Looking beyond the headliners at the smaller artists worth catching across Manchester.
I’ll start this one with a confession.
I’d never heard of The Kowloons.
Not a song. Not seen them live. Nothing.
And actually, that’s exactly what I wanted this series to be about.
It’s easy to go through the Neighbourhood poster and pick out bands you already know. It’s also pretty easy to spot the ones that are already getting plenty of attention.
But The Small Print is supposed to make me look further down.
So I did.
And that’s how I ended up listening to a band from Merseyside called The Kowloons.
SO, WHO ARE THE KOWLOONS?
At the centre of the band are identical twin brothers Stephen and Anthony Ng.
Stephen sings and plays guitar. Anthony plays drums.
Which obviously gets an immediate tick from me.
They’ve been playing together for a lot longer than The Kowloons have officially existed. The brothers started making music when they were around 10 or 11, with Stephen picking up guitar and Anthony getting behind a drum kit.
For years it was just something they did.
They’d apparently get home, disappear into the attic and play the same songs over and over again until they were ridiculously tight — despite having absolutely no gigs to play them at.
I love that.
Because before the releases, streaming numbers, festivals and everything else that gets attached to bands, that’s basically where most of this starts.
Someone gets an instrument. Someone else gets one.
And eventually you make enough noise that it turns into something.
THERE’S A STORY BEHIND THE NAME
I assumed The Kowloons was just one of those band names that sounded good.
There’s actually a lot more to it.
Stephen and Anthony’s grandad moved from Hong Kong to Liverpool in the 1960s. He came from Kowloon, specifically Ngau Chi Wan.
When the brothers eventually needed a name for the band, The Kowloons stuck.
So underneath what initially sounds like a slightly unusual indie-band name is actually a family connection stretching from Hong Kong to Merseyside.
That’s the sort of detail I probably wouldn’t have discovered if I hadn’t started digging through the bottom of a festival poster.
Which, again, is kind of the point of all this.
MELODY FIRST
The other thing that caught my attention was how they write.
The Kowloons describe themselves as being heavily influenced by British guitar music — The Beatles, The La’s, Oasis and plenty of the obvious Liverpool reference points are in there.
But there are also Beach Boys harmonies, The Kinks, The Who and Pixies amongst the influences they’ve talked about.
Their approach to writing is surprisingly simple.
Start with acoustic guitars.
If the song works with voices and an acoustic guitar, there’s something there.
If it doesn’t, making everything louder isn’t going to rescue it.
Their phrase for it is basically:
Melody is king.
I really like that.
Particularly at a time when it’s incredibly easy to make something sound enormous before you’ve worked out whether there’s actually a decent song underneath it.
THE SONG COMES FIRST
There’s another part of their attitude that I like.
They’ve said they don’t particularly think about what an audience might expect them to make.
They don’t want every Kowloons song to sound the same.
Some ideas happen quickly. Others apparently sit around for months or even years before they finally work out what to do with them.
They collect phrases and bits of conversations. Things from films. Books. TV. Stories they hear.
Then those bits gradually find their way into songs.
It’s not particularly glamorous.
But that’s probably why I like it.
It sounds like four people actually interested in writing songs rather than working backwards from what might perform well on TikTok.
THEY’RE DOING THE GRASSROOTS BIT
The Kowloons haven’t suddenly appeared from nowhere either.
They’ve been doing the small-room stuff.
Liverpool gigs. Support slots. Festivals. BBC Introducing at The Cavern. Building an audience around Merseyside and then gradually taking it further afield.
This April they released the four-track Hallelujah EP and headlined Liverpool’s Arts Club.
They’ve also supported fellow Liverpool band Red Rum Club at On The Waterfront.
And now Neighbourhood is next.
That’s a route I find much more interesting since starting Above Average.
I’m spending more time around grassroots music now. More conversations with bands. More small venues. More people trying to make something happen without enormous teams or enormous budgets behind them.
And the more I’m around it, the more I realise how much work happens before most people have even heard your name.
The Kowloons feel like they’re somewhere in that bit.
START HERE 🎧
THE KOWLOONS — “HALLELUJAH”
This is where I’d start.
Not because I’ve conducted some incredibly scientific assessment of their entire back catalogue.
I haven’t.
I’ve only just discovered them myself.
But Hallelujah feels like a good introduction.
The band themselves have described it as a step forward in their songwriting — trying different things without abandoning the melody-first approach they’ve built everything around.
After that, I’d try James Dean.
Then Can We Go Faster.
And if you want something brand new, they’ve just released Butterflies.
That’s what I’ve been doing anyway.
THIS IS WHY I’M DOING THE SMALL PRINT
Three articles in and I think I’ve finally worked out what I want this series to be.
It’s not really a list of bands I’m recommending.
It’s me actually going through the Neighbourhood poster and finding out who’s there.
Some names I already know.
Some I don’t.
The Kowloons were firmly in the second category.
Now I know about two brothers who spent their childhood making music in an attic.
I know why they’re called The Kowloons.
I know their grandad’s journey from Hong Kong to Liverpool is literally embedded in the band’s name.
And I know there’s a drummer involved.
Always a bonus.
Most importantly, I’ve found another band I want to try and catch on 17 October.
That’s one more name on an increasingly complicated Neighbourhood schedule.
And exactly why I’m reading the small print.
#001 Garage Flower — Leeds.
#002 Florentenes — Bolton.
#003 The Kowloons — Merseyside.
On to the next one.
Neighbourhood 2026: The Small Print #003
The names might be smaller. The music doesn’t have to be.
0 comments