JOKONKYBLOG: Clockenflap Festival 2025 Hong Kong

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Clockenflap Festival 2025 Hong Kong

Late October, the Dishonorable Edward Pastanga and I visited Wilhelmus von N's place, as we had been invited once again for a vinyl evening.
I had prepared myself by digging up some old singles and albums from my collection, as well as buying a new platter: Go Go Crankin’ - Paint The White House Black…
Afterwards, we sat down in his vinyl sanctuary, opened the beers, and started playing some discs, which is a kind of ancient ritual for us by now.

Most of the brought along 45s I couldn’t play as W’s record player missed one of those plastic adapters, but we still had more than enough music to enjoy.

Fuelled by copious amounts of beer, conversation typically went all over the place: Artificial Intelligence, politics, music, books, the mystery of the never-matching socks in our households, etc.
Suddenly, W announced that we hadn’t been to any real concert for a while, to which both DEP and I agreed, but didn’t have any suggestions at hand to rectify this sad state of affairs.
Not discouraged at all, W consulted his smartphone and suddenly exclaimed: “Oh, this is cool, Clockenflap Festival in Hong Kong, 5-7 December, we should go there!”
He shared the festival’s lineup with us, of which we recognised exactly two bands: Sparks and Franz Ferdinand…
Even so, we agreed that it really looked cool, and W immediately started booking tickets!
Other details, such as getting there + accommodation, we would look at later…

Once sobered up the next day, I texted DEP: "Did he really book tickets for that festival???"

To make a long story short, it turned out that W had exactly done that, so we started booking flights and hotels, which was relatively easy.

We watched these bands/artists during our short stay.

Friday: Passenger, Sparks, Digitalism DJ-set

Saturday: Phum Viphurit, Chilli Beans, L’Imperatrice

Sunday: Marcin, Jeremy Zucker, TV Girl, Franz Ferdinand, Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Our overall impression was that the festival was very well organised (unlike some of the Dutch events I attended back in the day), very clean, plenty of toilets, food stands, beer taps, etc., impressive!

Unfortunately during those 3 days, it became frightfully obvious that our decrepit bodies no longer could survive standing for more than 3 hours straight, no matter how much we shuffled around: lower back aches, leg cramps, and sore feet, our litany of complaints could have come from a bunch of pensioners in a nursing home...

As a result, we missed a lot of bands/artists, but from those we did see, here are our reviews:

Name: Passenger

Date Performing: Friday, 5 December 2025

Grumpy Old Men Verdict:

Art58Koen: Entertaining acoustic stuff, good interaction with public.

Wilhelmus von N: If you like buskers, you like Passenger. It takes courage to be alone with a guitar on stage. Knows how to involve the crowd - but there is only so much you can do with a guitar to really get the crowd going.

The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga: Chatty. He enjoyed sharing his new stuff, but no one in the crowd really recognized any of it. This became more obvious when he got a huge roar near the end when he played the only song everyone knew. Can imagine it gets tiring to play one song all the time, although he put on a brave face, claiming he enjoyed playing it.

Name: Sparks

Date Performing: Friday, 5 December 2025

Grumpy Old Men Verdict:

Art58Koen: Epic stuff! But how can Russell Mael (77!) jump around on stage like that? And Ron Mael doing his Suburban Homeboy shuffle was priceless!

Wilhelmus von N: I just want to age like Russell. They played an amazing set!

The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga: Excellent fun from the very off when they sang "Shall we start?". Great show, good music. Embarrassing for the grumpy old men who, quite rightly, avoid jumping around like that especially in public.

Name: Digitalism DJ set

Date Performing: Friday, 5 December 2025

Grumpy Old Men Verdict:

Art58Koen: DJ shite

Wilhelmus von N: Forgettable. Which I apparently did instantly.

The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga: Don't recall them. Must have been thinking about anything else.

Name: Phum Viphurit

Date Performing: Saturday, 6 December 2025

Grumpy Old Men Verdict:

Art58Koen: Funky Thai band, cool background videos too.

Wilhelmus von N: Really enjoyed this band - flute, violins, and all. Technically really good, and they clearly had a ton of fun being on stage. Great background videos too!

The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga: Started inauspiciously with a head-wobbling love song kind of track that Thai girls love. Once they got going though, it turns out, they are well funky with excellent production management. Fun show.

Name: Chilli Beans.

Date Performing: Saturday, 6 December 2025

Grumpy Old Men Verdict:

Art58Koen: Cute Jpop girl band who can rock!

Wilhelmus von N: They rocked - good bass player too!

The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga: Fun and rocking with cuteness overload from the lead singer.

Name: L'Impératrice

Date Performing: Saturday, 6 December 2025

Grumpy Old Men Verdict:

Art58Koen: Loud but fun, at times a bit like Level 42.

Wilhelmus von N: For me the best discovery of this Clockenflap. Funky, some Level 42 bass action, and sampling Massive Attack (Diamonds in the back, sunroof down, digging the scene... ). As it's all in French, it's hard to sing along and to remember songs, but I find myself listening to their playlist and liking their tunes more and more.

The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga: It had a good beat, and you can dance to it. They played a great many songs, but I cannot recall a single one and, if they played the song again, I would not recognize ever having heard it. Ultimately, the songs had no real distinguishing feature, unlike the lead singer who was extraordinarily lithe and had two very distinguishing features.....her voice and her dancing (not what Wilhelmus was thinking).

Name: Marcin