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...