Just a quick one as I board a very early, very long flight for – three guesses, first two don’t count. “Hong Kong Garden” was Siouxsie & The Banshees’ very first single, released in August 1978, and actually has nothing to do with the titular city-state. It’s named for a Chinese restaurant in London they frequented and which frequently had to deal with trouble from racist skinheads:
I’ll never forget, there was a Chinese restaurant in Chislehurst called the Hong Kong Garden. Me and my friend were really upset that we used to go there and like, occasionally when the skinheads would turn up it would really turn really ugly. These gits would just go in en masse and just terrorise these Chinese people who were working there. We’d try and say ‘Leave them alone’, you know. It was a kind of tribute.
Siouxsie Sioux, Siouxsie & The Banshees
Punk Top Ten Interview via Wikipedia
The single reached #7 on the charts but did not appear on their debut album The Scream in November of that year.
The version on the single is the second version of the song – an earlier version was recorded live at the BBC in February of 1978, and is available on some of the archival releases of their radio sessions:
And I don’t have the time/energy to make this a full iterations post, nor are there compelling cover versions, but there is this guitar lesson from the old reliable Anyone Can Play Guitar: