Emerging in the late 1980s, independent band AMK never reached the dizzying heights of contemporaries Beyond or Tat Ming Pair. Bu their influence on the Hong Kong scene is still felt far and wide.
A group of local bands - including 22 Cats, False Album, My Little Airport, Fruitpunch, The Marshmallow Kisses and Superday - has now put together In the Name of AMK, which pays tribute to the three-piece band. And Canto-pop singer-songwriter Endy Chow Kwok-yin has covered AMK's Please Let Me Go Home on his latest album, Greenhouse Balloon, which was released last month.
The band - initially called Adam Met Karl - formed in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Along with a group of young musicians including Keith Leung (aka GayBird) and Arion Au Yeung - who are both now with Anthony Wong Yiu-ming's People Mountain People Sea production house - they put together a compilation, Mixed Mind I, to express their feelings about the event.
AMK's original line-up was Kwan King-chung, Anson Mak Hoi-shan, and two friends. Because they all had wildly different musical preferences, they named themselves after the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, and the father of communism, Karl Marx.
Chow says he first heard of AMK though music magazines. 'At the beginning, the way [Kwan] sang - a bit not in tune - was strange,' he says. 'But gradually I found them really hip. Their music helps people fantasise. My band started to imitate them.'
In the early stages, AMK played a wide range of music from punk to post-punk, blues rock and gothic. Their songs addressed social and political issues.
In 1991, the band's growing reputation in the underground scene earned them a record deal with now-defunct local indie label Sound Factory. The next year, they released their debut, Love EP, featuring the single Hey Hey Hey I Love You. By then, the line-up had become Kwan (who is now a DJ at Commercial Radio Hong Kong), Mak, guitarist Hui Wai-sum and a drum machine, which they called Ling Ling.