deal in the entertainment industry and people want to escape, they want to be entertained.'
Blessed with nerves of steel, Hong Kong's party specialist was born in London. She moved to Hong Kong at the age of four with her father - the renowned Hong Kong actor and club owner Richard Ng Yiu-hon - and her English, hairstylist mother. She attended Kowloon's King George V School and by the time she was 13, Ng was already hanging out with Andrew Bull, who would become a leading promoter in Hong Kong.
'Andrew was a radio DJ at RTHK at the time and we would go up there after school and try to get him to play the Jam or Madness,' Ng says. 'I first got to know him then.'
She left Hong Kong for a British boarding school, before heading to California with the aim of breaking into Hollywood. 'I went to UCLA to do film, but it was so boring I changed to world art and cultures,' says Ng, breaking into a cackle, 'which means I can hoola dance and I can do Javanese puppetry'.