China drinks Chivas mixed with green tea because of Andrew Bull. As the story goes, he and his partner at their marketing agency Shine Communications noticed people drinking whiskey and green tea in early aughts Shenzhen, then suggested to their client Chivas that hey, we should brand this as Chivas and green tea. Now it's China's most infamous party drink. This is but one of many, many legends. Before that, in his concert promoting days with Arena Hong Kong, dude ate seafood on Lamma Island in Hong Kong with Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown when he brought Bobby over for the "Humping Around The World" tour. Whitney had come incognito as Mrs. Brown, and she wouldn't sit on the chair at the Chinese restaurant, so they had to go buy a new towel for her to sit on.
Now, words don't really do this guy justice, but I'll try to tell a few of his stories. Bull was bringing major artists to China before Live Nation, or AEG, or A2 Live, or any other concert promoters. "I was the vector, like the one flight attendant guy who started AIDS. I'm the disco vector. I was there before anyone else." We're talking artists like Paul Simon (Guangzhou in the late '80s), Kylie Minogue, Phil Collins, Diana Ross, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel, Jason Donovan, Ryuichi Sakamoto, The Manhattan Transfer; then later, Celine Dion and Bjork (1996, at Gongti in BJ), then the HK handover concert in '97, with Boy George, Grace Jones, Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold, and a massive Y2K party in HK, with Whitney Houston and Sister Sledge.
But before any of this, Bull was a DJ. And he's still in a DJ. Let's go back to the 1970s...
Bull's father was in the British army, stationed in Cologne, but also worked in radio. In 1968, his dad let him play some records on the air. In school, the young Andrew organized all the parties for Valentine's Day, Halloween, and so on. Back in these days he played records by Led Zeppelin and Rod Stewart, until he moved to HK and got a gig in the basement of the Peninsula hotel in 1972, at their club called The Scene.
That was during the Vietnam War, when HK was a major R&R destination for American soldiers. "That particular club had a bunch of girls who specialized in hanging out with black guys". So those girls would head down to the ship with free drinks tickets and bring them to the club. "Sooner or later we had sort of a funk convention going on", where Bull played records by Earth Wind & Fire and Willy Hutch. There were whole tailor shops devoted to American sailors, including one called The Power that specialized in Curtis Mayfield-esque gear. The soldiers who danced at The Scene had two weeks of R&R before getting shipped back to the jungle -- it might have been their last party ever. And Bull, this 16 year-old white boy from the UK, was dropping heat.
This was the early days of disco and funk. "The club was an incredible melting pot of people. The Peninsula was the epicenter of upscale NY fashion designers. You had guys like Kenzo or Alan Flusser, Pinky and Dianne -- whoever were the designers de jour -- they would also stay at the Peninsula hotel, because the airport was in that part of town. So we had the black guys, and we had a huge gay contingent of designers -- people that would hang out at the Puli hotel in Shanghai [nowadays]. The guys who actually work at a senior level in Prada. We also had the hip local community of Hong Kong, who were on the cutting edge, bringing a lot of New York news..cassettes鈥 would even have guys who wanted to ensure their musical happiness in HK by going shopping in New York for vinyl and just bringing me a bag and saying 'time to get busy'".
Bull recites these stories casually, wearing his trademark Panama hat, sipping a San Pellegrino. Another of his many claims to fame is playing the first 12" vinyl single in Asia. Before this, most HK clubs just had Filipino bands, and Chinese customers at Bull's nights would often ask for a refund when they learned that the band would never start.
At the same time, something similar was popping off at The Loft in NYC -- before Studio 54, before Paradise Garage, before AIDS. Bull had left high school at the age of 16 for a dayjob at a HK radio station during the day and at the club at night. That gig at The Scene lasted five years, or "around 20,000 hours of non-stop disco mixing", until '77 when the club shuttered.
From there, Saturday Night Fever kicked in and Bull moved to The Taipan Club, then together with Gordon Huthart -- who used to deliberately dance with other men to get kicked off the floor by the special gay-busting HK police unit, and later got the homophobic laws changed -- opened Disco Disco, "the studio 54 of Hong Kong, in an alley which was completely a no-man's land, which has become Lan Kwai Fong. That was Studio54, that was cocaine in the office, that was Andy Warhol hanging out in the DJ booth, that was Kraftwerk coming down on the transit on the way back from Japan to Germany". That closed in 1983, then he opened a record store called Musique Boutique Bull in the spot where the 7-11 is in Lan Kwai Fong now.
Then came the Canton Disco, which Bull opened with two co-investors in 1985. That's where Kylie Minogue played her first show. New Order played there too. And during the daytime on Saturdays and Sundays, they threw packed parties for teens under 18. That one just had a 30 year revival party earlier this year which got a two page spread in Hong Kong Tatler. The for Canton Disco boasts over 2200 members who post regularly.
Then came the concert promotion, and later, the branding and marketing game. The stories could go on and on, and they've been corroborated by other old-school cats in the China music business. Bottom line, dude is foundation sound for Asia. He should write a book. Andrew Bull still DJs every Monday night on , another of his projects. He's also playing at the in Jing'an. Ahead of that, let's get into his five defining Tracks鈥�
5) First Choice - "Ain't He Bad (Harlem Hustlers Mix)"
"I had a mixtape and I said I gotta find that track. I hunted it down. That song rocks [the remix]. The original is not that good."
4) Carolyne Bernier -- "Hold Me, Touch Me" (Instrumental)
"The version I like is the instrumental on the B-side, on Private Stock Records."
3) Boz Scaggs - "Lowdown"
"Another classic"
2) Eddie Drennon & B.B.S. Unlimited - "Let's Do The Latin Hustle"
1) Space - "Magic Fly"
"French discoteers Space are from whom Daft Punk stole the whole 'French guy in a space helmet' idea"
***BONUS ROUND***
"There's so many songs鈥or me, as a DJ, it's not really about the music. The sound I wanna hear is the girls going 'Andrew, you fucking rock!" -- that's the sound I wanna hear rather than the song itself. There's certain touchstone songs which, in their time, were the ones I would use to gain that effect. "Love Hangover" by Diana Ross鈥t's hard to leave that off the list.
"And on a more commercial bent, you have to acknowledge Nile Rogers and Chic with 'Le Freak'. I suppose you have to give the readers one song they're actually heard of, to make sure the guy's human [laughs]."
Andrew then ran to the DJ booth to play the drop that Nile Rogers recorded for him when he came through Shanghai last year. Something like "This is Nile Rogers and you're tuned into my main man Andrew Bull and The Disco Buffet". Legend status.
***
Andrew Bull hosts the weekly Disco Buffet party and radio show every Monday night at
, which streams live on . He's also mixing live this Saturday at SHFT's Summer On Smash party.
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