Rapper finds his footing in Hong Kong scene

Massachusetts, some time in the early 1990s. Beneath the pewter grey skies of the eastern seaboard a self-appointed slacker was coming of age. Hip hop had begun its fabled golden period while grunge music was exploding out of Seattle, and at the now defunct Boston club Rathskeller a 20-year-old singer and guitarist named Brandon Ho was taking to the stage with his band, Needs River. Little did he know then, but two decades on he would become a key player of the Hong Kong music scene.

Born in Montreal in 1973 and the eldest of five children, Ho didn't arrive in Hong Kong until he was 11. His love for music started early, and like most children of the 1980s he fell for Michael Jackson and Madonna. But before long Ho was soaking up The Beastie Boys, Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J, and Public Enemy. "I just looked at the covers, and if I saw black guys with chains on I knew it was rap and I knew it'd be dope," he says over dim sum in Tin Hau on a sweltering day.

Being impressionable, his tastes shifted further still. He saw Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash on an Australian music channel and everything changed. "All kids learn the recorder, and my parents tried to encourage my piano playing, but the guitar was on a different level." At 13 his sister gave him one as a gift.

Ho was getting into trouble around this time, venturing to Kowloon under-age bar In Place on a regular basis. His behaviour wasn't unusual, but his parents were concerned enough to pack him off to boarding school in Michigan, US. "I was deemed to be incorrigible, so something had to be done. I was pretty apathetic to be honest," Ho says with a flutter of regret.

He took the relocation in his stride, and it was there that American music made its most visceral impact on him. Ho joined punk and metal bands with names such as The Confused and Morbid Acerbity, playing mostly cover tracks. But he soon began to write his own material. "Everything else became secondary. I just had that feeling that I had to do it. I was into death metal, as well as still being into hip hop. It was Doc Martens, flannel shirts, and mohawks."

High school was a blur, but he ended up an undergrad at Boston University on a general studies course. But music was paramount, and as he slipped deeper into that lifestyle and further from Hong Kong things came to a head: "I was partying a lot at university and I was a pretty dark kid," he says. "I didn't understand the world. After my sophomore year my parents wanted me to move back to Hong Kong as my dad's business was struggling. But our relationship wasn't as good, so I said, 'if you're not paying for me then I don't have to listen to you'. They told me they'd stop supporting me and I'd have to look after myself, so I did."