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HK Magazine

I’ve always been a Wan Chai boy. I was born there in 1945 and grew up there.
Wan Chai was just as sleazy then as it is now. I lived right on Lockhart Road where the action was. It’s hardly changed.
My father died when I was 12. My mother raised me as an only child. She was a fine woman.
Antonioni’s “Blowup” hugely inspired me in secondary school. It changed my life. I began to see things differently. I became obsessed with visual forms and wanted to become a photographer.
I discovered jazz at the same time. I heard Stan Getz on Uncle Ray’s radio show and it instantly turned me on. I started collecting Blue Note records from Tom Lee.
I went to the UK when I was 20. I was trying to escape from the tight enclosure of the local social system and wake myself up.
I started my photography career when I was 24. But music was always bound up with it. I’d always have music playing during shoots, and I took a lot of pictures of jazz musicians, which I sold to a jazz record shop in Paris.
I also worked as a macrobiotic chef for a while, pioneering the macrobiotic salad at a well-respected restaurant in London and opening a health food store in Cumbria.
The 60s was a great era. It was our most creative era. Then in the 70s disco brought the hippies back into enclosed spaces, where they danced under corporate supervision.
I gave up commercial photography when I was 50. Only then did I realize music, not pictures, was my true medium.
My whole photography career had been dedicated to trying to mimic the hero of “Blowup,” and I’d ended up pretty much the same way he did.
I believe everybody is deeply influenced by some image they pick up when they’re younger. That image stays with them for a long time, until they have a mid-life crisis. Then they wake up and start doing what they really want to do.
I ended up in Scotland, where I met a Chinese owner of a deserted karaoke bar. I ran jazz nights there.
Hong Kong has much better live music now, because the bands are playing crazy stuff—more punk rock. Cantopop is an off-the-shelf product that goes all the way back to Elvis. It’s an old trick, and very unimaginative.
We were a well-behaved society under the British, partly because people were only interested in making money. Now about 20 percent of the activity here isn’t about money.
People are starting to realize that life is about more than just having two houses, four wives and five cars.
I’m a proud cofounder of the local Dirty Old Man’s club with the cinematographer Chris Doyle, a very like-minded fellow.
Being “dirty” is about more than what the word suggests on the surface. We’ve been brainwashed to believe it’s a bad label, but it will eventually become classy. Dirty old men appreciate beauty.
All men think funny things when they look at women, even those who pretend to be genteel. When a man looks at a woman, his imagination is stimulated by the form and the color. It’s like going to a gallery and looking at a fine painting. If we can appreciate Mona Lisa, why can’t we appreciate someone who moves?
I don’t drink alcohol. I’m allergic to it. And I don’t understand why people drink. Is it because Jesus drank red wine in the Bible?
Young people are what keep me going. I learn from them and fit into their circle, which then allows me to manipulate them. We both benefit from it in the end.
If I wasn’t doing what I do, I would be stuck with my stupid old friends who play golf in Shenzhen and smoke cigars in wine bars. My life is more meaningful, and I can communicate with my children now, because I talk their talk. All parents should do what I do.


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Founder of Ultralounge, DJ Kulu

Magazines

The founder of local electro-jazz outfit Ultralounge, Kulu is Hong Kong’s oldest, hippest and dirtiest DJ. He talks to John Robertson about his early life as a photographer, his deep appreciation for the female form, and why all parents should do what he does.
