Hong Kong post-punk band David Boring talk Anthony Bourdain, their South by Southwest debut, and protest art
- After five-month break from performing in the city, the post-punk band are back with a new guitarist
- They talk about playing South by Southwest festival and why they didn’t write songs about the Hong Kong protests
Outspoken Hong Kong post-punk band David Boring perform this weekend for the first time in more than five months, a notable period of absence that coincided with some of the most intense street protests the city has seen. The group had been scheduled to perform at the Clockenflap Music Festival, Hong Kong’s biggest live-music event, in November until the festival joined a long list of events cancelled because of the civil unrest.
Their show on Sunday will be the group’s first with new guitarist Kit Yip, who joins from experimental shoegaze act Murmur. Known for their dark, wild and often shocking image and sound, the band will bid farewell to guitarist Dave Cheng, who is leaving to pursue his studies.
The band owes its formation to the anger stirred up by the 2014 Occupy Hong Kong protests. They quickly rose to prominence in the Hong Kong independent music scene, and their infectious and cathartic brand of nihilism earned them attention abroad.
Seated in a cafe in Tai Hang, around the corner from Victoria Park – the starting point for several big marches in opposition to a proposed change in extradition law, the spark for the ongoing protests – lead singer Janice Lau and guitarist Jason Cheung acknowledge the compulsion in the artistic community to be creative during tumultuous times, yet say that they chose to hold back amid the noise.
“This might be a controversial opinion, but I think times like this always encourage bad art and music,” Lau says. “Every time something is a piece of political art, people become much more forgiving or the focus becomes the message rather than the quality of work. I think everything we do is still highly political [but] it’s more unspoken than what is written out.”
Every detail of the band’s sound and image is meticulously crafted, though they prefer not to confirm any theories about the symbolism of either.
“We don’t usually explain the things we do,” Lau says. “Everything we do is a statement of some sort. We don’t really like to provide our personal intent. It makes it too easy, and it’s not something we feel can be summarised in a few lines. It’s always really interesting to read about how people interpret what we do. Sometimes they really get it and that’s really nice.”
Instead of using the protests to elevate their profile, the band waited, bringing Yip up to speed with their back catalogue before turning their attention to new songwriting and the next chapter.
Although a challenging year for Hong Kong, 2019 was a largely fortuitous one for David Boring, who became the first act from the city to perform at South by Southwest, the annual music festival in Austin, Texas, where they did four shows in five days and got their first taste of “the hype machine”, as Cheung puts it.
From Texas, they flew to Philadelphia for three days to film a documentary with the non-profit organisation Weathervane Music, which produces Shaking Through, a series of short films each focused on a different band. The resulting film finds the band at their most laid-back and vulnerable, chatting candidly as they explore Philadelphia’s indie record stores and working out kinks with engineers as they record a session.
Weathervane director McTear says: “What I saw on Bourdain’s show was them expressing fear of losing the freedom to express themselves as artists. And that seemed to really highlight something very specific here in America with the rise of Trump. They are the coolest people I’ve met in years. They are so proactive. They really wanted to have this experience. And so they made it happen.”
On the final night, they perform an intimate live set, after which Lau was visibly moved. “This is very off-brand for us,” she said as she thanked the Weathervane crew. In person, Lau is measured and speaks precisely; onstage, she stalks the room like a panther and stares down the crowd in between shrieks of rage.
Every time something is a piece of political art, people become much more forgiving or the focus becomes the message rather than the quality of work
The songs are a way of documenting “stories not heard”, Lau says. David Boring find inspiration in “all these reasons why people are messed up or why they are who they are now”, she says. “Most of the time it’s to do with what’s happening around them. So we’re trying to link everything together and form a monologue.
“Normally you judge someone from how they’re acting. But this is almost as if they’re conscious and speaking from personal experience. It’s empathy; it’s how we show empathy.”
