Mad Dogs, Joe Bananas, King & Country - how Andy Neilson made his mark in Hong Kong
From a short stint as a policeman to opening a pub and a nightclub, to making toy soldiers, it’s been an eventful 40 years in Hong Kong for Scot Andy Neilson
“I was born in a little town called Renfrew, about 8km downriver from Glasgow. My dad was a carpenter and my mother a housewife. As a kid, until I turned 13 and discovered the opposite sex, I was into toy soldiers.
The big break for me was winning a scholarship to a senior secondary school – the (Scottish) equivalent to a grammar school in England. Suddenly I was studying with kids who were doctors’ sons and lawyers’ sons, and my horizons opened up.
At school I was interested in history, art and the military, and I went on to study drawing and graphic design at art college. At the end of my second year, I got involved in a fight with one of my lecturers over a [woman] in the student union disco, and I got expelled. “
“I went to America with three other Scottish guys and we worked in a steel foundry in north Michigan. It was 1969 and there was a labour shortage because all the blue-collar guys were drafted into the Vietnam war. In those days, if you worked in America for six months you were eligible for the draft, and after six months I got my postcard from Uncle Sam.
I went back to the UK and managed to get back into art school and finish my training. I got a job in advertising in one of the first Saatchi & Saatchi offshoots, in Glasgow.