From radio dogsbody to a big mover and shaker in Hong Kong disco
Trailblazing DJ and concert promoter Andrew Bull on how Hong Kong’s disco scene exploded, and losing HK$10m on a Celine Dion concert
I WAS BORN IN Tidworth Military Hospital (in southern England) in 1956. My father was a medical orderly during the 1956 Suez Crisis and I was conceived on a rooftop in Benghazi (Libya) and flown back to England to be born. My father was doing his National Service. He later went to London Bible College. My maternal grandparents had a wonderful little house in Flitwick, Bedfordshire, where my brother and younger sister were born. Much later, in 1974, my youngest sister was born. My father graduated around 1963 and became a vicar. He was ordained in York Minster and we moved to York, where he became a curate. He wanted his family to see the world so he joined as a chaplain in the British Army. The Reverend Ian Henry Bull, chaplain to the forces.
I WAS ABOUT NINE when we lived on a sugar-cane plantation. We had a wonderful white house on legs and in the evening we would be allowed to stand at the window and watch the bats before going to sleep under a mosquito net. Next door we could hear the West Indian families listening to steel band music and dancing. There was a lot of calypso in those days. I could hear them making this happy noise, and that affected me. It stayed with me, that I would always like to be responsible for making that noise.
I WORKED THERE as an intern, doing all sorts of odd jobs. Every evening for the broadcast there would be a concrete bunker with a transmitter in it, in a field. There was no air conditioning and the transmitter used to overheat all the time. So someone had to sit on one of those Chinese folding chairs, and then throw the switch on the transmitter every time it tripped. That was my job, which I did while listening to Hindi film tunes.
