Cantomania: the DJ night driving Hong Kong’s Cantopop comeback
As Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong echo through the nightclub, a love letter to Cantopop gives the city a space for joy and belonging
The man behind the deck was DJ Fabsabs, real name Pete Sabine, a Hong Kong-born gweilo whose sets have become a celebration of the city’s musical past and a major part of its Cantopop revival. I met him one muggy night in late September at MIHN, the Sheung Wan club that often hosts Cantomania. Sabine had come straight from a DJing gig for a corporate client, a backpack slung over his shoulders and running shoes on his feet. “I don’t wear Converse any more, now it’s all about comfort,” he says, adding that he has long since traded alcohol for Red Bulls during his late-night DJing.
Inside MIHN, the air smells faintly of smoke machine haze and beer. The club’s resident DJ and music director, Jean-François Amadei, known on the global techno circuit as Sunsiaré, normally enforces strict codes – no photos, no small talk, no lights. “It’s always dark here,” Amadei tells me. “If people talk, we ask them to leave.” But twice a year, when he opens the floor to Cantopop, he makes an exception.
MIHN is hosting a Cantomania night featuring Sabine that evening. “You’ll see the energy later,” Amadei says, nodding towards the stairwell where people are queuing to enter. “It’s different from what most people expect.”
Globally, the resurgence of Y2K culture has people rewatching Friends, dressing in low-rise jeans, carrying point-and-shoot digital cameras and embracing the pop aesthetic of the early 2000s. The same retro pull has helped the rise of Cantomania. “It’s this constant recycling of culture, old sounds becoming new again,” Sabine tells me over coffee at his studio in Yau Tong, surrounded by shelves of vinyl records and DJ gear, and a life-size cardboard cut-out of Leslie Cheung, folded in half after an overexcited fan snapped it at a show.