Teresa Teng

In the 1980s, Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng's (Deng Lijun)songs were officially banned in China, but countless pirate cassettes were circulated. The saying went around that Deng Xiaoping ruled China by day, but Deng Lijun ruled by night. It seems that not much has changed. Apple Daily had a recent report on an internet poll asking which cultural icon has had the greatest influence on China since since 1949. 24 million voted and Teresa won with 8.5 million votes. Next came Faye Wong with 7.5 million, and in third place Jay Chou.

Teresa Teng sang in Mandarin and Cantonese, but also recorded songs in English, Japanese, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Vietnamese. The image is from a CD reissue of a selection of English and Japanese songs that originally came out in 1976.

Buying second hand vinyl in Hong Kong

Where would you go to buy second hand vinyl in Hong Kong? Where else but from Paul, who has far more than he can handle. And at last he has a card to show for it. Paul is a great character, speaks English and loves to talk about records. He reckons he has around 200,000 discs, which makes it a little bit difficult to browse. So give him a call, tell him what you want and see what happens. If you read Chinese, you can find more stores on the maps at HC Lee's Vinyl Paradise. But beware! It hasn't been updated for a while and some have closed down.

Japanese English Pop 4 - Betty Inada

A while back I wrote about Japanese-English bilingual songs in the early '50s. Here's one from further back still - Betty Inada singing Happy Days Are Here Again (1929) first in Japanese and then in English. Betty Inada was a nisei (second generation Japanese) who came over from San Francisco and was in on the start of the 1930s jazz boom. There were numerous bilingual recordings in the 1930s and I guess this was one of the first.

Singing in Spanish

I mentioned that the song on Rebecca Pan's new My dream, my way, my indie music CD that I can't out of my head is the pancakes version of Magica luna which she sings first in Spanish, then in English. In the CD booklet, she writes:

'I learnt Spanish many years ago. At one point I realized that I will never be able to speak Spanish well in my life because I found the tenses very difficult. But luckily, there are always beautiful Spanish songs in this world which we can sing, one of which is Magica luna.

Here is Moriyama Kayoko singing Magica luna in Japanese...

Rebecca Pan - My Dream, My Way, My Indie Music

This is probably going to be the most interesting HK album I hear this year. It isn't exactly by Rebecca Pan, but mainly tribute tracks from a bunch of local indie artists. When we met Rebecca two or three years ago, she didn't know about the indie acts singing in English. We also interviewed a few of the artists on the album and they didn't know about her. So it's nice to see them together because it creates a little bit of continuity in the music scene that wasn't there before. The hedgehog adventurer likes Ketchup's Solid Gold Rickshaw, Ga Yum Yan's, The Protest, and my little airport's I Wonder Why (actually, that is just P). I like the pancakes' Magica Luna, or at least it has got stuck in my head like a lot of her songs do.

The picture below is Rebecca signing the CD after her concert a week or so ago at the Sunbeam Theatre in North Point. PixelToy, Ketchup, Chet Lam, the pancakes, at17, p, and Eason Chan all appeared and Rebecca did a few numbers on her own. A lot of fun. So why is she signing on the stage? It seems the Sunbeam Theatre management wouldn't let her set up the table in the foyer, so as soon as she finished her encore, the curtains closed, up came the table and Rebecca sat down.

Japanese English pop 4 - RC Succession

Again from Carolyn Stevens' Japanese Popular Music, there is a story behind these covers of Summertime Blues and Love Me Tender. In 1988, RC Succession recorded an album called COVERS, which was intended for release by Toshiba-EMI on the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and included Japanese versions of American protest songs such as Blowing In The Wind and Eve Of Destruction. So why Summertime Blues and Love Me Tender? In their Japanese versions, both are transformed into protests against nuclear power plants. This didn't please Toshiba-EMI at all - Toshiba being involved in the construction of nuclear reactors - so the record was pulled just before it was due to come out. Released on Kitty Records instead, the album went straight to number one in the Oricon charts.

Japanese English Pop 3 - Kosaka Kazuya

Kosaka Kazuya's, Heartbreak Hotel came out hot on the heels of Elvis' version (January 1956) and was one of the big hits of 1956 in Japan.