Where the Music Isn't Over

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2014

Travel

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SINGAPORE

Where the music isn’t over Singapore’s rock ‘n’ roll culture of the 1960s faded away—but the city is beginning to groove again

B Y K RISH R AGHAV ···························· he band on stage is wearing matching red striped pyjamas.

I’m standing in a tiny traditional Singaporean shophouse converted into a space for music gigs. Fifty people have somehow been crammed in here. It’s across the road from the Masjid Sultan, Singapore’s largest mosque. Between songs, you can hear the call for prayer. A big sign at the entrance says, “No Drugs, No Alcohol”. It’s about as un-rock-‘n’-roll as it gets. And yet…whoever said rock ‘n’ roll has to follow any rules?

I was there because I had seen some album covers.

Exhibit A: The Vampires, an all-women Mandarin rock band from the 1960s, posing in front of the Cavenagh Bridge that spans the Singapore River. In the background, the iconic clock tower of the Victoria Memorial Hall, now the National Gallery Singapore.

Exhibit B: A six-piece multiracial band, covering the spectrum of Singapore’s three major races—Chinese, Malay and Indian—wearing outrageous floral jackets, staring into the camera. Trousers so flamboyant that they glowed ethereally, as if emitting their own light. A wash of psychedelic colour in lieu of a background.

The images, part of a blogpost I had stumbled upon on a site called the Singapore 60’s Pop Music Hall of Fame, seemed disconnected from the contemporary Singapore I knew—straitjacketed, disciplined Singapore with its ruthless efficiency—complete with suits, high-rises and spanking

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clean streets. These images had a strange, jittery quality about them, as if they had landed from an alternate universe that surely couldn’t be a part of the same city that I was inhabiting.

The band on stage seems to share my thoughts. “We are The Pinholes!” the singer, Famie Suliman, shouts to the cheering crowd. “Chill out, relax…we’re taking you back to the 1960s!”

If you did point your time machine back to Singapore in the mid-1960s, you would find a city in the middle of a bona-fide psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll boom.

The dull office towers of Hill Street and North Bridge Road were scenester-central back then, filled with youngsters with Mosrite guitars in their hands and dreams of stardom in their eyes. The classifieds section of The Straits Times overflowed with concert listings—from qui-

TRIP PLANNER/SINGAPORE Flights to Singapore’s Changi Airport are available from most Indian cities. Round-trip fare starts at around R25,000.

MALAYSIA Pulau Ubin

SINGAPORE Toa Payoh

Bedok

Chinatown Jurong Semakau Island

Stay

Eat

Do

Singapore is a very tourist-oriented city, and almost all the major hotel chains are present there. For an offbeat experience, try The Sultan boutique hotel on Jalan Sultan street (thesultan.com.sg; tel. 65-67237101) in the middle of the Kampong Glam conservation area and close to all the major concert venues. Rooms with breakfast start at around SGD 200 (around R9,540) a night for double occupancy.

You can’t go wrong with food in Singapore. For some delicious traditional Malay Muslim food, head to the Hjh Maimunah restaurant on Jalan Pisang street or Warong Nasi Pariaman on North Bridge Road and queue up for some beef-rending (beef in rich, spicy coconut milk curry). Vegetarians have plenty of options at Fortune Centre on Middle Road—try Herbivore on Level 1, and get a very Singaporean Milo ice cream at Merely Ice Cream across the road on Bencoolen Street.

Most of Singapore’s indie music landmarks are concentrated in the city centre. Pink Noize, Lithe Paralogue, the Museum of Independent Music and Straits Records are all in the Kampong Glam conservation area. Hear Records is in nearby Bugis. For gig listings, visit www.bandwagon.sg. If you want to hear 1960s Singapore music, head to the free Esplanade library on Raffles Avenue, between 11am-9pm, and find the music section.

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AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

Groove: (clockwise from top, left) The Clans with Fatimah M. Amin; D’Starlights; a Saloma EP; The Dee­Tee’s EP; The Esquires’ 1961 line­up; and The Antartics’ album cover.

eter “tea dances” in the afternoon to raucous rock ‘n’ roll parties in the evening. The city was also the regional hub for all the big record labels—Philips, EMI, RCA—who sent scouts to local concerts to find the next big hits.

Those concerts must have sounded a bit like what I was hearing from The Pinholes —cheery, psychedelic music inflected with traditional Malay and Javanese rhythms. Jangly guitars, singalong choruses and a strong dose of rock ‘n’ roll theatrics filled the room. The genre is called “pop yeh yeh”, after the chorus of The Beatles’ song She Loves You. The scene, after growing and becoming a defining part of Singapore life, died a rather sudden death in the early 1970s, when a growing drug addiction problem led to a total ban on live music from 1972-77.

Psychedelic culture was deemed inconsistent with Singaporean values—the authorities even banned long hair. An apocryphal story goes that the members of British rock legends Led Zeppelin, who had played in Singapore earlier in the 1960s, were turned back at the Johor-Singapore border with Malaysia after they refused to cut their locks.

The 1960s, therefore, are tragically absent from local cultural memory. The history of Singa-

pore’s independent music, I realized, was a history of amnesia. Every discovery I made felt like a revelation, like uncovering a secret. I was driven by my own interest in finding connections between the independent underground music of countries across Asia, and Singapore in the 1960s seemed to be where many of these roads met.

Blog-posts led to YouTube playlists which led to compilation albums, and the trail led me to a thin volume at the Singapore National Library called Legends Of The Golden Venus. The book, by music journalist Joseph Pereira, was a history of Singapore bands in the 1960s centred around a single venue—The Golden Venus nightclub on Orchard Road. I took walks to the locations of the erstwhile dive bars and clubs that the book mentioned, discovering with a twinge of sadness that all these places—the Golden Venus, The Celestial Room, Tropicana—had given way to shopping malls and office buildings.

But once I found the rabbit hole—and once I knew that Singapore used to wear rose-tinted glasses and rock hard—I began to see signs of this past within the gleaming, modern cityscape. Psychedelic Singapore, I found, is alive and well, perhaps even seeing a resurgence.

I met Pereira, the foremost archivist of that era in Singapo-

rean music, and my guide into this rabbit hole. “Back then, Singapore was pop heaven,” he says. “We had a record-buying public, companies hungry for new talent, and more shows than you could ever attend.” In his “study” inside a modest 13th floor apartment, Pereira threw open a set of cabinet doors and pointed to his painstakingly acquired collection of vinyls and records. “Here they are,” he said. “The crown jewels”.

The jewels include some of the grooviest covers I’ve ever seen—from the psychedelic swirls of records by bands with names like The Cyclones and D’Starlights to gorgeous period photographs of fashion-conscious singers like Ahmad Jais and Rita Chao.

Pereira has also written three books on the Singapore 60s, with their own treasure trove of rare pictures and album covers from the era. He has collaborated with record labels to issue remasters and definitive editions of classic, sadly forgotten, bands like The Quests, and Naomi and the Boys.

Those CDs are available in a cluster of independent-minded record shops, like Straits Records in Bali Lane, or Hear Records on Bencoolen Street.

The dreadlocked Ridhwan, aka Wan Vegan, runs Straits Records, and is a regular presence at local shows. When I visited Hear, I heard strains of “pop yeh yeh” and saw crate diggers rifling through 50 years of Singaporean indie vinyls.

Both stores even do intimate inhouse concerts, getting disparate musicians to collaborate and jam. It’s this network that inspired The Pinholes, and their conscious throwback to 1960s’ sounds.

Blogs and zines like Other Sounds and music label Ujikaji

Records have taken over scouting and discovery duties— scouring YouTube videos and Bandcamp demos to find the next indie darling. I went to a Distro Day Out event at a local arts hub called The Substation, where music fans swapped cassettes and hand-printed zines.

In June every year, the durian-shaped Esplanade theatre hosts hundreds of local bands, new and old, for the annual Baybeats festival. At last year’s show, I saw the raucous crossgenerational crowd that turned up for a reunion show by Force Vomit, a 1960s-influenced 1990s rock band. When they brought out their biggest hit, Spacemen Over Malaysia, thousands sang along, and those rose-tinted glasses seemed to reappear over Singapore for the briefest of whiles.

This September, a group of record labels and studios got together to announce the opening of the Museum of Independent Music, a permanent archive of the community’s oral, and aural, history. At the launch concert, punk band Daily Ritual put its finger on why it was important to remember Singapore’s psychedelic history: “We should never forget,” they said, “that we once had a fierce belief in ourselves.”

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

While many gigs are adults only, the outdoor shows at the Esplanade theatre are geared towards families.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

While some venues may be claustrophobic and cramped, most can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

While gig goers are not prejudiced and there is a vibrant LGBT underground, homosexuality is illegal in Singapore.