Hardcore punk festival Alive 4 shows the alternative scene is growing in Hong Kong

Of all the types of music that attract seriously obsessed fans, from jazz to hip hop to Wagner, perhaps none inspires quite the same level of fervent dedication as the very loudest and nastiest-sounding of all. That style tends to be located at the intersection of hardcore punk and heavy metal, and Hong Kong's own festival of such skull-scouring sounds is set to return to the stage after a hiatus. The latest edition of Alive, which started in 2009 and has taken a break since 2011, will showcase a series of loud, fast, uncompromising bands from home and abroad. The event, being held at Central venue Backstage Live on September 8, will be headlined by Nepalese group The Underside, whose brand of fierce retro thrash has gathered a global following. Having just completed a tour of India, they're off after their Hong Kong appearance to tour Europe, including an appearance at a Swiss heavy metal festival on the same bill as Motörhead. They are supported by a variety of local bands that demonstrate what a cosmopolitan scene this can be. King Ly Chee are veterans of the Hong Kong hardcore scene, involved in its creation around the turn of the millennium. Rough, raw, raucous Hong Kong street punk outfit Defiant Scum have an Australian vocalist and a German drummer; aggressive alternative metal band Team Hero are Hong Kong-raised Filipinos; and thrash group Dead Soul, who like The Underside, originally hail from Nepal, where they formed more than 20 years ago. They broke up in the late 1990s and recently reformed. Alive 4 is their comeback gig. The presence of so much Nepalese talent isn't a coincidence. The event began as a showcase for Nepalese bands in Hong Kong, and has since grown, partly because the organisers have reached out to acts from the city's other ethnic minorities, and because it features a style of music that tends to attract fanatics. It began when co-organisers Min Gurung and Labin Gurung, who had been in a rock band together in both Nepal and Hong Kong, found that they could no longer play regularly due to family commitments, and decided to start organising gigs instead. "I started the event in 2009 to promote new bands within the Nepalese community in Hong Kong," says Min Gurung. "But as the years passed, I started bringing in different minority bands and trying to mix up the rock genres as well." Alive 3 included overseas acts for the first time, Indian metal band Girish and the Chronicles, and a DJ from Mumbai. There will be a DJ from Delhi for Alive 4. Both India and Nepal, in fact, have seen their alternative metal and hardcore punk scenes take off spectacularly in recent years. Bikrant Shrestha, frontman of The Underside and also organiser of Nepal's five-year-old Silence Festival, says his band now regularly plays to crowds of more than 500 at home, adding that he's expecting more than 5,000 for the next edition of Silence. Alive 4 won't get that big a crowd, but the scene in Hong Kong has been growing fast. Riz Farooqi, the frontman of King Ly Chee, formed the band after being bitten by the hardcore bug while studying in the US in the 1990s. "During my time away from Hong Kong, the international school kids really took to punk rock and were creating some amazing things, and really living by some of those punk rock ideals," he says. "So I thought that when I moved back, punk/hardcore would've exploded — but it hadn't. I was discussing why is it that punk rock hadn't taken off — and I realised that was because it wasn't being taken to the local population. "The idea of King Ly Chee grew from the idea of taking this punk/hardcore mentality to the local kids through the band, and an underground bilingual 'zine called Start from Scratch that I put out for a number of years." When the band started, he adds, Hong Kong's musical climate was very different. There weren't any venues around to showcase underground music. Farooqi would walk from bar to bar, asking the owners if his band could play. "They were always like, 'What bands do you cover?' My answer was, 'You know, the usual: Backstreet Boys, Bon Jovi' — anything to get the owner to say yes. We got three shows at bars, and one called the police during the show." These days, he says, the scene has expanded dramatically, and it's happened without any external help. "All this growth has been because of the unyielding passion of people who just love music and haven't given up on Hong Kong. This road hasn't been easy, and for certain types of music, it will continue to be an uphill battle." The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand all have much more mature hardcore scenes, he says. And the mainland is starting to catch up, too. Hardcore is starting to build momentum: the whole of Asia's ears will be bleeding soon. Alive 4, September 8, 9pm, Backstage Live, 1/F Somptueux Central, 52-54 Wellington Street, Central, HK$200. Inquiries: 9348 5545