The Long Play Sessions: Emma-Lee Moss - My Cantopop Nights

Join The Long Play Sessions for an evening with writer and musician Emma-Lee Moss, also known as the singer-songwriter Emmy the Great. She will be talking about My Cantopop Nights, her first book and a moving memoir of pop music, identity and Hong Kong. In the summer of 1995, 11-year-old Emma-Lee lives in a city where Cantopop is everywhere, on every billboard and street corner. When her family moves to England later that year, she keeps her love of the music alive as the sound of a secret childhood identity.

Twenty years later, Emma-Lee finds herself in a Hong Kong bar, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music is her inheritance. Her book follows an identity crisis that comes just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into the 2019 protests, and the search to reconcile Hong Kong and British, Cantopop and indie. It is a story of coincidences, magical thinking and falling in love with a city, a country, its people and its music. Emma-Lee has written for the Guardian, Vice, i-D and British GQ, and as Emmy the Great has released four studio albums, so she brings a musician’s ear to the story.

The conversation will be chaired by journalist and author Siân Pattenden, who will explore the book’s themes of music, memory and belonging. Don’t miss this chance to hear one of the most distinctive voices in music writing talk about the songs that shaped her.