The Untold Story of Lamma’s 1990s Indie Music Scene

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lamma Island briefly became something Hong Kong has never had before or since: a concentrated, self-sustaining indie music community, improvised out of cheap flats, long jam sessions, odd jobs, ferry rides and a remarkable density of drifters, dreamers and players. Its three principal bands — the new-folk collective Squinty Backbone, the alt-rock Adaptors and the all-girl punk group Sisters of Sharon — grew out of the same family tree and intimate ecosystem, one in which people lived in and out of each other’s homes, rehearsed in living rooms, busked to make rent and carried their instruments from beach to bar to ferry pier. The Los Angeles enclave Laurel Canyon was famous in the late 1960s for its long-haired bohemianism and unusual preponderance of talent (including Joni Mitchell, the Byrds and Jackson Browne). Two decades later, Lamma was the canyon’s anarchic East Asian love child.

At the centre of that world was the late Ray Perigoe, the wiry, dishevelled frontman of the Adaptors — a band that became a compelling live act in the face of multiple tragedies. Perigoe was charismatic, funny, intelligent, unruly and impossible to ignore. To cast him simply as a doomed genius would be to render in one dimension both the man and the scene around him; still, his presence helps explain why Lamma felt so electrically alive, and why his death by overdose in 1992 came to feel, for many, like the end of an era even before the era had formally run its course.

Earth Day had a legacy 

If the scene has an origin myth, it is the Earth Day Festival organised in April 1989 by Saskia Kent — British, a single parent, and later Lamma’s own forceful impresario, herding the island’s loose constellation of buskers and street entertainers into bookable groups for large events. She cut her teeth at the Earth Day gathering, which more than one musician points to as the moment the island’s scattered talents turned into an actual scene: Kent identified who was living where, who wrote songs and who could play. She more or less ordered people to show up, find bandmates and perform. 

“Saskia was, I would say, responsible,” says Kim Falkingham, speaking by video call from her home in the UK. “She literally put us all together.” 

The granddaughter of Jimmy Scoular — a football legend who led Newcastle to its 1955 FA Cup victory over Manchester City — Falkingham was a solo performer, a member of the Sisters of Sharon and, by virtue of her gravitational presence at parties, the Lamma scene’s It Girl. She partly grew up in Singapore, where her mother was an English teacher, and attended a local school (“because we weren’t on an expat contract”), learning to speak Malay. After an abortive attempt at further education in the UK, she followed her mother to Hong Kong, arriving on Lamma in 1988 at the age of 20. “It was like coming home to Asia,” she recalls. Inspired by the island’s atmosphere and her then-boyfriend Chunny Bhamra — a South Asian Scot and a member of Squinty Backbone — she picked up a guitar for the first time since her childhood music lessons and quickly came to Kent’s attention.

The Earth Day event took place in a set-back area near Yung Shue Wan’s main street and drew hundreds. The Cantonese indie bands Martyr and Black Bird played sets, but the bill was dominated by the dancers, unicyclists, oddball performers and musicians who would later form the backbone of the island’s culture. 

Falkingham remembers it as the first time she and eventual Sisters of Sharon bandmate Chris B were thrown together, and the point at which collaboration became the island’s default setting. Mike Brophy, the Adaptors’ guitarist and a friend of Kent’s from their time as neighbours in southwest London, likewise recalls that being booked for the festival forced the band to cohere — even if their appearance has since become Hong Kong music legend for the half-dozen failed attempts at George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.”  

“That went disastrously wrong,” Brophy laughs, speaking from his garden in the UK, where he continues to make music and has recorded three albums with his current project Pybus. “It obviously wasn’t the right song for the Adaptors. But apart from that, the festival was a roaring success. It really made the band come together.”

Like Falkingham, he credits Lamma with reviving his early passion for music. Although he had worked in a variety show at a Surrey theme park and fallen in and out of bands “playing lots of parties,” Brophy says, “the music wasn’t really happening until I got to Hong Kong, and that just kick-started me musically again. I’ve never really looked back.” 

Easy come, easy go

Scenes do not appear by magic; Lamma’s emerged from a very specific set of historical circumstances. Before the 1997 handover, young British travellers could land in Hong Kong and, with relatively little trouble, stay, find casual work and drift into semi-permanent lives. Many arrived while backpacking through Asia, with China initially in their sights; after the June 4 crackdown in 1989, some became reluctant to continue north and remained in Hong Kong instead.

That mattered because the people most likely to wash up on Lamma were already unusual: adventurous, often artistic, often broke, and predisposed to communal living. Falkingham argues the scene could not have happened in the same way had Hong Kong not still been British, because people could stay without the same visa barriers that would later apply. “It was on the backpacking trail for lots of people,” she says. “They would arrive on the island, find jobs and make some money.”

One such traveller was Squinty Backbone’s guitarist and songwriter John Hutton, a Scot who still lives and performs in Hong Kong under the name Squinty John. Jill Eason — a university friend of Hutton’s, who would end up playing bass in the Sisters of Sharon — told him about Hong Kong in a Christmas card, and Hutton turned up in December 1988 on a one-way ticket from the UK. The first thing he did, he says, was to “start busking by the General Post Office, as I had no idea how much the ferry to Lamma would cost. It turned out it was HK$4, so I had plenty left over to celebrate my arrival.” His first impressions of Lamma were shared by many of his peers. “My friends were waiting in a Chinese restaurant when I stepped off the boat,” he recalls. “Lamma was resplendent, the sky was blue, and the streets were quiet and tiny. I loved it.”

Unlike local musicians scattered throughout Hong Kong’s expensive urban districts, Lamma’s artists were crammed into a small, walkable place without cars but with bars, beaches, balconies and shared flats constantly feeding into one another. “Because we were all kind of thrown together on this small island,” Falkingham recalls, “in one bar you would find people from all walks of life.”

Hong Kong-born Chris B, who continues to work in music as a performer and founded the long-running Underground music nights, was Perigoe’s girlfriend at the time as well as a vocalist and keyboard player in the Adaptors. She remembers their flat as a kind of informal, conveniently located salon.

“Our landlord lived on the top floor, we were on the ground floor, but we were off Main Street, so literally people would turn up and we’d jam,” she says. “We’d be making music all the time. There’d be these perfect days, where we’d like jam for maybe six, seven hours. It was like a dream. It doesn’t happen anymore.”

This sharply distinguished Lamma from the alternative Cantonese scene developing elsewhere in Hong Kong. While some locals, like Chris B, crossed into the island’s orbit, the city’s exorbitant housing costs and familial culture often meant younger Chinese players still lived with parents and remained geographically dispersed. For them, being in a band meant paying for costly studio time because homes were off-limits. On Lamma, by contrast, jams were free and happened in front rooms. Youth, transience and proximity created an accidental commune: people without money, family ties or supervision become each other’s bandmates, audiences, romantic partners, roadies and housemates all at once. 

Between worlds

Perigoe entered Hong Kong as one of the travellers who expanded Chris B’s sense of what life could look like. She met him when she was a teenage runaway, holed up in a hostel in Chungking Mansions. She had had a troubled, cash-strapped upbringing, the daughter of a Hong Kong mother and a tough, prison-officer father from Yorkshire. Although she fell between Chinese and British worlds and spoke Cantonese, she often downplayed that part of herself in order to fit into South Island School and expat society. Around the backpackers in Chungking, she encountered for the first time people who saw her bilingualism and background not as something to conceal but as something unusual and valuable.

“There was a little group of us that went out, and we were going to the clubs dancing and stuff,” she remembers, “and all these people were very, very different to people you met growing up in an ESF school, for sure. People I didn’t imagine the world had. It was nice.”

Perigoe, who had quit an engineering job in the UK to go on the road, was one of them and they quickly became a couple. He turned up in Hong Kong in his mid-20s, after living for months in Nepal, and even those who are careful not to romanticise him still describe his startling force. Brophy says he could seem intimidating — loud, rebellious, full of opinions — but insists he was “more of a lover than a fighter.” Chris B remembers the quick intelligence, the conversation and, above all, the stage presence: offstage, there were jokes about her and Ray as “Beauty and the Beast,” but once he performed, everything became clear. “People would go, ‘Once we’ve seen him on stage, we get why you’re with him.’” He expanded her world literally as well as intellectually, taking her on a trip to the UK: it was the first time she had ever left Hong Kong. 

He was also, by every account, a catalyst. The Chris-and-Ray house became one of the scene’s central spaces; Perigoe bought recording gear, worked on a Fostex four-track, looped sounds, wrote songs for causes (including one commissioned by Greenpeace), and helped create an atmosphere in which experimentation was an imperative. “He would have loved the internet and all of the things that came afterwards,” Chris B says wistfully, looking back on how instinctively he embraced found sounds and collage before such practices became commonplace.

He also had a gift for delivery, for making even borrowed words feel newly dangerous. I know this because in 1991, when I was 25, I produced an album of Hong Kong bands for BMG, entitled Diving for Pearls. The sessions took place over six weeks in the tiny BMG studio in East Kowloon, and of all of them the Adaptors’ is the one I remember most. Perigoe showed up in a torturous frame of mind. The track we were working on didn’t just have to be well recorded; he was obsessed with capturing something visceral. The result was the spine-tingling “Robbie Burns”: 4’20” of cavernous dub-funk, in which Perigoe decided to howl the words of a Robert Burns poem, The Jolly Beggars, over Brophy’s atmospheric guitar, Chris B’s icy keyboards, and bass work by Andrew McDowell that you could feel in your ribs.

I worked with many musicians at that time, but Perigoe was the most obdurate and the one with the clearest idea of how he wanted to sound. That made him infuriating, but at the same time he left me in awe. I was also conscious of the darkness that dogged him and the band. The Adaptors had recently lost their sax player and Brophy’s sometime girlfriend, Marian Craig, in a road accident in the Philippines (“Robbie Burns” is dedicated to her). McDowell’s brother John, an architect, died that Lunar New Year, when a pleasure boat he was on collided with a ferry in Victoria Harbour. Ray himself had only a year left to live. As I wrote in the liner notes to Diving for Pearls, the band had “survived personal tensions and tragedies to become one of the sharpest and darkest forces in Hong Kong music today. Does the devil exist, or did the Adaptors just happen?”

Bigger than the island

The music that emerged from Lamma was never one thing. Squinty Backbone, led in part by Hutton, was ragged, manic and proudly itinerant: folk-punk with the energy of a travelling circus. The Adaptors were darker and looser, built from Perigoe’s urgency, McDowell’s reggae inflections, Brophy’s elegant guitar work, and a repertoire that moved between originals and rapidly self-taught covers.

“This was pre-YouTube and Spotify and everything,” says Chris B. “ We’d be taping songs off the radio and then the guys would be working it out and then we’d be playing the song that night, by Pixies or by whoever. We were really fast at transcribing the music.”

Sisters of Sharon, meanwhile, emerged from the same circle but partly in reaction to it. What began as women in the orbit of the Adaptors, deciding to start an all-girl band, eventually became a formidable act in its own right. For Chris B, the impetus was her breakup with Perigoe, pushing her to step away, courageously, from a relationship and a band that had defined her late adolescence. She says that when she and Falkingham began to put the Sisters of Sharon together, in 1991, it felt at first as if the Adaptors were towering over them. “The Adaptors had done a lot of gigs and some were quite big. They were here,” she says, raising a hand high above her head. But the all-female lineup quickly became its own statement of purpose, and later carried them as far as a self-financed US tour. In 2001, the band’s song “Will You” received a nomination for Best Alternative Song at the Golden Sail Awards, hosted by the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong, narrowly missing the top prize to pop star Faye Wong. 

Nobody had much money, but all found ways to keep going. Falkingham busked in MTR stations and took any paid gig she could find; Brophy decorated flats, taught, transcribed films for ATV and also busked when rent was due; Chris B supported herself through giving English lessons while buying drums and keyboards and spending her free time making music. The point was not that everyone was jobless or detached from reality, but that enough people were willing to live precariously for all kinds of art, not just music, to become the island’s priority. The Hong Kong illustrator Harry Harrison was part of the scene, Falkingham says, and so was the British sculptor Russell West. “He was making these incredible sculptures,” she remembers. “There was a washing machine that washed up on the beach one day and he turned it into a six-foot, great big saxophone. There were artists, there were writers, there were musicians.”

Naturally, the scene reached beyond itself. The Adaptors gigged all over town, from Kowloon pubs to Lan Kwai Fong Street Carnivals and benefit shows. Chris B’s meticulously kept scrapbooks show just how prolific the Sisters of Sharon were. They played in dozens of bars, on Lamma beaches, at the Fringe Club, Sheung Wan Civic Centre, the Coliseum, UST, the Gold Coast, and private parties in Shouson Hill. There were gigs across the estuary in Macao and a support slot for Fugazi at Chris B’s alma mater South Island School. The venue for one show in August 1996 is simply given as “construction site.”

Both the Adaptors and the Sisters of Sharon played for Vietnamese refugees in Chi Ma Wan camp, experiences that several participants still remember as among the most meaningful gigs they ever played. For Falkingham, the peak came — appropriately — on Victoria Peak itself. “I remember playing a gig up there and being on the top of the world with these kids who were just absolutely loving it. I felt like a million bucks with my electric guitar and the wind in my hair.”

Grief, but also rage

Perigoe died in June 1992 in a Wan Chai alley, aged 31, after returning to heroin following a period in which, according to Chris B, he had been clean. Having lost her father just three weeks earlier, she heard rumours of Perigoe’s death while she was walking on Lamma’s Main Street, and confirmed them after a frantic phone call to the morgue. Although she was no longer with him by then, she had to notify his family in the UK “as I was the one that knew them.” His passing left her enraged as well as grief-stricken. “I was quite angry with him, because I had to sort his bloody stuff out as well, and pack it up and send it to his family. I was so angry with him.”

That anger is worth keeping in the picture because it resists the cliché of the self-destructive artist. Perigoe was gifted, but he was also part of a community whose creativity depended on many people, not one tragic star. By the time of his death, Sisters of Sharon had already taken on a life of their own, and others on the island were carrying the scene forwards. A new generation of Lamma bands — notably Mothership, with Falkingham’s brother Mark in the lineup — had emerged.

Still, his loss mattered. Brophy describes Perigoe’s death as the thing that “underpinned the end of the Adaptors.” Even for those who kept making music, he remained an animating absence: someone whose songs and charisma still seem, in memory, to contain more possibility than the surviving recordings can quite hold.

That might be an epitaph for the Lamma scene itself, because the conditions that created it have never come back. Hong Kong has a thriving independent music scene today, and Chris B remains a lynchpin of it, but that network is necessarily more dispersed, more professionalised and less communal. The old Lamma scene was held together by cheapness, legal looseness, youthful drift, constant proximity and a city that had not yet become digitally connected enough to let musicians create entire worlds from separate bedrooms. Back then, scenes had to be built physically: if you wanted a sound, you needed bodies in a room, amplifiers on the floor and a crowd willing to come by ferry.

Then the structural changes arrived. After 1997, those who wanted to stay on Lamma increasingly needed visas or more stable reasons to remain; the stream of young, mostly British drifters naturally thinned. Lamma itself changed too, becoming more expensive, more polished and more attractive to commuting professionals than to broke musicians with a guitar, a tape recorder and nowhere in particular to be.

That does not mean the legend is entirely nostalgic fantasy. It is, as Hutton admits, “made more rosy by the memory of a young man back then. I picture friends my age, without a care in the world. People dropping round and killing time on a laid back balcony and surrounded by nature.” But the consistency of the testimonies matters: again and again, people describe a place of freedom, creative overlap and mutual availability that Hong Kong has struggled to reproduce. 

“It was such a beautiful place,” Falkingham sighs. “At certain times of the year, the trees there are just covered in butterflies. It’s like Never Never Land. My perfect day would be going for a beautiful walk and seeing the butterflies and being able to sit on the beach with my guitar and just sing to the waves.”

On Lamma, for a fleeting few years, Hong Kong’s alternative music scene was not something you visited at night and then left behind. It was where you lived.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the year of Ray Perigoe’s death. It was 1992, not 1995.