Even looking behind the mirror there’s not been much to get excited about for local live music fans over the last 18 months as COVID and government regulations have decimated live music and concert venues.
Sometimes though, behind a cloud there is actually a silver lining as fans of the iconic hardcore band King Ly Chee found earlier this month with the surprise announcement of the band’s first concert in four years.
As resurrections go, this was totally unexpected – seismically similar to the ABBA reunion among pop fans perhaps – as the band’s break-up in 2017 seemed terminal with former members all getting involved in new bands and musical projects.
In 1999 when Pakistani frontman Riz Farooqi returned to his birthplace from New York ‘hardcore’ barely existed in Hong Kong. Riz though was a passionate devote… finding happiness, joy and release/freedom in the music and community.
Finding some like-minded musicians King Ly Chee was born and a generation of HongKongers found their voice and identity in Hong Kong hardcore.
bc magazine spoke with Riz Farooqi ahead of their new concerts:
King Ly Chee live again, honestly didn’t expect to see that to happen – how did it come about? The band ended in 2017. I carried the band through numerous lineup changes which I did because I had made a commitment to myself back when I started the band in 1999 that I would keep it going no matter what. So regardless of who left I just kept it going which is why it ended up feeling like a revolving door of members. But by 2017 I was done looking for new people – it finally came to a point that it just wasn’t right to keep replacing people. That particular lineup that ended in 2017 included a total of 5 people (Myself, Ivan, Brian, Ho, and Joe) who pretty much made the band their lives and dropped everything to be able to honour commitments when it came to shows, touring and recording.
So in 2017 it was done and I was ready to move on with my new band Dagger.
But then Covid came and put a complete stop to Dagger because my drummer, Ivan, lives in Macau. In fact the very last show I’ve played was two years ago when Dagger played at The Wanch in Feb of 2020 which was also the last time I saw Ivan. So it’s been two years of absolutely nothing going on in my life. NOTHING. I even started another band, Regret, in that time trying to get the fire going again. But the drummer of that band, Egas, ALSO lives in Macau.
I started reminiscing and a bunch of old KLC photos and videos kept popping up on my newsfeed. These photos were from an era of the band that was MOST beloved by Hong Kong. That’s not even an understatement…looking at all those photos and videos of people right here in Hong Kong losing their minds to this band was something that really meant a lot to me. Interestingly enough the drummer for that era is an amazing dude named Kevin (out of all the band members I’ve had the honour to play with in KLC, he was always the closest to me – like a full-on brother), just so happened was also missing that era too. I contacted Andy who played guitar back then and the three of us decided to try it out to see how it felt. It was just a quick jam – but we ripped through all those songs as if literally NO time had passed. After the first jam we all kinda sat there smiling from ear to ear.
There have been many members of King Ly Chee since 1999, who will be in the 2021-22 line-up? That’s the thing. When people ask if we’d ever reunite I always say, “which era”? For Hong Kong there was never any doubt that the ‘Stand Strong’ era would be it. So the band that is back together is myself, Kevin, and Andy (Unfortunately Alex is not in Hong Kong so it won’t include him, but our good friend Ho (also an ex-member of KLC) will be on bass).
What has it felt like to prepare for a gig and play the King Ly Chee songs again after such a long time? As mentioned above, it was like literally no time had passed. Kevin, Andy and I got right back into it and the craziest part was that the vibe was exactly the same from back then. People have to understand, we’re talking about something we did almost 20 years ago, and for it to click like the way it did today in 2021 is something none of us envisioned. But it felt right being back in the practice room together and we’re currently gearing up to play the first of our comeback shows. We’re STOKED.
For those who might recognise the name but don’t know the band, can you give us a quick potted history of who are/were King Ly Chee? King Ly Chee is a hardcore band I started back in 1999 as a way to introduce the world of “hardcore” to HKers. I wanted to introduce this underground culture in a language that was more easily digestible to the local population (Cantonese) because it’s what saved my life once (as did metal and punk rock) and I wanted to see if it could help others as well.
Are you going to record/film/live stream the upcoming King Ly Chee shows? The current plan is to film the first show back and then see what happens.
The first show sold out in minutes, the second almost as quickly – is King Ly Chee back as a band? Will there be any new KL songs? We have been totally shocked by how fast both shows sold out!
Yes, we have 2 brand new songs done and will continue to write into the new year. We’ve talked about maybe getting a brand new EP out in 2022 but will see how it goes. The most important thing about getting back together is to just have fun and put zero stress on each other. All of us are married, have full-time jobs, the majority of us have children, we’re just getting back together to have fun, play shows, write music, and use this all to have an excuse to be in the same room together.
Which of the various online music channels can readers buy/stream King Ly Chee? We’re on everything – bandcamp being the best because bands get paid the best on this platform.
Where can people purchase King Ly Chee albums, merchandise? Currently, the only store selling our stuff in Hong Kong is the amazing Infree Records in Mong Kok run by a true HK legend Soni. If you all haven’t visited this store yet, you’re missing out on an absolute cultural event.
As a musician what has been the hardest aspect of life under COVID? Not being able to play shows and tour. I couldn’t care less about recording – I actually HATE recording – being a studio musician/band has never interested me at all. For me the whole point of being in a band is to actually play shows in front of people engaging with music screaming their heads off.
Apart from the King Ly Chee gigs, what’s on the musical horizon for your other bands Dagger and Regret. Nothing else…not until it’s easier for people to travel to Hong Kong.
Apart from writing, singing and performing in three bands Riz Farooqi started and runs the hardcore website UniteAsia which brings together bands and fans of hardcore, punk, metal from across Asia.
Read bc magazine’s recent interview with Riz Farooqi about King Ly Chee resurrection here.
King Ly Chee are playing the third Tone Online Music Festival, 16 January at 5:30pm, catch the whole festival on TonemusicTV’s Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TONEMUSICTV.
Due to Covid restrictions, King Ly Chee’s gig on 22 January has been postponed.
Earlier this month on their facebook page, Riz Farooqi officially announced the break-up of iconic local hardcore band King Ly Chee after 17 years of gigs, tours and albums. You might not be into hardcore music, but the band not only entertained it’s fans it inspired many across all music genres about what a Hong Kong band could achieve.
It wasn’t an end though, rather the beginning of something new. Dagger – a new more metallic hardcore band formed by Riz and former King Ly Chee bandmate Ivan with James and To – who released their debut EP Dagger on Bandcamp this week. bc spoke to Riz about Dagger.
Best start with the obvious one from many fans will King Ly Chee return, the band has after all undergone many lineup changes over the years?
No – I can’t imagine the band will ever play shows again. Originally in January we decided to take a break. Right around that time I was already getting the itch to play guitar in a band again which was the whole catalyst for Dagger. So King Ly Chee was most definitely put on the back burner to be revisited again maybe at the end of the year or even next year.
I started Dagger with the current King Ly Chee drummer Ivan so it kinda left the other three guys in this weird kinda place where they didn’t know what was going to happen. Eventually those guys decided they didn’t want to be left in limbo and made the announcement that they were leaving.
Once they did that there was NO way I was going to put myself through searching for THREE people! That’s just insane…plus these three guys aren’t replaceable. These are all guys who’ve put in a LOT of time, effort and heart into the band. How do I just ignore that and “replace” them? It just doesn’t work that way… So when they made that announcement I was at peace to just end it.
We’ve done everything that we possibly could do with the band over the 17 years we’ve been around. We’ve released albums that have impacted Hong Kong and our scene of heavy bands here. We’ve toured Asia countless times. We’ve played in the States opening for our heroes Sick of it All on their 30 year anniversary!
How do we top any of this? If anything – I might record the demos that I had written for what was going to be the next King Ly Chee album and put it up for free download or something. But for now the band’s done. We had a good run. It wasn’t easy ever that entire time. But we were able to accomplish some great shit…
Why a new band, rather than a side project / collaboration?
Well it was supposed to just be a side project. Then when King Ly Chee ended it became my main band.
What do you want/need to say with Dagger that you felt you couldn’t do with King Ly Chee?
Lyrically it’s all on the same wave length. With Dagger the focus is certainly more on riffs and musicality. I wouldn’t say lyrics are a second thought – but it’s certainly the music that is the driving force in this band.
Long time fans are going to see ghosts of the past, how are you going to get people to see Dagger for what it is something different?
People already see it as a different beast because our EP is up and they can hear that the music is completely different, not to mention that I’m not the main vocalist. The music is just much heavier.
The response for the EP has been beyond our expectations because to be a new band in 2017 it’s pretty much impossible to get people’s attentions cause there are millions of bands in existence. But people have been giving it their attention and it’s unbelievable that it actually resonates with people! That’s insane to me…
Where did the name Dagger come from?
No real back story…just searching for a one word name that was short. I was considering how the name would look on merch. 17 years of trying to lay out “King Ly Chee” across a variety of merch has taught me to never use a long name again Hahahaha
The new EP Dagger, tell us about it?
The band started in January and I already had a couple demos just to get the ball rolling. But once the four of us got together it was easy to get more ideas out and change parts, rewrite parts, start new songs, move parts around etc. It all came together super quick.
The actual idea was to release a demo of these tracks. But as we started talking about recording and how high our standards were for even the quality of the demos…we realized that with the amount of money we’re throwing into this, the demos really are more like an EP. The tracks were all mixed and mastered in the US so this isn’t really a “demo” by any means. That’s it…things have moved at a quick pace. Now we’re ready to play a bunch of shows and start working on brand new tracks for our debut full length.
689’s disdain for the arts reached absurd levels recently with riot police deployed to prevent a gig taking place and international bands detained at the border. What would you like incoming Chief Executive Carrie Lam to do to support local music and especially live music in Hong Kong?
I don’t know what expectations I have for her or any CE coming in. The CCP continues to force the idea that we are not autonomous – they will always be the masters. So what can any CE really do when they’ve been hand selected by the masters? All they can do is follow their orders.
My only wish is for the CCP to one day see Hong Kong for what it is, a city with a strong set of values for right and wrong. A city that doesn’t accept nor follow blind worship of any specific political system nor party. A city that doesn’t need nationalism shoved down our throats to keep people in line.
Hong Kong has always been an international city. All this stupid talk about putting more ethnic Chinese people in places of power such as the judiciary, the government and police force (as if that already isn’t the case!!!) sets this city down a very dangerous path where we will lose all its international character.
We’re only years away from seeing all our signs with traditional Chinese characters being replaced with simplified characters, you’ll hear more Mandarin on the streets, there’ll be more of those stupid red propaganda banners along the roads…
So all of this is deeper then just the woes of us musicians. The character and beauty of the real Hong Kong is at stake.
The SAR turns 20 at the end of the month, what are your personal musical highlights of those twenty years?
20 years is a long time to talk about…off the top of my head seeing Metallica, Megadeth and Sick of it All on our shores was simply unbelievable…
The bands that I grew up listening to while walking the streets with big ass headphones and my Walkman trying to make sense of my place as a Pakistani kid in a Chinese society…for the bands who provided the soundtrack for that part of my life to finally play here in Hong Kong was unbelievable.
In the words of Taylor Young at California’s The Pit who remixed Dagger’s debut EP “RIP King Ly Chee, long live Dagger!”
Dagger’s debut 6 track EP is out now on Bandcamp and will be released on cassette at Dagger’s debut gig – the Unite Asia Showcase on the 1 July at Focal Fair
After 18 years it looks as though one of Hong Kong’s most enduring bands King Ly Chee has reached the end of it’s current road with the hardcore band’s mainstay Riz Farooqi posting this message on their facebook page yesterday.
我中文真係唔夠好…十分抱歉…
Tonight my brothers Brian, Joe and Ho announced that they will be leaving the band. In fact the band has been taking a break since January of this year to figure out where we are emotionally and within the various stages of our lives. Making a commitment to a band like this (and a person like me) has not been easy and will never be easy – you can ask anyone in the photo here about their experiences both within and outside the band.
Either way…when we all look back at this and what we were all able to accomplish together – all these faces in this photo (and the ones who aren’t here Mike, Gaeon, Wing, G, Fei Hin who kept the band going in dire times) took a little dream that I had when I started in 1999 and made it their own.
At 22 years old I came back to Hong Kong wanting to do something to help Hong Kong’s underground community, who knew it would turn into what it did
There are so many memories come flooding back…I still remember the day King Ly Chee joined a music festival in Tuen Mun (Gold Coast) in the summer of ’99 and at the same competition a death metal band got on stage to compete. After they finished I ran to go say hello to them because I was so happy to hear extreme music in Hong Kong! They turned out to be Departing Cross…that guitar player Chai became a great friend of mine later. The drummer who would join them later (Man) would also become a member of King Ly Chee many MANY years later. I remember having the same response when I went to a show at the Warehouse in 1999 and saw a band called Hyponic get on stage and play doom metal and how happy I was to meet Roy and his wife Anita. They later even helped me translate MANY of the articles that were in my zine called 由零開始 Start From Scratch, as did Sammy of Lam Kei, and so many other friends.
I remember touring China in 2000 for the first time and we stayed at Wu Wei (singer of SMZB)’s house with his mom, I remember traveling by train from Wuhan to Beijing for the first time and arriving in Beijing Train Station while the snow was falling around us, I remember getting on stage with Reflector-Brain Failure that night and becoming lifelong friends, I remember the next day Xiao Rong of Brain Failure took me to Scream Records to try to get the label to release our album We Are Who We Are in China.
I remember putting my arms around Stephane and Alex as they cried on the plane leaving Korea after we played 6 shows in 3 days in Seoul in 2000, I remember getting my daily 4pm phonecalls from Kevin when he joined King Ly Chee, he would call every single day for the first year exactly at 4pm on his way to work at a tattoo shop and we’d talk about whatever like only brothers did, I remember Andy-Alex-Kevin and I recording “Stand Strong” until 5am every day and then going home for one hour then getting changed and going to our jobs, I remember touring Southeast Asia for the first time and meeting so many great people who are still good friends today, I remember touring Europe in 2006 in the fucking cold with Ming-Andy-Alex-Pong and dying cause it was so cold, I remember how on the way back from Europe while we were at the Dubai airport Alex told us that he had decided to leave and my heart broke into a million pieces because never in my life would I have ever thought he would leave the band, I remember after that Andy and Pong were like “Don’t worry – we’ll keep the band going with you”, I remember so many people saying that to me every time something happened – like Mike, Gaeon and Wing who sprung into action and helped the band continue somehow someway, I remember going on tour with NOFX and even though Fat Mike didn’t like anything that was too metal sounding – El Hefe and Smelly always came to watch us play every night and they always said “Man your guitar always sounds so HEAVY! I love it!”, I remember receiving a random message from some guy named Brian who was living in Australia and played in a nu-metal band, I remember many months later receiving his band’s CD, I also remember later he sent me tracks of some really progressive metal songs that he had written, I remember that around this time the next heartbreak happened when Andy decided he couldn’t continue either, many months later that random ICQ (or was it MSN?) friend Brian was in King Ly Chee, I remember touring the Philippines and after the last show of the tour we all stayed out with our Filipino brothers until the next morning talking – laughing, how about the time that I picked up my ultimate heroes from the airport in Hong Kong – the band that GOT me into hardcore back in ’94 – mother fucking Sick Of It All! Holy shit…not only was I picking them up but I was the one organizing their first ever show in Hong Kong…Holy fuck…
Memories like this can go on and on…because there are COUNTLESS stories like this to be told and shared with all of you…maybe one day there may be a book made
For now…I want to first and foremost thank EVERY single person who has ever joined King Ly Chee for believing in me, believing in the band, believing in the purpose of the band, believing in the message…I know that some of these guys left the band not on good terms – but as my brother Kevin once said “Man – time heals everything” – I do hope that as time passes that every single one of these guys (and girl – we did have a girl vocalist for a year will always remember their time in this band and the great things that we accomplished together.
Thank you everyone for giving us your hearts, believing in the band anytime in our 17 year existence…whether you were a fan of the Stephane-Ian lineup or the Stephane-Alex lineup or the Alex-Andy-Kevin lineup or the Alex-Andy-Pong-Ming lineup or the Andy-Pong-G lineup or the G-Brian-Pong-Man lineup or the Kent-Egas-Brian-Ho lineup or the Kent-Egas-Joe-Brian lineup or the Joe-Ivan-Brian-Ho lineup…whichever lineup you fell in love with – I can tell you from the bottom of my heart EVERY member gave 150% of their heart and soul to this band, to creating the music you heard, to playing those shows that you saw, to touring all over the world…
To this I live in eternal gratitude to these amazing individuals.
Lastly, thank you to every one of you all over this world who has supported the band. Thank you for your kindness, for your generosity, for your graciousness, for your heart…thank you for believing in this band.
I have about 13 demo songs that I had written this past year or so for a future King Ly Chee release – but now I guess I’ll just put those online as a heartfelt thank you.
For one last time…
我 － 地 － 係 － KING － LY － CHEE
1999-2017.
