Hong Kong indie music venue Hidden Agenda returns as TTN – and it plans to have something for everyone
Despite repeatedly being hounded by government departments over its lack of licences and its location constantly moving to various industrial buildings, Hidden Agenda has finally found a new home in Yau Tong as new venue TTN
Hidden Agenda has been reborn – sort of. At the new venue TTN, the walls are festooned with posters for Hidden Agenda events. It is as if the old independent gig venue, repeatedly hounded by various government departments over its lack of licences and location in various industrial buildings, has just reopened in yet another new venue.
But there’s a crucial difference. Hidden Agenda’s lack of official status eventually caused it to close down last year. The final straw was the police and immigration raid during a gig in May 2017, resulting in the arrest of founder Steveo Hui Chung-wo, along with British math rock band TTNG (formerly This Town Needs Guns) and US singer-songwriter Mylets, on alleged visa violations. In contrast TTN, short for This Town Needs, co-founded by Hui with event promoters Joshua Chan and K.K. Wong in Yau Tong, is now fully licensed.
Specifically, it currently has a temporary liquor licence, one designed for individual events and issued by the police, while it waits for its permanent liquor licence to come through. It also has a temporary place of public entertainment licence (which, despite only lasting for three months, takes about 40 days to approve while it gets passed around five separate government departments, one at a time).
As Thai indie rock band Yellow Fang are soundchecking ahead of an early June gig, a representative of the Liquor Licensing Board strolls around taking photos, mostly of signs warning off would-be underage drinkers – the latest of many people from the Hong Kong bureaucracy to inspect the premises.
And quite a premises it is. A huge, high-ceilinged cavern of 18,000 square feet (1,670 square metres) that is also available for hire for non-musical events, TTN occupies a commercial space on the first floor of Ocean One, a mostly residential development in an industrial area of Yau Tong, overlooking the villages next to Lei Yue Mun.
But it almost didn’t happen. So ground down was Hui by his experiences with Hidden Agenda, he was planning on giving up the messy business of running a venue. “I thought I could just get a job and put on gigs,” he says. “I didn’t want my friends to have to take this risk.”
But he was persuaded to continue by Chan, of events company Sigma Production; the pair have known each other for a decade. Together with Wong, who had been working for Chan, they decided to try to do the hard yards of renting premises in a commercial building rather than an industrial one, with the accompanying higher rents; and of acquiring the necessary licences to operate as a fully legitimate venue.