168 168 15 Performing the Political Refections on Tatming Meeting George Orwell in 2017 Yiu Fai Chow, Jeroen de Kloet, and Leonie Schmidt Tatming, Popular Music, and Politics One can trace a clear history of the alliances between popular music and politics, ranging from protest songs and Band Aid and Live Aid to, arguably, the other end of the political spec- trum, national anthems (Street, 2012). In Hong Kong, despite its overwhelming capitalist logic, makers of pop music have established a tradition of political engagement, stretching from the post-Tiananmen fury and fear and the anxiety towards the 1997 handover to the more recent articulations against increasing intervention of the Beijing regime, ofen dubbed its new colonizer afer the old one of the British Empire (Chow, 1992). Such articulations are ofen linked to more indie genres; the local band My Little Airport, for example, preceded the Umbrella protests 1 with their song “Donald Tsang, Please Die” (2009), riding on the popular discontent against the then Chief Executive of the city. Among the more mainstream entertainers, pop stars like Denise Ho (何韻詩) and Anthony Wong (黃耀明) aligned not only their music but also themselves expli- citly to political movements, as in their intense involvement during the months-long Umbrella protests in Hong Kong in 2014. Since then, both have been banned from China. 2 In this chapter, we focus on Anthony Wong and Tatming Pair (達明一派), a duo Wong formed with Tats Lau (劉以達). Tatming Pair released its debut in 1986 and has since built a reputation with its extravagant aesthetics, electronic sounds, and engaged lyrics. Tatming’s decades-long political engagement and concern with local issues did not go unnoticed. In his book on Hong Kong music bands, Stephen Chu (2000) discusses how Tatming refects Hong Kong culture. Similarly, Esther Cheung (1997) has located feelings of pre-handover anxiety in Tatming’s songs. In her book on Hong Kong popular culture, Lok Fung (1995) addresses the social consciousness of Tatming’s music. She describes how the sense of melancholia in their music was evocative of living in pre-handover Hong Kong, or what she calls, “the fn de siècle city.” In 2017 Tatming staged a round of three reunion concerts in the Hong Kong Coliseum, the Tatming Pair 30th Anniversary Live Concerts. Tis was fve years afer their Round and Round tour. Both the 2012 and the 2017 concerts created a great buzz around the city of Hong Kong and were applauded for their political, musical, and aesthetic standards. In an earlier publica- tion (Schmidt, Chow, & de Kloet, 2017), we analyzed the performative aesthetics of the 2012 performances and argued that they foreshadowed the upcoming political protests, “attesting to the close alliance between the cultural and the political. It shows how popular music, in word, sound and image, both refects, as well as impacts on, the city of Hong Kong” (Schmidt et al., 2017,