Clockenflap returns after a four-year hiatus with local and international names, as it continues its mission to be the best city-based festival in the world
To the delight of the city’s musos, Clockenflap, Hong Kong’s biggest annual outdoor music and arts festival, returns this month for the first time in over four years. Justin Sweeting, Clockenflap’s co-founder, vividly remembers the team’s decision to pull the plug exactly a week before the 2019 edition. The November event had on the line-up Japanese rock group Babymetal, American singer-songwriter Halsey and British folk rock band Mumford & Sons, but there was too much uncertainty given the social unrest, much of which was centred around Central Harbourfront, where the festival had been staged every year since 2016 after its relocation from West Kowloon. Then the pandemic and its restrictions hit.
The full return of the festival this year is cause for celebration; when we spoke to Sweeting in January, he told us the Clockenflap team had confirmed more than 30 local and international performers—and were expecting as many as 100. They include hip-hop legends Wu-Tang Clan; British rock icons Arctic Monkeys, who will be playing in Hong Kong for the first time; French synth-rockers Phoenix, who performed here in 2014; Japanese experimental rock legends Mono; and local singer-songwriter Tyson Yoshi.
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Sweeting says the idea for the festival’s comeback wasn’t for a grand transformation or scaling up. “We’re approaching this as a reset. We want to get back to the essence of what people love about the festival, which is coming together for the shared experience—and that doesn’t change,” he says. “All these things would have sounded almost silly if you said them pre-pandemic, but what makes Clockenflap fun is people having the ability to move freely around the site, stand or sit whenever and wherever they want to, and enjoy food and drinks.”
Sweeting, who is from Hong Kong, set up Clockenflap in 2008 with techno crew Robot members Mike Hill and Jay Hofmann-Forster, who are originally from the UK. They missed music festivals but couldn’t find one in Hong Kong. Sweeting says that there were performances by local musicians and attempts at setting up festivals in the city before and after Clockenflap, such as Rockit, a smaller-scale event that ran from 2003 to 2006, where Sweeting and Hofmann-Forster first met. But they had their hearts set on something bigger.
