How Hong Kong's Canton Disco became one of world's coolest clubs

Andrew Bull might be best known as Hong Kong's ever-ebullient music promoter and undisputed king of the disco, but the Englishman who these days resides in Shanghai is no slouch when it comes to a savvy marketing stunt.

After cutting his disco teeth as DJ at The Scene, Michael Kadoorie's swinging 1970s club in The Peninsula and then at Gordon Huthart's epochal Disco Disco, Bull found himself tasked with launching a club that set out to be the greatest thing since slit skirts, gold medallions on beds of chest hair and cream three-piece polyester suits.

Canton Disco was a cavernous, sprawling lair stretching away into the bowels of Harbour City where all bets were to be off and all rules were to be broken as Bull and his less-high-profile partner and backer, Tony Law, picked up the mantle from New York's Studio 54 and set about creating one of the coolest clubs on the planet.

This would be highly evolved disco with an experimental, avant garde bent and a steady flow of cutting-edge live acts, flowing with the asymmetrical swagger of a New Romantic suit and buffeted by the fickle winds of fashion. Here, Kylie Minogue would play her first-ever live gig, and the main stage also hosted the edgier shores of Canto-pop land, acts such as Beyond and Tat Ming Pair, along with international artists including Erasure, Swing Out Sister, New Order, Run DMC and Eartha Kitt.