I can't remember how old I was when we got cable TV, probably around eight or so; it was known as Redifusion and took Hongkong into the age of television. The black and white screen, and its accompanying wall-mounted black plastic dial, started to pop up with greater frequency in kaifong dai-pai-dongs and leung-char-po's ( neighbourhood street-stalls serving cheap food and traditional Chinese medicinal beverages ), community centres, and in the living rooms of the more fortunate. In the process it would also go on to prove Marx completely wrong by quickly becoming the preferred opiate of the people; after all, religion didn't put rice on the table, which wasn't all that easy in those days, nor could it compete with TV's undemanding and simple entertainment that also hinted at a vision, however hazy, of a better immediate future.

Television would introduce me to to one of the icons of 50's America - the TV Cowboy. We now know of course that he was really a role-model with a hidden agenda, which was to turn young kids into clean-cut, well-behaved, and above all, nice little children, and to make a killing while he was at it, all in the name of entertainment. I was too young then to even guess at this conspiracy, of course, but one season of the Lone Ranger and Hop-a-long Cassidy, and I soon learnt how to smell a rat. They didn't smoke, didn't drink, they didn't even talk rough, which was pretty un-cowboyl-like of them. So even a city-slicker Chinese kid from East of the Yangtse could tell that they were completely clueless about what real cowboys were about; not only were they fakes, they were pretty bad at it as well, and their ridiculous costumes and immaculate grooming always gave the game away. So I came away a little wiser and added a new motto to my expanding repertoire - Ya Cain't Trust No Clean Cowboys. And then we went our separate ways.

As we were about to turn the corner into the Sixties, something called Rock and Roll appeared on my horizons, and, hoping it would hasten my entry into adolescence, I dutifully decided to look into it. The staple music diet - and diet is indeed an apt description - at that time consisted mainly of Chinese opera and "light music" (it had yet to begin its close association with elevators), so the undertaking proved to be as difficult as finding a run on Kemosabe's body suit. Redifusion, which also had a radio channel on its dial, featured one of the few weekly pop programs, so once again it became one of my portals into a brave new world. And guess what? There I would once more come face-to-face with a new generation of Clean Cowboys.

This time around they had names like Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Cliff Richard, the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and Bobby Vee, to name a few. By some rotten stroke of luck, their music happened to be some of the first I came across, and it very nearly brought a premature end to my interest in Rock and Roll. I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was about these guys but there was something not quite right, until images of the Lone Ranger started flashing in my head. I guess kids have a natural intuition; mine was telling me that these jokers just didn't have Soul - which is a pretty limiting defect in Rock and Roll - but more than that, they were guilty of the greater crime of not even trying to reach for it in the prime of their youth.

But, as they say, one man's meat is another man's poison, and the older teenagers lapped it up. Names like Elvisina Tender Wong and Troy Vee AuYueng soon peppered the newly popular radio request shows, and then there were the parties with ducktails and ponytails and ......well, just try and imagine Grease with a Chinatown cast. I guess a difference of a few years really is an unbridgeable gap when you're young, because I didn't get any of it and so I just watched from the sidelines.

Don't get me wrong, I knew good music was also happening - once in a blue moon I would come across fantastic stuff from people like Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, who really touched you with their music and lit up the world when I heard them - but it wasn't as mainstream and so it was difficult to get it on the radio. And in those days before cassettes and mp3's, and singles were a month's allowance a pop, that meant it might as well be on Mars, which also happened to be pretty much how far away most of us felt the U.S. to be.

Anyway the syrup brigade lasted for a couple of more years and then started to lose momentum as the singers and the music got to sound more and more like each other, which, of course, was what the adults had been trying to tell us all this time. I guess by the time even the King of Rock and Roll started hitting us with songs and movies like Blue Hawaii and Viva Las Vegas, the Cat had become a docile mouse, and the energy and vibrancy of the music had long gone. And everyone was waiting for the Next Big Thing.