Why is Paul MacLean Turning Down the Volume at The Wanch?

There’s a sign over the stage of The Wanch that positions you inside “Hong Kong’s home of live music.” It’s a bold claim, for sure — but it rings true, at least for expat musicians of a certain vintage. In its chronological span, the Wan Chai venue appears unrivalled. In business since 1987, it’s offered thousands of musicians a rare stage sanctuary, amid a fast-moving nightlife sector otherwise ruled by rising rents and aggressive bottom lines. 

Paul MacLean can think of only one living soul who has performed beneath that sign more than him: John Prymer, the long, blond-haired, denim-clad rock dude who booked nearly every artist that has performed at The Wanch in the past 15 years. Until now. Soon after celebrating his 70th birthday onstage on New Year’s Eve, the American rocker stepped down, with MacLean taking over as booking agent from early February 2026.

Regulars will miss JP’s enthusiastic drawl and nightly guest turns on the mic, but many will also welcome some fresh blood and direction. MacLean promises to lead the venue into a new era, with a fresh emphasis on young and original talent, in place of the increasingly predictable roster of cover bands that have come to populate the weekly schedule. 

MacLean also has a big opportunity, one that might sound incongruous for the notoriously aggressive drummer: he is simply turning down the volume. Even on Sunday afternoons, he says, “It was so loud that people [were] coming up the stairs and going like, ‘Oh, no,’ fingers in their ears, turn around, I’m leaving,” he remembers. “I get the irony of a music bar that has to turn the music down. But, yeah.”

More irony? Around two hours after saying this, the 49-year-old snuck onstage, disguised in a balaclava and a cape, to pound the skins remorselessly in a completely improvised, unadvertised post-punk power trio, while many in the audience tucked into dinner. 

Longtime Hong Kong drummer Paul MacLean, the new booking agent for The Wanch

Meet the new boss

The only truly surprising part about MacLean’s appointment is that he has time to take such a demanding role on. “They kind of needed someone to step in,” he explains, nursing a glass of tap water at a corner table. “And I was thinking, okay, who would be good? Someone that knows a lot of bands.”

That MacLean does. As the founder of Sunset Studios, the Canadian producer has recorded more than 100 Hong Kong acts. He’s also performed in at least 20 bands over as many years — once a member of at least eight gigging groups simultaneously, he recently pared it down to just two core outfits: Catscare and 南洋派對 NYPD. 

Both are edgy, original bands otherwise made up of native Hongkongers. The former is a power trio of scene luminaries familiar from My Little Airport, The Lovesong, Whence He Came and Elf Fatima. NYPD is a noisy-but-danceable punk quintet who have found surprise success singing abrasively about the mundanities of Hong Kong life; the name is an acronym for the Cantonese phrase naam4 jeong2 paai3 deoi3, a somewhat oblique reference to South China and the naamyam style of Cantonese music. 

The offer to join came after MacLean recorded and mixed NYPD’s 2020 self-titled debut album at Sunset — a task he wasn’t ready for at the time. “When I listen back to it, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I would love to go back and remix it now that I kind of have a little bit more skill.’”

His first gig with the band was a sell-out headline show at Music Zone @ E-Max, with three weeks’ notice. The second? A festival at AsiaWorld–Arena. “It went from an audience of 800 to 14,000 — like, what the fuck?” he remarks. Since then there’s been multiple China tours, a Clockenflap headline slot and a long-awaited second album, 我鍾意, produced by MacLean and released on February 22.

While it seems unlikely NYPD will be onstage at The Wanch anytime soon, fans will hope MacLean can utilise these scene connections to coax happening local indie acts into a historic venue long associated with amateur expat musicians. A simple first step was just encouraging artists to sing Cantonese songs. “So you change the music, you change the style, you change the environment,” says MacLean, who first performed at The Wanch in a noisy punk-country duo sometime around 2003. “What this place needs is a little shake up,” he adds. “We all love John, he’s an amazing guy, and what he’s done for music has been phenomenal. But I did find that it was kind of getting a little bit samey. And maybe the guys just needed someone to come in and go like, ‘Yo, I think we need to change.’”

Noisy heritage

This isn’t The Wanch’s first big shakeup. An earlier one came a few years ago, when it was brought back from the dead thanks to a rush of new investment. For the first 33 years of its life, The Wanch existed in a poky, grungy space at 54 Jaffe Road, where there was no stage, just drums and amps crammed in a corner, and barely room for 20 people on what might be called a dancefloor. 

On busy nights, many more people were invariably found outside in the street — it was both too noisy and too cramped to be comfortable inside. MacLean remembers bringing musicians and crew from touring acts — including Tame Impala, Bon Iver and Morrissey — and finding not a soul would step inside. “As we’d be getting closer, they’d be like, ‘Not that place, I’m not going in there, man,’” he says. “I never, ever got a band to go in because they were like, ‘Fuck, we need our ears, dude. We’re on tour.’”

In the summer of 2020, The Wanch joined the legions of live music venues forced out of business amid the pandemic. Less than two years later, it miraculously reopened at its current, nearby first-floor home, multiplying the floor space and staff costs alike by several times; it also saw the venue serving food for the first time, a crucial source of revenue to meet the inflated costs. “This is a phenomenal step forward, and it has so much more potential than the old Wanch,” says MacLean. “But the old ways didn’t work [here] — you get 20 people in here. And it looks like, oh my god, these guys are gonna be shutting the doors [for good] in a minute.”

It may not help matters that longstanding all-night rock club Amazonia sits next door on Luard Road, and too frequently The Wanch’s post-midnight weekend programming resembled that of its downstairs neighbour. “Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine,” notes MacLean. “It’s all amazing, and I don’t want to throw any shade towards anyone that plays that kind of music, but I would be listening to that music here, and then I go downstairs and hear the exact same song.”

Peace and cats

With his long beard and ponytail, denim-heavy wardrobe and cat shirts, warm laugh and general Rick Rubin-like demeanour, it’s hard to imagine MacLean was once a secondary school chemistry teacher. Born and raised on Canada’s east coast, he came to Hong Kong aged 26, smitten with wanderlust like so many others. While teaching at an international school, he soon found himself in the heart of the city’s music scene, performing with The Academy, and later the stoner rock duo DP — who notably performed at renowned music festival South by Southwest in 2010. 

“I used to walk off stage and my hands would be bloody — and if they weren’t bloody, I would think that I didn’t play hard enough,” he remembers. “It was just like, yeah, that’s the kind of naïveté that you have when you’re younger. You don’t see that you’re playing to a crowd. I look back, and it’s kind of stupid. Now watching some bands, I’m like, ‘Yo, I hate to be that guy. But we have to get a little bit of balance because I want this room to sound really good’.”

To that aim, MacLean’s first move after coming onboard was to switch out the big boomy drums for the old venue’s smaller kit, as well as repositioning amps and installing rugs, all in a bid to reduce volume and increase clarity. The Wanch’s longstanding rigid weekly schedule sheet has been torn up, with fewer bands playing for less time, and nightly 30-, 45- and 60-minute-long sets building in intensity. “Bands are coming back and going: but I usually play 90 minutes,” says MacLean. “And I’m like, sweet. That’s great. Take that 90 minutes, and give me your best 30. And trust me, the crowd’s going to love it, because there’s not going to be any filler songs, and the audience won’t get fucking bored.”

Looking ahead, MacLean hopes to work more closely with promoters like Clockenflap and Bandmennofool to bring overseas acts to the venue, and will be scouting for regional talent while on tour with NYPD. More immediately, the cover bands have been pared back and encouraged to refresh their material.

“This year I’m going to be focusing on the young talent out there — giving them a stage to become a better live act, a tighter band, just overall better musicians — and also sharing the knowledge that I’ve learned over the years on how to become that band that gets on bigger stages and plays festivals and goes on tour,” says MacLean. “Basically to give the energy that we had in the old Wanch a chance to return back to this Wanch.”

There are other changes, too: the monthly jazz nights have been canned and the Monday jam night format has enjoyed an artist-friendly refresh, with comedians and poets all welcome; a magician has already appeared. Likely to cause most consternation among wizened regulars is MacLean’s plan to start hosting guest DJs and even full techno and drum and bass club nights at The Wanch, with Magnetic Soul, Yeti Out and Heavy Hong Kong top of his wishlist.

“I look at the fact that a lot of people that come out to watch live music, of a certain age, when it comes about midnight, 1am, it’s time to go to bed,” he explains. “But clubs go on until 5am, and that means that there’s a whole other demographic that still wants to listen to music, just not necessarily live music. And if you’re the kind of person that says, ‘Yeah, DJs suck’ — give it a chance. Don’t knock it until you try it.”

The Wanch in 2026? Hong Kong’s home of live music — and maybe a whole lot more.

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