Hong Kong English vinyl record covers

chopsticks sandra and amina, originally uploaded by HKpop.
We have been collecting English language records by Hong Kong artists for a few years and, if I remember rightly, it started out with a hunt for The Chopsticks. More on Sandra and Amina another time. This is just to celebrate finally getting all our vinyl record covers - around 120 of them - into a Flickr set. Special thanks to Sally for the scanning and Kaz for getting the files down to size.

Law Yim Hing - Tonight

Apart from tracking down English recordings and performances by Asian singers, we are also tracking down Cantonese and Mandarin versions of English songs. This is not so easy because the Chinese title doesn't usually give you much clue, and if you don't know the original English song, what do you do? Here's an easy one, Law Yim Hing singing a version of Tonight from West Side Story in a 1964 Cantonese movie Riches in Splendour. Law Yim Hing was a well-known Cantonese opera singer and I'd say it shows here.

I doubt this song was recorded other than in the film and the movie setting has her singing live on radio, which was also popular back in the days when people who enjoyed Cantonese songs mostly wouldn't have the income to buy records.

This is posted on YouTube by HongKongInThe50s who has put up lots of 50s and 60s Cantonese movie clips. What a guy! I could watch all day.

Hedgehog

I have been downloading music from emusic for a few years now and even though I have gone from unlimited downloads for US$10 a month to around 50 cents a track, I still think its a good deal for the music you find there. Not much good for Asian music, but I have just come across this excellent album by the Beijing band Hedgehog as well as albums by Carsick Cars, Sober and Queen Sea Big Shark. Noise Hit World is mostly English and I wonder if the title is namechecking Apples in Stereo's Fun Trick Noisemaker album, which gets its name from a Chinese toy?

Here's a nice interview with Hedgehog's drummer, Atom, and Li Qing from Car Sick Cars.

Bangkok vinyl

Tonchabab Vinyl Records, originally uploaded by HKpop.

On a trip to Bangkok last week, we had a fun time searching for Tonchabab Vinyl Records on 10 Boonsiri Road. He has a great collection of second hand vinyl in his shop both western and thai. We picked up some nice Hong Kong stuff there, including a lovely Mandarin/Spanish album by Mona Fong & Los Mensjeros del Paraguay. And as you see, the owner is a really nice guy.

The reason we had a fun time searching is that a friend of the owner has put the location on google earth, but unfortunately in the wrong place. I've posted up this picture in the right place, and you can also find it on yahoo map if you follow the photo into flickr. It's kind of the middle of nowhere but not far from Khaosan Road.

Kay Tse

The hedgehog adventurer is spending a lot of time compiling a list of English songs recorded by mainstream Hong Kong artists for our research (now around 3,000). Most are covers, but quite a few are written. This is The One and Only written by Lam Sze Chung for Kay Tse and included on her Kay One album in 2005. Kay Tse is one of the four big female singers in Hong Kong right now, together with Joey Yung, Miriam Yeung and Denise Ho. She is also a good example of how it is becoming more and more important for East Asian singers to speak English. Kay is a graduate in American Studies from Hong Kong University and everybody knows that!

Hocc x Paisley Wu

My last post mentioned Faith Yang's Falling Slowly. This is Hocc (that's 'ho-see-see', aka Denise Ho) and Paisley Wu singing California Dreaming and Falling Slowly on TV. As the hedgehog adventurer points out, the Hocc and Paisley version is better if only because they noticed that it is a duet. Not recorded as far as I know. Nice comment from jocelyng87 - 'luv it...hocc english soo good....胡蓓蔚 kinda so-so lol'.

Perfect day

This is not quite what it looks like. Perfect Day (Lou Reed) by Faith Yang ft. Eason Chan over a few minutes from the Japanese movie Taiyou no uta. Just to confuse things, the girl in video is not Faith, but J-pop star Yui who plays the lead in the movie. But I guess that's the kind of thing people do on YouTube.

This is from her Self-selected album of English covers released on Sony BMG in April, which definitely ups the ante for my-favourite-songs albums. Other tracks are Fake Plastic Trees (Radiohead), The Drugs Don't Work (The Verve), Halellujah (Leonard Cohen), 20th Century Boy (T-Rex), Diamonds Are Forever (Shirley Bassey), Falling Slowly (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova), Song 2 (Blur), The Scientist (Coldplay), After Hours (The Velvet Underground) and Miss Underwater, which is not a cover but a song written for her by Maximilian Hecker.

I think Lou Reed would like this version and he would like this badly recorded live version even more.