In 1978, the Sex Pistols rocked the United Kingdom, and a group of faithful fans followed them for all their performances, becoming an indirect part of the group and a direct part of the cultural movement that started inside the store of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Among the young people was Susan Janet Ballion, later known as Siouxsie Sioux.

Like many of her generation, Siouxsie saw in punk rock a way to express herself and, at the head of the band Siouxsie and the Banshees, was an immediate success with the public and critics, becoming an icon of rock and fashion. Their first hit single was a strange oriental melody, which turned into Hong Kong Garden, now a classic. However, even though it was a success, it took the precise taste of director Sofia Coppola to transform the song into a literal classic. That’s right, when she chose Hong Kong Garden for a key scene in her 2006 film Marie Antoinette, she rescued punk success and updated it. So much so that, in 2023, it entered the opening episode of the second season of And Just Like That in a tribute to Vivienne Westwood and also to the French Queen, as it was a reference to a masquerade ball. But we’ll get there.

Hong Kong Garden placed Siouxsie and the Banshees in the UK and later on the world charts. Today designated as one of the landmarks of what would come to be called the ‘new wave’ movement, it was casually born from a band rehearsal. It was guitarist John McKay who played the riff on the guitar in 1977, naming the melody People Phobia. It was Siouxsie who changed the name when writing the lyrics, referring to an oriental food restaurant in Chislehurst High Street, London, which was the target of racist and xenophobic attacks by skinheads. Incidentally, the Hong Kong Garden continues to operate at the same address to this day! Anyway, the vocalist frequented the place and got angry when the immigrant employees were attacked.

As Siouxsie recalled years later in an interview, she herself wanted to “kick all skinheads in the head” because of prejudice and violence. “It made me feel so helpless, hopeless, and sick,” she said, who voiced all of this criticism in the song.

The recording of Hong Kong Garden was completed in just two days (after they changed the producer) and innovated in the recording of drums that went on to influence the entire post-punk sound after it was released, making it onto the band’s first album, Scream. In 2014, it won a remastered version with the orchestrated version that appeared in Sofia Coppola‘s film, perhaps today the most played of them.

In the film, Hong Kong Garden is the song played by the orchestra at the masked ball at the Paris Opéra, in which Marie Antoinette and the king go into hiding since their identities cannot be identified. It is there that she meets the man who will become the love of her life. Sofia’s personal signature is an anachronism, which she deliberately uses to lead modern audiences into the historical moment on screen, something openly copied in The Great and Bridgerton. So her film could be set in pre-revolution France, but the soundtrack was all 1980s rock, and even an All-Star tennis player appears among the queen’s things. But in the case of the song by Siouxsie and the Banshees, there was something else. As an Austrian, Marie Antoinette suffered extra prejudice from both subjects and nobles, and it is about xenophobia that Hong Kong Garden talks. Furthermore, the punk (or new wave) movement was about transgression, represented by the ball’s masks in an environment that underscores both Marie’s sense of isolation and disconnection and her pursuit of fun, identified in modern songs.

In the particular case of Hong Kong Garden, reportedly, the director used the hit as an ‘alarm clock’ for the team, so there was also an element of a ‘private joke’ between them. And somehow, it also has an extra touch when it was chosen to close the first episode of the second season of And Just Like That. It is the orchestrated version – worthy of a masked ball – that enters the series, in reference to the party Carrie is going to at the Metropolitan Museum. But it is also the link between Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola, Vivienne Westwood, and Siouxsie Sioux: icons, pioneers, and connected. Just like Carrie.

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