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Saturday night in Kowloon, and the joint is apparently going to rip. The local band Beyond are playing the coliseum. Bring earplugs, I am warned. Brace yourself for power-chord anthems about social justice and the struggle to get by.

Real rock music in Hong Kong? I have a ticket for the show. I also have my doubts.

The city is a one-music-industry town. The industry is called Canto-pop, and it is hard-core. Pop idols, chosen for their smiles and hairstyles, are briefly famous and then fondly recalled. During their 15 minutes, the idols crank out dozens of CDs and sing anodyne love ditties live to canned music. They also underact in bad movies and hawk cellphones and date each other to fuel the gossip mags.

Canto-pop's palace of dreams is the coliseum in East Kowloon. It seats 12,000, and top acts are expected to fill it several nights running. Leslie Cheung, a local legend who also happened to be a talented actor, once sold out the venue 24 times. Cheung jumped off the roof of a five-star hotel this past spring. He was 46 and had struggled with depression.

Beyond packed the coliseum for four nights a month before, and so added three more shows. That sounds suspiciously like a Canto-pop product. But the group is also credited with pioneering rock in Hong Kong two decades ago, a lonely stewardship given the Chinese resistance to strong musical flavours. One magazine described them as "the Beatles, the Clash and Oasis rolled into one."

It is raining when I arrive. The coliseum, an alien vessel idling atop a vast concrete pad, can't be reached without getting wet. Approach the building by bus, subway or taxi, and the result is the same: a 50-yard dash to the nearest gate. Though it is 7:30 p.m., it is already dark. Victoria Harbour lies to the south and the skyline, stretching along the north shoulder of Hong Kong island, is surreal.

My ticket costs a reasonable $200 Hong Kong dollars ($35 Canadian). A sign announces that a few $400 floor seats remain. These all go before the show starts.

The value of a $200 ticket depends on who is purchasing it. There are two broad categories of ticket buyers. Group A includes the affluent locals and expatriates who move within the globalized business camp. Group B is most everyone else, including the millions who work long hours for low pay in a city with no minimum wage.

Group A wouldn't blink at paying $800 to see Moby or Norah Jones. Group B must scrimp to afford Beyond. Canto-pop runs at the coliseum count on repeat customers, mostly teenagers, who scream their idol's name night after night, until they are rewarded with a photo-op.

For some, the auditorium's location next to the main railway station precludes it ever being a cool night out. (International acts play the convention centre in Wan Chai, across the harbour.) By the looks of them, the crowd this evening is pure Group B.

Dress code is Kowloon-side: T-shirts and jeans. The clubbing uniform -- guys with streaked hair and muscle shirts, girls in baseball caps and white undershirts -- is absent. Likewise, the emaciated body shape favoured by rich-kids-who-party. These are regular Hong Kongers with normal bodies and clothes. Many do dangle cellphones around their necks, though -- a modest statement of Asian hip.

Band T-shirt sales are brisk. Every $100 purchase includes a post card of the group. The photo shows three grinning men embracing three equally content dogs.

"What's this about?" I ask a man selling the shirts. "They like dogs," he answers. Sales proceeds are destined, in fact, for an animal rights organization called Animals Asia.

Public gatherings tend to bring out the closet Singaporean in Hong Kongers. Rules designed to check fun at the door abound. There are no concession stands inside, obliging people to sneak food in. (Weirdly, ancient men climb the steep aisles selling Haagen-Dazs ice cream.) Alcohol is forbidden, as is smoking. Standing is not permitted during the performance.

I am seated between two young couples. All four of them wear Beyond T-shirts and hold glow-sticks, like Bilbo Baggins with his Sting. They speak only slightly better English than I speak Cantonese. One couple are seeing the band for a second time. The other includes a debutante and a veteran of three shows. The veteran works in a clothing store. Her boyfriend drives a truck for a supermarket chain. "Three times?" I say to the woman. "I like to sing the songs," she replies.

The lights go down. At once, the darkness is filled with whistles. Glow-sticks transform the floor into a surface of skittering water bugs. The faces of the three band members flash across screens, along with that of a younger man. His photo earns the loudest roar. Below the face is written: "In Loving Memory of . . ." Beyond wears its 1980s pedigree proudly. Hair helmets and apparel are circa-Duran Duran, especially drummer Yip Sai-wing's leonine mane. Paul Wong has the guitar-god poses down cold, and there is even a drum solo, where the pod floats out over the audience, like a telephone repair man who has lost his way.

All of which is just fine. The band plays hard for almost three hours. The songs are mostly chunky riffs and grumbling bass lines, with U2-styled choruses and perhaps one too many echoes of Journey and Styx. Beyond has a reputation for that rarest of Hong Kong attributes: a social conscience. Lyrics touch on human rights and the aspirations of everyday folk. One of its hits was a tune about Nelson Mandela.

If there is a coliseum sight more shocking than a guitar player offering a wailing solo, it is that of an audience standing on their collective feet, arms raised and hands fisted, shouting out lyrics about justice and truth.

Hong Kong may hanker for the clinical tidiness of Singapore, but the city is far too warm-blooded. The crowd doesn't applaud strenuously and doesn't dance. But people do ignore house rules and rise up from their seats. The girl from the clothing shop stands the entire night. She issues warbly cries of pleasure between numbers, and sings every word to every song.

Near the end, a silk screen is raised at the front of the stage. Beyond nearly disbanded in 1993 after its lead singer and songwriter, Wong Ka-kui, died in a bizarre accident while taping a Japanese TV show.

He was messing with his mates for the cameras when a panel at the edge of an elevated stage collapsed, crashing him to the floor. Wong was only 31.

The same young man whose image was thrown onto the Jumbotron earlier is now projected by laser onto the silk. There Wong Ka-kui stands, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing a cut called Fighting War for 20 Years. His younger brother, bassist Wong Ka-keung, and his old friend Paul Wong join in from either side of the screen, and together the living and the dead belt out a real song full of real feelings.

The crowd hushes at the sight, and the girl next to me weeps. For a third straight time, I am willing to bet.

Charles Foran's latest novel is House on Fire.