OR A NOT-SO-SILENT NIGHT: MY SWAN SONG AS SANTA CLAUS AT THE TOP TEN DISCO IN SINGAPORE.
A Not-So-Silent Night: My Swan Song as Santa Claus
Exactly thirty-five years ago, at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve, I made my final appearance as Santa Claus at Singapore’s legendary Top Ten nightclub. It was the end of an illustrious—and increasingly ridiculous—four-year run.
Allow me to take you on one last sleigh ride through the escalating madness that led to that night.
Year One: Politically Correct Santa (Sort Of)
In 1987, Peter Bader, the Top Ten’s owner, made me an offer I didn’t know I’d end up regretting with my spinal column.
“Be our Santa,” he said.
My first outing as the jolly fat man was fairly traditional: Ho-ho-ho’s, hearty belly laughs, the usual “Merr-rrrry Christmas, Singapore!” The crowd got what they expected—at first.
Then my special guest appeared: a young Singaporean Indian man in a crisp People’s Action Party whites and a mask of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. He strolled onto the stage, solemn as a cabinet meeting, and perched on my lap.
From my sack of seasonal surprises, I pulled out his gift: a Singapore edition of Monopoly. It was my gentle nod to the PAP’s long-standing dominance—satire-lite: enough to make people chuckle, not enough to get me quietly deported.
Year Two: Santa Goes Tropo
By 1988, it was clear the character needed, shall we say, development.
I decided it was time to loosen Santa’s belt—figuratively and literally.
That year, Santa was ambushed onstage by a squad of scantily clad “reindeer” dancers. With theatrical outrage, they stripped him down layer by layer until the audience was confronted with a more climate-appropriate version of Saint Nick: a saggy old man’s bathing suit, Santa-style.
If the North Pole was freezing, the Top Ten that night was positively equatorial. You could almost hear Rudolph demanding hazard pay.
Year Three: Santa’s Naughty Secret
By 1989, subtlety was officially dead.
I went for broke.
Once again, the reindeer descended on Santa and began their familiar disrobing routine. This time, the audience discovered that underneath the traditional suit, Santa had been harboring a scandalous secret.
Out came the garter belt. Then the fishnet stockings. Then a massive bra, generously stuffed to Kris Kringle capacity. In his hand, the pièce de résistance: a whip.
As Madonna’s sultry “Santa Baby” purred through the speakers, I transformed from Father Christmas into something more like Mrs. Claus’s unhinged alter ego. For added realism, a friend had sewn me a skin-colored under-suit that could be padded with pillows, allowing this decidedly non-fat performer to become a pleasantly plump cross-dressing Santa in full off-season bloom.
One might say that by then, the Top Ten’s Santa tradition was already teetering on the brink of the absurd. But the brink, it turned out, was still a long way from the edge I was heading toward.
Year Four: Satanic Santa
As Christmas 1990 approached, several things conspired to push me over that edge.
First, I had decided to leave Singapore in early January 1991. A documentary on the Peruvian city of Iquitos had lodged itself in my imagination. Described as the “Venice of the Amazon,” Iquitos had once rivaled Manaus during the rubber boom. It boasted its own opera house, tropical decadence included. Then the rubber industry collapsed, undercut by Malayan rubber, and Iquitos faded into semi-mythic obscurity—just the sort of place to tempt a restless soul.
It was also where Werner Herzog had filmed Fitzcarraldo, about a man dragging a steamship over a mountain in pursuit of his opera dreams. How could I resist?
So the plan was set: I would leave Singapore, fly west via South Africa to visit old friends, then continue to Brazil and travel up the Amazon to Iquitos.
Knowing this would be my farewell appearance at the Top Ten, I wanted to make it unforgettable. The kindly old man in red, I decided, deserved a devilish final act.
My concept: Santa was actually the devil in disguise.
There was, however, one rather substantial problem.
Two weeks before Christmas, in a misguided attempt to karate chop through a teak door, I badly fractured my hand. Three pins were inserted to hold the bones together, and the whole contraption was encased in a sturdy fiberglass cast.
This orthopedic inconvenience posed a serious challenge to the spectacle I had in mind. But I was determined that nothing—even my own skeletal integrity—would stand between me and the ultimate Christmas Eve production. After all, the show must go on, especially when it really, really shouldn’t.
The Grand Design
In my head, the show played out like a twisted Christmas special directed by Terry Gilliam.
At midnight, a thin, shadowy figure would shuffle onstage. With his back to the audience, he would inflate into Santa’s familiar girth using a small tank of compressed air hidden in his sack and a concealed inner tube around his waist.
Meanwhile, the band would launch into a warped version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” that would morph into a heavy rap beat, underpinning a refrain of “You better not… you better not…”—the hook for the satirical Santa rap I’d been writing.
Satanic Santa
As Santa rapped about commercial excess and spiritual bankruptcy, he would commit increasingly un-Santa-like acts: pulling a shotgun from his sack, firing at helium-filled reindeer-shaped balloons, and blasting them out of the air as they drifted above the crowd.
At no point in this creative fever dream did I seriously consider what kind of impact this might have on people who had simply come out hoping for a bit of Christmas cheer and maybe a slow dance under the disco ball.
The climax would reveal the truth.
The band’s lead singer—an attractive young Filipina—would become so disturbed by Santa’s aberrant behavior that she’d hurl herself at him, tearing off his hat and wig to reveal a pair of devil’s horns. The band members would close in, and Santa, now revealed as Satan, would fight them off with a pitchfork drawn from his sack while backing toward the rear of the stage.
At that point, I would secretly hook myself to a flying rig installed that afternoon: essentially a clothesline-thick wire stretched from the stage to the rafters, threaded through pulleys to the wings where two or three strong men were supposed to haul me skyward.
Attached to the wire was a shackle that would clip onto a hook protruding through the back of my Santa suit. The hook belonged to a windsurfing harness I wore backwards under the costume.
In a proper theatre, this sort of thing is handled by a fly system with counterweights and brakes.
We, alas, had none of that.
The idea was simple: the devil-in-disguise would flee his attackers by flying out over the dance floor, hovering above the startled masses before being dragged back down and theatrically “destroyed.” It was ambitious, dangerous, and entirely dependent on one detail.
Which is precisely where things went gloriously wrong.
The Muscle Problem
Top Ten owner Peter Bader, who had promised to recruit the muscle for this stunt, either forgot or was the victim of Singapore’s first sudden gym shortage.
Moments before showtime, instead of two burly weightlifters, he presented me with three of the scrawniest Chinese boys you could hope to find outside a noodle factory. Their combined weight roughly equaled my left leg, minus the shoe.
There was no time to find replacements. Faced with the prospect of cancelling the climactic flight, I improvised.
“Don’t try to lift me,” I told them. “Just take up the slack when I hook on, then hold on.”
That last phrase would prove unnecessarily optimistic.
Showtime
DJ Moe Alkoff stepped up to the microphone and announced to the packed dance floor that Santa himself was about to make a surprise visit. The band crashed in, and the show began.
The inflation gag worked perfectly: a thin silhouette blossomed into Santa’s rotund outline in seconds.
The rap kicked in, delivering its tongue-in-cheek sermon on the commercialization of Christmas—“all you shopkeepers get down on your kneeses, it’s time to acknowledge the baby Jesus…”—while I blasted inflatable reindeer from the air, planting suspicion that this might not be your average North Pole visitor.
Then came the confrontation. The Filipina lead singer attacked, tearing off Santa’s hat and wig to reveal the red horns. The band surged toward me as I waved my pitchfork, backing up onto the elevated drummer’s platform and groping for the wire.
Up to this point, the show had followed its dramatic arc with unnerving precision. Which meant, by the principles of the universe and Murphy’s Law, there was only one direction left to go.
The Flight From Hell
Trying not to picture three skinny boys being yanked through the pulleys like dumplings on a string, I clipped the shackle onto the hook of my harness. The fiberglass cast on my right arm had been trimmed down to a Michael Jackson-style glove earlier that day, sacrificing medical protection for finger dexterity.
Without pausing for second thoughts—I knew hesitation would be fatal—I hurled myself off the platform.
I expected to plummet headfirst onto the dance floor. Instead, to my astonishment, the boys held.
I swooped down just inches above the stage lights and sailed out over the heads of the crowd like a demented Christmas airship. The audience stared up, stunned, as Satanic Santa arced through the smoky air.
It was as I reached the far end of the swing that a new realization dawned: what goes out must come back.
I spun to face the stage and saw the drummer directly in my path. At the time, SCUD missiles were dominating news coverage of the Gulf War, and I understood exactly how they felt. I was a Santa-shaped projectile on a collision course.
Picking up speed, I slammed into the Perspex shield in front of the drum kit with bone-rattling force. The strobe lights erupted into blinding fury, freezing the chaos into disjointed frames.
Miraculously, the drummer never missed a beat. To this day, his composure stands as a shining example of Filipino band professionalism in the face of demonic aerial assault.
The impact, however, shifted my harness. I found myself dangling upside down, slowly spinning, unable to reach the stage with my outstretched arms.
Strobes, Stabbing, and Slow Motion
The drummer seized the moment and launched into a pounding, “Wipeout”-style solo, while the strobes transformed the scene into a jittering, black-and-white nightmare.
Because we’d never rehearsed this part, the three boys in the wings had no idea they were supposed to lower me. Their instincts, understandably, told them to hang on for dear life.
So there I hung, an inverted Satanic Santa, as the band members swarmed. They began stabbing frantically at my inflated midsection with the small knives I’d provided to puncture the inner tube and deflate me.
Their enthusiasm may have been just a touch over the top. One suspects that the ferocity that felled Magellan in 1521 still lurks not far beneath the surface of today’s outwardly easy-going Filipinos.
From the audience’s perspective, things must have slipped beyond comprehension: they had just watched a pitchfork-wielding Santa swoop over their heads, crash into the drum kit, then dangle upside-down while a mob hacked at him in a frenzy of flashing lights and thunderous drums.
I doubt many of them connected it to any coherent critique of consumer culture. Most were probably vowing quietly never again to spend Christmas Eve outside the safety of a living room.
Vanishing Act
Eventually, in a final Herculean heave, I managed to haul myself down enough to unhook from the harness and crawl offstage on hands and knees. At that exact moment, the strobes cut out and the lighting returned to normal.
To the audience, whose pupils hadn’t yet adjusted, it must have seemed as though Satanic Santa had simply evaporated.
Then, from the darkness, a disembodied voice à la Vincent Price floated through the club—my improvised Twilight Zone-style warning about false Santas and the dangers of greed.
The exact wording is lost to memory, but the gist was clear:
when people get greedy, Satan evens the score.
A moment later, the band slid gracefully into John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” as if nothing particularly unusual had just happened.
Exit, Pursued by Fate
Two weeks later, I was landing in Mauritius for a brief stopover before continuing to a newly post-apartheid South Africa, eager to compare the new era with the grim years I had known under the verkrampte National Party rule of old Jan Vorster.
I had no idea that my arrival there would launch a three-year odyssey that would test my survival skills as severely as any theatrical stunt, before I eventually found my way back to Singapore and the Top Ten.
The Satanic Santa Show taught me something that life has continued to prove: you can try to live as though you’re following a carefully written script, but circumstances will always conspire to send everything sideways. The real challenge is learning how to get yourself back onstage after you’ve been left dangling upside-down in the dark.
Stay tuned. There are more tales to come from a life lived with minimal regard for social conformity or conventional thinking:
- Dangerous encounters inspired by the dubious wisdom of Friedrich Nietzsche.
- A thousand and one miracles in the pursuit of improbable dreams.
- Snakes, scorpions and centipedes: a field guide to ill-advised adventures.
- Embracing the Phoenix—renewal, resurrection, and hope.
And much more, from funny to philosophical, suspenseful to sentimental, insightful to inexplicable.
In the meantime, if you ever find yourself in a crowded nightclub on Christmas Eve and the Santa onstage suddenly pulls out a shotgun and an air hose, my advice is simple.
Duck.
Now, enjoy The Satanic Santa Show song. https://youtu.be/kQ446KI0pHU
hughchi 