Sunday evenings are always hectic in the make-up lounge next to TVB's Studio Two. This is the time and place where both established and aspiring pop stars converge before making their appearance on Jade Solid Gold, the channel's weekly pop chart show and probably Hong Kong's best-known music television programme. Forget the fancy bars and fashionable shops: at 7pm every Sunday, the packed but dourly decorated green room becomes the place with the highest density of pop celebrities in town, all of them awaiting their call next door.
Among the stars to appear on this edition, broad-cast last Sunday, are Anthony Wong Yiu-ming and Tats Lau Yi-tat. The duo, known as Tat Ming Pair, are veterans of the show, becoming regulars as early as 1987, when they scaled the charts with songs such as Chronicles of the Stone and Street Angels. Their latest appearance coincides with an upcoming reunion concert series to celebrate the group's 20th anniversary.
When they finally enter the parlour after having their make-up applied in an adjacent small room, they walk straight into a paparazzi scrum. But this time the pair are mere spectators: the flashlights are all directed towards Twins' Charlene Choi Tsoek-jin, making her first public appearance since straining her neck in a traffic accident on the mainland. Then the press pack descends on Wong and Lau - though even then, some of the more vociferous hacks insist on taking pictures of them with their coiffeur Jacky Ma, better known to scandal-hungry readers as the protagonist in a bizarre love triangle involving actress Loretta Lee Lai-chun.
Such indifference from the tabloid press is astounding, given the stunning performance they are about to deliver. It might be only a four-minute medley of three hits from the 1980s, but it illustrates how much they are ahead of the contemporary pop herd. Not content to just walk through the set - as Twins, heartened by a horde of screaming teenage fans, did with their usual flat-voiced routine - the group have reinvented their work with a pipa-led arrangement, probably the first appearance of the classical Chinese instrument on Jade Solid Gold.
Given their concert series is titled 'Tat Ming Pair - at the Service of the People', do they fear the masses fail to appreciate the significance of their work? 'We are only musicians,' says Wong. 'The fact we are able to be on stage and perform is already some form of service to the people. Inevitably there will be people who are consuming or enjoying music in different ways. But we can't think about this too much - we are producers, we just do what we do.'
Beyond the tabloid tittle-tattle, however, Tat Ming Pair's reunion is big news. The more upmarket, middle-class lifestyle magazines are awash with coverage of their upcoming concerts. Record companies are doing brisk business with reissues of their work, including a boxed set of their six studio albums and a CD and DVD greatest hits package. Tickets for the concerts are selling so well organisers have added an extra night to the series.