Hungry Ghosts
Together for five years, Hong Kong’s famous indie post-rock outfit Hungry Ghosts has been a long-time fixture of the city’s music scene, and has opened shows for the likes of Saosin, Lymbyc Systym and Caspian. Before the launch party of their second EP, the band members—frontman Luke Chow, guitarist/keyboardist Paul Lam, bassist Tiffany Laue and drummer Michael Jack—sit down with their old pal Penny Zhou for desserts and to talk about the growth and future of the band.
HK Magazine: When and how did Hungry Ghosts come together?
Luke: Paul is a great guitar player and a good friend of mine, so we thought of forming a band together back in 2007. Then we got Tiff and Mike to join us; both mutual friends of ours. It’s not really an exciting story…
Paul: At the beginning we were just jamming and hanging out, throwing ideas around, and then got a bit more serious as a band in 2008.
HK: Were you guys all students when the band first started?
Luke: I was still in college, studying dentistry.
Paul: I was teaching at the time but was sort of unemployed. I mean, not that teaching in general is bad, but my teaching job wasn’t a real job. My schedule was a joke—I had so much free time so I played a lot of video games and wrote many guitar songs.
Tiffany: I was doing a Health Science degree through correspondence and working as a dancer at the same time.
Michael: I was on a sabbatical from university for a while because I was doing a degree in Business Management and Economics, which I really hated. So I took some time off and went back to university in 2009.
Luke: That’s why we took some long hiatuses when Michael’s in university in Australia. I remember we would be in the band together for almost three years, but if we subtract those eight-month hiatuses, the actual time when we played together would only be like six months. We weren’t a full-time band.
HK: How did you come up with the band name, “Hungry Ghosts?”
Paul: Just when we started playing, I was really into this band called Wolf Parade. And they have this song called “Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts,” which was my favorite track of that album. So I kept saying “Hungry Ghosts, Hungry Ghosts…” to my band mates.
Luke: No one else cared.
Michael: Plus there’re three, four, five other bands called Hungry Ghosts.
Paul: I didn’t realize… But I didn’t shut up about it until they gave in.
HK: How’s the song-writing process like in the band? Is it mostly done between Luke and Paul?
Paul: Pretty much. Either me or Luke will come in with an idea, and on top of that we build off each other.
Luke: Mike and Tiff team up quite a lot, because they’re the rhythm section.
Paul: They give us a lot of suggestions, such as “this part needs to be straight rock” when we’re like “we want a guitar solo here!” And normally we’ll go with their opinion for the better.
Michael: Me and Tiff do the quality control. These guys are like the scientists, and we’re like the pharmaceutical company who goes “that’s too crazy” or “that’ll cost too much.”
HK: Do you think the music style of the band has changed over the years?
Michael: Yeah, I think so. We use to try to cover so many genres when we wrote songs—not [on] purpose, but we’re just influenced by different music at different times. But the things we write now are more-focused, better songs.
Paul: We tried to do too much and forced a lot of things, without sitting back and thinking about it enough. I feel like we were really noisy and loud before, and we kind of stopped doing that, which changed the dynamic a little bit for the better.
HK: Having been in the local indie scene for a few years, what do you think of the scene?
Michael: I’m always the negative guy so I’ll start with the dark side. There’re not enough venues in Hong Kong for live music. For there to be a good “scene,” you need to have places where the community can go and support the music, and in Hong Kong you have the Wanch, Fringe Club and only a couple more. It’s pretty boring, especially for people who aren’t in a band but want to see band shows—listening to the same songs from the same bands at the same venues. There’s not much diversity.
Paul: From a realistic point of view, setting up a show or doing a show is not cost-effective in Hong Kong. The venues are always small, so you don’t have a big enough capacity to pay for drinks and tickets. Also, people here are not so rock band-driven now. I remember growing up a lot of kids would want to see band shows, nowadays they just want to go to clubs.
Michael: And instead of wanting to be in a band, young people now want to become a DJ. It’s so easy for them to just go to a club, plug in and play the playlist… It’s more accessible and cheaper for people to do that.
Luke: In most big cities, you have one big rock venue for arena bands, one medium-sized venue for bands that aren’t quite arena-level yet, and there’re small venues. But in Hong Kong, we don’t have that middle ground.
