Growing Up In Geylang: Head Tunes

You know how ditties are: once they get inside your head, they will grip never let go. It's what folks these days term an "earworm". I have a ditty which I have been singing since I was five or seven. It's in Cantonese and is about a man who one day, while having satay along Beach Road, thought he saw an old flame and decided to approach her. He then got beaten up by her male companions and even lost his job over the incident. He also recounted how he and this girl named Molly first met and fell in love. The war then came and they lost touch with one another afterwards.

Surprisingly, this ditty did not come from Hong Kong which for a time was very caught up with playful and parody tunes. Cheng Kwan Yin (Min) was the king of this period. He was comparable to the fame of Weird Al Jankovic in the 80s (well, at least in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia).

Cheng's songs were not just about funny lyrics set to a popular tune - they were also about witty conversations between two people... Why Cheng often sang with a partner, usually female. These conversations could be about anything under the sun. A famous one was about getting a treat of roast duck from a friend (which later became a song about fat ladies learning to play football in a hotel and then falling into a river). Or about why a couple should go to a teahouse for tea and a dance. There's even a song about having a salted-egg (ham tan) meal!

These light-hearted tunes first appeared in the late 50s and early 60s and quite a few had Cha-Cha and Ah-Go-Go rhythms with them. For a kid, tunes with such funny lyrics like Body Full of Ants (Cantonese, chow sun ai) or Please Walk Faster (hang fai di ler wei) were hilarious and offered countless hours of priceless repeat singing and play-acting.

I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that this particular Cantonese ditty in my head all these years was not actually from Hong Kong but Singapore.

When I again set eyes on that album cover (with the National Theatre icon as backdrop no less) after so many decades, I was immediately taken back to those lazy Sunday or Saturday afternoons when my mom or dad would put on a record or two. We had a record player that was set in a cabinet. It also had a built-in radio. (See pics below)

The cabinet was of two levels: Two sliding panels on top, and a pull-down door below. It was longish and low and had those short slim round legs that pointed out and capped with brass - a very typical design feature in those days to protect the wooden legs from mopwater on the floor. It was all very typical '60s design that was part classic, sedustive, and rather full of swanky attitude with its tin-strip trims at the edges. I still am enamoured with such furniture today. They really break the boxy designs of today's unimaginative pieces.

That unforgettable tune I mentioned earlier had a title. It was called Tam Sha Lei, the nickname of the character in the song. The other indelible song in my head was Hawaii Five-O. "Tat tat tat tat da daa...tat tat tat tat tat daa...." As a kid, Jack Lord's suaveness was what I aspired to. Growing up, I never did forget this tune nor Lord's 'curry-puff' hairdo. (Aren't you glad that there is now a brand new Hawaii Five-O series? You can watch it with your grand-kids and when they become old, they can also think back to the time they spent with you humming that irresistible theme music like you did when you were young with your parents!)

Some other records we played frequently were Russ Hamilton's We Will Make Love, Skeeter Davis's End of the World, Elvis Priestly's Blue Hawaii. A Mandarin record that held a special place in our hearts was Xiao Bai Chuan or Little White Boat. It had that classic song Ma Ma Hao or Mother is Best. Like the rest, Xiao Bai Chuan was a 45 rpm record. Only Presley's a 33 rpm because he simply had too many songs.

Quite a few Chinese singers also crossed over to sing in English, at times simply replacing the words in Mandarin with English. One particular creation went like this:

To you I have a thing called Love.
It is always in my heart.
I recall I fell in love when we met I knew...
But why did you keep ignoring me,
Makes me feel that I'm so alone.

My love for you is true that I know,
Please don't make me feel blue.

Another one was:

All pretty flowers bloom in the month of Spring
And by the riverside we see lovers stroll
Under the tree they sat and kissed,
You and I are in the Wonderland of Love.

Think of the love we gave
when we're all in love
My love is true that I know
But you changed your mind
You found a new sweetheart
Oh, oh, no I'm not what I was before
Oh, oh, no I'm not what I was before

I think the above two songs worked very well as transplanted creations (not an easy thing to do). People have tried it with Cantonese opera with disastrous results!

There were also a few international English hits that got inside our heads. Two in particular: Butterfly and Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Apparently Butterfly was a song made famous by Danyel Gerard in the 70s but got rewritten and sung by Jim Ed Brown. Here's the one from my childhood:

You are bright as a night full of moon

Butterfly you have left much to soon

You have found you have wings and now you wish to fly

Please don't go, oh please don't say good bye.

Butterfly, my Butterfly now I know you must be free