The Hong Kong Musical Two-Step Cha Cha
Hong Kong has never been known for original music nor a particular sound. This is something to think about these days when there’s almost a roaring silence running throughout a city that once never slept.
Music has the power to change so many things which, I believe, we have not looked after in the way that it deserves and are now paying the price for this. A city without good ‘live’ is something like that old Gene Pitney song about a town without pity.
Though having created the term Canto, this was for a news story when writing for Billboard, the leading American music trade publication. Sam Hui fused what was basically Western pop music chords and structures with Cantonese lyrics written primarily by Peter Lai, who recently passed away.
Their songs really captured the mood and interests of Hong Kong Chinese people and was a huge departure from Western popular music, especially the new British beat boom and the fashion and thinking it brought with it.
It was something foreign to them, but we needed this balance and which is very much missing today. It’s this balance that made Hong Kong an international city and gave it a unique sense of style and a fabulously interesting English speaking Chinese city, especially because of the songs played on the radio and the popularity of karaoke.
As for Sam Hui, he was always clever when it came to knowing what local audiences liked, and something that me and my best friend Steve Tebbutt, below, second from left, recognised when we were in school and just getting into seeing what we might be able to do in music by forming our first bands.
Steve was an exceptional musician, and though his instrument of choice were the drums, he could play anything he picked up and was writing original music that belied his 14-15 years.
Despite being the younger of two sons to a wonderfully nice parents and enjoying a pretty privileged lifestyle, Steve marched to the beat of his own drum.
While elder brother Tony was academically gifted and an accomplished sportsman, Steve led a rather nocturnal life on the wild side comprising being with more experienced girls and frequenting the handful of bars and clubs with groups providing ‘live’ music. Steve often sat in with them because they recognised that this kid was an exceptional talent.
As his best friend and whose band I joined as a replacement, I was something of his unofficial cheerleader who was happy getting to know friends of the older girls he was attracting. These included certain Australian and Canadian showgirls who did tricks on the side and was something accepted during those times.
It’s quite a feat that we actually attended school, because Steve and I were discovering a life well away from the rules of KGV secondary school and where we were forced to do things like dissect rabbits and frogs for biology lessons and take up lessons in woodwork and running marathons. We preferred to drop acid.
The Swinging Sixties had swung by Hong Kong and the local bands were okay and living was easy and fun with pop concerts and headline acts like the Beatles, the Kinks, Manfred Mann etc.
Steve had I had got to know Sam Hui before all this “swinging” happened and when he was the bassist with a group called Bar Six, the resident group at the Firecracker Bar of the Hyatt Regency.
Before Sam broke into the consciousness of young pop fans as the lead singer with the Lotus, Steve was already talking about forming a group with him.
He saw something in Sam that no one else had and was suddenly playing guitar, was growing his Afro out and listening to Bob Dylan. He wasn’t very interested in the British Beat Boom and was writing his own songs- Country influenced songs that held some powerful juju for him.
Sam’s star was in an upward trajectory. He was a television star with his brother Michael and then a pop star who graduated into being one third of the uber popular Hui brothers and their enjoyably formulaic brand of movies that were part Marx Brothers and part “The Sting”.
Steve fell into playing with some pretty good professional bands at venues like the Den at the Hong Kong Hilton, and whenever we would talk, it was clear that he had outgrown Hong Kong, but was lost as to where he wanted to go next.
I saw him when he was playing professionally in Tokyo and then Honolulu, but his mind was busy wandering until he decided to accidentally check out. I never saw Steve growing old, so him leaving this world didn’t surprise me that much.
By this time, I was married and had started writing songs for Sam, the Wynners, Hong Kong’s champion sprinter Silent Witness, Jacky Cheung, McDonald’s, STARTV and was soon making my mark together with Norman Cheng heading up the Regional offices of Universal Music and EMI.
As for Canto Pop, it had become a big bloated business model where style trumped over substance and many have become very rich off it, especially those in the concert business and where concerts often became extremely long and extravagantly tacky HKTVB variety shows.
When Norman had Jacky Cheung, the most popular Chinese singer on the planet, record his latest single in Mandarin, it was the perfect song and with the perfect accompanying music video.
Mando Pop came into play and the humongous China music market opened up along with massive touring opportunities for Hong Kong artists like Faye Wong, below, and Andy Lau.
Faye was fabulous in practically every department and could have been anything, and became the diva who she still is having won over audiences with her Chinese versions of hits by artists like the Cranberries and being heavily influenced by the creative freedom of Bjork.
I remain a huge fan and supporter of whatever the hell Faye does.
When I persuaded the Danish pop group Michael Learns To Rock to record an English version of that first Mandarin hit for Jacky Cheung, and saw how hugely popular this became, especially through marketing hits via the karaoke market, Norman and I knew that we had created a business model for International acts.
It didn’t take long for classical crossover artist Maksim from Croatia, BOND and a few others labelled “crossover” started touring China regularly and building fan bases and attracting sponsors.
We had some commercial success internationally with a visually appealing group known as the 12 Girls Band from China, but none of this was leading to an original Hong Kong or Chinese sound other than an erhu whining away in the background.
My late friend Morton Wilson from Schtung Music probably came closest to capturing something truly Chinese when he scoured the Pathe music library in Shanghai and brought to us at EMI the original recordings by the Shanghai Divas that his team had Remixed.
Though extremely stylish, as were the Chinese and Bollywood remixes of tracks that Morton I worked on by David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Placebo, Gorillaz and a few others, none of these recordings led to where I wanted them to go.
Perhaps this had to do with the lack of support from head office, or our thinking being stymied by working too closely with people like MTV and, at least for those from this part of the world trying to be Western when we were not?
Perhaps it was the times?
The thing is that like everything else in life, times change and the one constant about music from anywhere in the world is that it’s built around storytelling.
There are the song and dance stories from today and yesterday and fascinating backstories about how these came together and with all those different characters involved.
The above is only part of my story about the role music played in my life and how everything seemed to fall into some place whether I liked it or not.
Chatting recently with Norman about those days and what we did and how we perhaps could have done better, we both came to the realisation that the less we question what we did, the better.
Everything that happened was for a reason. We were extremely successful in what we did and often tend to be our harshest critics.
We also forget that the central character in our stories was and always is the Music. This is the heartbeat of our story and these stories often write themselves through the inner you…
It’s about preserving these stories and how we present them to at least two generations who might hear something that we never did the first time around.
As for Hong Kong and music- ‘live’ or recorded or streamed- this has me stumped as I don’t see The New- audiences and performers
And if EVERYTHING is old, how does one make things new again?
There just might be an answer around the corner: SpotiFLY.
Wow! You’ve been very busy! Well done!