Canto-Rock coined in 1979

Canto-Rock, the new idiom in pop music

After years of unsuccessfully attempting to duplicate the Top of Pops of the Western World, Hongkong music makers have finally put aside their copier machines for musical inspiration, musical muscle and, perhaps more importantly, musical identity.

All this searching has resulted in Canto-Rock, a best-of-both-worlds musical concoction, the ingredients for success being colloquial Cantonese lyrics sung over a grinding, Anglo-American-Influenced hard-rock instrumental backdrop.

Canto-Rock began to roll into action in 1974 when singer-songwriter-actor Sam Hui recorded the soundtrack album to Games Gamblers Play, a film in which he co-starred together with his elder brother Michael.

Prior to the release of the album, Hui had seemed content to follow a safe-as-milk recording approach, churning out innocuous albums in English that lacked originality, credibility and commercial success. The singer seemd lost in a sea of confusion, scratching the surface of second generation rhythm and blues, touching on mild-mannered Top Forty hits, flirting with middle-of-the-road sentimentality, everything eventually dissolving into a musical deadend.

But on Gamblers, the artist changed direction, shuffled a full deck of new ideas and camp up trumps, drawing on Western pop and rock rhythms, marring them with potent Cantonese lyrics that reached out and grabbed the local masses between the ears.

Apart from his own compositions, Hui also turned to songwriters such as Paul Simon and Lobo for melodic support.

To the tune of Simon's neo-reggae-in-spired Mother And Child Reunion, for instance, he tackled the then-topical subject concerning water-rationing, whereas the white-on-white purity of Lobo's I'd Love You To Want Me was turned into soft-core blue moves.

"Before the release of Games Gamblers Play, all Chinese recordings had a typical, conventional type of instrumental backing - guitars playing a few simple chords, drums that could barely be heard whereas the lyrics only dealt with love," explains Norman Cheng, head of operations in Southeast Asia for Polydor, the label Hui records under. "Sam changed all that. He sang about everyday life in Hongkong, about what people here like and about what they don't like over a rock beat. It was an enormous musical breakthrough." 

Games Gamblers Play rocked and rolled and reeled in triple-platinum dividends, having to date sold more than 200,000 units in Southeast Asia.

Hui has released four Canto-Rock albums since Gamblers, the most successful of these being last year's soundtrack to yet another Hui borhters film, The Contract. To date The Contract has sold more than 500,000 units in the region, making it the largest selling album in the history of the Southeast Asian recording industry.

But possibly his most interesting recording has been the 1977 release Here Comes Fortune, an album featuring a wild, wacky choice of material. Hui, for instance, unravelled the scrambled intracies of mahjong playing to the tune of the current disco smash A Little Bit of Soap then employed Don't Be Cruel, once a hit for Elvis Presley, as the backdrop to a song revolving around a popular Chinese dish in wintertime known as "Monks jumping over the wall."

This April, Hui released his most controversial recording to date, a Canto-Rock version of the old Bill Haley classic, Rock Around The Clock, a song that dealt with inflation and the "problems" of being a Hongkong-born Chinese, the lyrics screaming out the message, "If your face is yellow, you won't have much power/If I had only known that earlier I would have been born a Britisher/At least I would have a home to return to." 

Although he jokingly refers to himself as "the Chinese answer to Bob Dylan," Hui with his increasingly more politically-pointed lyrical jabs, is gradually emerging as the musical spokesman, social chronicler for Hongkong's young and restless, his music now also reaching millions of Chinese overseas.

In fact, Norman Cheng calls Hui "the best-known Chinese recording artist in the world today."

"Sam's records are selling very well in Chinatowns in even America and Canada," says Cheng.

"He is also a movie star, which means that he is very much in demand by promotors around the world. In fact, he has been approached to tour the States for quite some time now. In the past, we always felt that he wasn't ready for a tour of that scale. But now I think he has had enough success in this part of the world to gradually concentrate on breaking into other markets."

In January of this year, Hui, and his long-time backup band the Lotus, took Canto-Rock to the heartbeat of Canada, performing at sell-out concerts in Vancouver and Toronto.

Then, as if to prove that Canto-Rock has no geographical boundaries and no language barriers, the theme song from the 1975 Hui Brothers film, Private Eyes, began to gain widespread popularity in Japan.

Titled Mr Book specifically for the lucrative Japanese market, the recording has sold over 500,000 units in that country, the achievement somewhat underscored by the fact that Hui's Cantonese recording was competing for chart honours with two local versions of the same song.

Hui followed up the success of Mr Boo with the equally popular theme song from The Contract. And in a recent marketing move, a full-scale promotional push was planned for the artiste that capitalised upon his recent participation in this year's Tokyo Music Festival.

Hui, the first artiste from Hongkong invited to perform at the increasingly prestigious musical event (others invited included international acts such as Rita Coolidge, Sergio Mendes and Brasil 88, Al Jarreau and A Taste Of Honey) used the Festival as the launching pad to introduce his third single release in Japan.

Titled You Make Me Shine and co-written by Hui and American songwriter Casey Rankin, the record features the artist singing in both English and Cantonese, the session having been produced in Hongkong by highly-respected Japanese producer, Robby Ward.

According to Ward, Shine has all the necessary commercial ingredients to become a million-seller and establish Hui as one of Japan's most popular international artists.

Spurred by Hui's success with Canto-Rock, Polydor in Hongkong recently announced plans to record almost its entire local talent roster in Cantonese.

"It seems the logical step to take," says Cheng. "Whereas in the past Cantonese albums outsold English albums by two to one, in the last 16 months this ratio has stretched to as much as four to one."

Among the label's newer Cantonese releases was the debut solo album from Alan Tam, lead singer with the Wynners, one of the most popular groups in Southeast Asia who have made a name for themselves with their English recordings.

The album, produced by John Herbert, who once worked with bands such as Boney M and SIlver Convention in Germany, included Cantonese versions of Billy Joel's My Life, the Bee Gees' Too Much Heaven, Let Your Love Flow and I Was Made For Dancing (a recent hit fo weenybopper idol, Leif Garret) plus originals by Cantonese writers James Wong and Joseph Koo. The material showed Tam to be moving away from Hui's brash, hard-rock sound, sprinkling his material with brass arrangements and synthesiser work that gave the album an almost Canto-disco flavour.

As Tam explained, "Sam (Hui) opened the door for us as far as recording Cantonese music is concered. And now that he has opened that door, it would be a total wast of energy if we didn't explore other musical avenues, begin experimenting with new sounds and develop Canto-Rock even further."

Lam, another singer who only recently made the transition from recording in English to recording in Cantonese, is also beginning to chart a new course for this increasingly interesting musical hybrid.

Having first made a name for himself with his Paul McCartney-Paul Simon-influenced English recordings, Lam was about to begin work on an English album of his own material when the Canto-Rock bandwagon rolled his way. The artist jumped on for the ride.

The result was The Money Trip, an album obviously moddled after Hui's Games Gamblers Play and featuring Canto-Rock versions of Boney M's Rivers of Babylon, Mandy, Jim Croce's I'd Have To Say I Love You In A Song and Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music.

Lam describes the album as something of a "cop-out," a contrived effort to attain commercial success, artistically unsatisfactory since he feels it was devoid of any emotional content.

With his soon-to-be-released follow-up album, Passenger, however, all that has changed, he says, commerciality being replaced by originality, and brass, synthesisers and marmonies taking the place of the hard guitar-oriented sound that dominated The Money Trip.

Containing Cantonese versions of Little River Band's Long, Long Way and original material, Passenger features exciting jazz-tinged keyboard work and arrangements by Filipino musician Chris Babida, pumping-iron bass lines and high-flying Eagles-type harmonies.

"What missed most of all with The Money Trip were the lack of opportunities to experiment with different vocal harmonies, something I'm very fond of doing and some thing I always attempted on my English recordings," says Lam.

"Because of the necessity for clearly-defined inflections of Cantonese words, adding harmonies to songs is a very difficult, time-consuming, sometimes impossible task. But on Passenger, I believe we've succeeded in getting around this problem.

"On Long, Long Way, for instance, the recording features triple-tracked harmonies. What I am particularly pleased about is that with this album, I believe we have stumbled upon the perfect blend of Cantonese and sophisticated Western popular music. I guess you could call it Canto-jazz-rock."

If Lam is the prime mover behind a more sophisticated approach to Canto-Rock, Big A take this music genre back to the basics, screaming out his risque, hard-core lyrics in a gin-soaked voice reminiscent of Rod Stewart at his most rough, tough, street-wise level.

On his first album for CBS Sony, the artist tackled the rituals of Chai Mui, the Chinese drinking game whereas Buttons and Bows, once a hit for Doris Day, was transformed into a song about alcoholism, called in Chinese, I'm Not Drunk.

Also making their presence felt today are artists like Roman Tam, a flamboyant personality who has been described as a Chinese version of Liberace, Paula Tsui and Adam Cheng, all of whom are providing Chinese record buyers with an alternative to rauchy Canto-Rock by recording saccharine-soaked sentimentality, strings taking the place of guitars, brass taking the place of do-wops Man-Yee-Lo-style Canto-Pop, if you like.

As for Sam Hui, the person who renewed this interest in Cantonese music almost overnight, well, he's too busy to be worried about any competition.

"I'm changing all the time as far as my recordings are concerned," he says. "I always make a survey of the market before I record an album, listen to all the Cantonese songs released at that particular time and then look for areas I can improve on. This whole Canto-Rock thing is still so new to me. I feel that we can still do a great deal more with it. Which is why I experimented with instruments like the pipa, the tsang and even Chinese flutest on The Contract. As for my new album, I think it will be more politically aware, lyrically, than my previous recordings. There's a song on it for instance, called Where Is My Home? which is about a young guy contemplating the insecurities of living in an ever-changing city like Hongkong. What will never change however is my music. It will always be about what I care the most ... and that is Hongkong and its people."

Hans Ebert, "Canto-Rock, the new idiom in pop music," South China Morning Post, 4 Nov 1979, p. 16.