Clockenflap Festival review 2024: Hong Kong’s biggest music festival returns as eclectic and exciting as ever

Forget Reading’s Thameside park, All Points East’s berth in the heart of the London borough of Tower Hamlets, or even Glastonbury’s rolling Somerset hills. When it comes to impressive – not to mention immersive – festival locations, it’s hard to beat Clockenflap. The three-day Hong Kong event is plonked in the territory’s financial district. Or, one of them.

Thrusting high above the harbourfront site are the main-stage headliners of the banking world: JP Morgan, HSBC, Citibank, Bank of America, and Tottenham Hotspur kit sponsors AIA. Their gleaming high-rises shimmering and pulsing with logos and illuminations that put the festival’s actual light-shows in the shade.

All the more pressure, then, on the bill to deliver. Particularly when, across six stages, the capacity is a relatively small 30,000 per day. And Clockenflap, for all the nonsense of its purposefully “distinctive” made-up name, punches above its weight. Running since 2008, last year it put on two editions, in March and December, featuring Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Idles, Caroline Polachek and Wu-Tang Clan, plus a host of artists from across Asia like local rapper Tyson Yoshi and Cantopop girl group Collar.

This year’s line-up is similarly impressive. On the opening Friday night, Porter Robinson’s fratboy hyperpop draws an excitable young crowd to the main Harbourflap stage. But the sugary rush of the American’s opening “Cheerleader” barely lets up, leading to toothache as much as it does a jetlagged headache. Much more balming is Air’s headline show. Playing the sublime Moon Safari-and-more set they’ve been touring for much of the year, the French duo’s artful, atmospheric electronica is a bewitching, if hardly rousing, end to the first evening.

Hence this international attendee hotfooting to the second stage (sponsor: another bank) for the delights of Creepy Nuts – a rap duo led, I was reliably informed, by the “Japanese Eminem”, aka R-Shitei. “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born”, their breakout global hit from earlier this year, is the highlight of a furiously entertaining show that was less hip hop than it was a techno-fied Basement Jaxx.

Late Saturday afternoon, a different kind of sonic and visual riot arrives courtesy of Creepy Nuts’ compatriots Sakurazaka 46. The all-female J-pop group have not quite reached that number of members, but they’re not far off. Since forming in 2015, some 70 members have cycled through their ranks, with the current, two dozen-strong (give or take) line-up spilling out across the main stage. Theirs is poppy speed-metal that hammers along in a blur of bubblegum vocals and frantic choreo. Each song seems to have three intros, three endings and multiple dance moves in between. Exhausting in a (mostly) good way.

Exhausting in every way are Fat Dog. The South London fuzz-punks kick up a lairy storm on the brandy-sponsored Park Stage. “King of the Slugs”, their immediately-classic debut single from last year, brings moshpit mayhem to the otherwise genteel and bijou grassy space, the finance bros slam-dancing like they were OOO forever. Brilliant.

Similarly sweaty scenes attend Suede’s set. They’re beloved in Hong Kong for being one of the first Britpop-era bands to visit the then-colony, and for the fact they keep coming back. By their second song, “Personality Disorder”, frontman Brett Anderson is on his knees and drenched. Before long, he is among the people, whipping into a frenzy a crowd that didn’t need much whipping to begin with. Fast, lean and rowdy, Suede’s Dorian Gray-ish midlife is as exciting as ever.

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Back on the main stage, St Vincent’s art-rock angularity – with added shredding – is a dynamic precursor to the monotony of Central Cee. The expat teens were out in force for the Londoner, now the biggest UK artist on TikTok in 2024. But a set entirely based round one man rapping over backing tracks did not a riveting headliner make, no matter how dexterous his flow.

There is better crowd-wowing entertainment on Sunday, even if Glass Animals’ clever-clever synth-pop evokes an Aldi version of The 1975. Jamie xx is a party-starting hit-machine, playing a seamless (no breaks, no chat) mix of globally-roaming dance music beneath a giant disco ball. Finally, capping off the main stage, is the electrifying rock’n’roll Stakhanovite that is Jack White.

He and his three-piece band are arrayed in a tight trapezoid formation in the middle of the stage, as if to recreate intimate, blues-bar intensity at the top of a festival bill. Barely pausing between songs, they barrell through ageless anthems “The Hardest Button to Button”, “Fell In Love With a Girl”, “Hotel Yorba” and a blistering cover of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. As the towering riffs of "Seven Nation Army" close out Clockenflap, White proves that you don’t have to be a blinged-out skyscraper to dazzle in Hong Kong.

Early bird tickets for Clockenflap 2025 are available here