kevin sinclair's hong kong

What's the most memorable Hong Kong song? Weird as it may seem, it's probably an ode to the repulsive litterbug Lap Sap Chung. We're the only community on Earth whose closest thing to a municipal anthem is a song about a green-and-red rubbish worm. Don't we deserve something better? I think we do.

Most famous cities have an easily identifiable song. We don't. When the Hong Kong skyline flashes up in movies, there's a clunky piano roll that vaguely represents what Hollywood in the 1930s considered Chinese music. It's a chopsticks tune with imaginary honky-tonky Chinese characteristics.

Yet listen to the refrains of other cities. The big apple has New York, New York. The city by the bay has I Left My Heart in San Francisco. Liverpool sways to You'll Never Walk Alone. All eight million residents of the British capital can sing Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner.

If you stagger out of a pub in Scotland into a bright mid-summer eve you can drone on about Glasgow Belongs to Me. Even Copenhagen has it's own tune, as does Aberdeen (The Northern Lights) and Galveston, Texas, (Galveston, naturally.)

But what about us? We've got the rubbish worm song, devised by the eccentric genius Arthur Hacker when he was government creative director at the time of Clean Hong Kong in 1972.

We have a brilliant song about the police revolution of 1977 written by journalist Graham Earnshaw. Who can now remember either the event or the tune?