This is the 83rd instalment in a biweekly series profiling major Hong Kong pop culture figures of recent decades.Long before he packed out the Hong Kong Coliseum for his 40th-anniversary Get Up concerts last October, Alex To Tak-wai was busy changing the fundamental rhythm of the city’s pop music.Emerging from the nightclub circuit in the mid-1980s with a kinetic, Michael Jackson-inspired stage presence, To eschewed the standard ballads of his contemporaries to introduce R&B and Western funk to mainstream Cantopop.Today, at 64 – though his age-defying appearance suggests otherwise – he remains one of the industry’s most enduring and unpredictable figures, having navigated shifting musical trends, high-profile scandals and a recent, critically acclaimed pivot to dramatic acting.Musical royalty and the Michael Jackson connectionBorn in Hong Kong in 1962 and raised partly in Malaysia, To comes from musical royalty: his mother, Chang Loo, reigned as Shanghai’s legendary Queen of Chinese Song in the 1950s and 60s, while his father, Ollie Delfino, was a prominent Filipino jazz drummer and music director.Alex To at an interview with the SCMP in 1987. Photo: SCMP