Back in the late 1980s Cantopop reigned supreme in Hong Kong and one of the most popular bands on the scene were City Beat. But there was just one unusual thing about these Cantorockers…their lead singer John Laudon wasn’t Cantonese and although he speaks fluently now, at the time he sang Cantonese better than he spoke it. City Beat made four albums between 1988 and 1991. The other band members moved on, John stayed composing Cantopop, working with his church and more recently recording Christian music. We interviewed John in his home studio in Tai Po…
What brought you to Hong Kong?
I came in 1984 when I was 21 years old. Back home I was apprenticing as an electrician and I was playing in a band with friends just for fun. I came here initially to do volunteer work with Youth With A Mission (YWAM). At first I was in Singapore. After about half a year Daryl Ching 陳華添 , who was working for YWAM in Hong Kong, came over to Singapore and suggested we put together a band. The drummer, Jym Kay, was already here. Initially it was just three of us. Jerry Marshall, the bass player, was working for YWAM in Japan came over later. We originally started by playing instrumental jazz because none of us really wanted to sing. The band was called Zoe, and Kenny Jackson sometimes joined on saxophone and vocals.I ended up being the singer by default because I could play and sing at the same time.
And two years later you were singing at the Carlsberg Pop Music Festival Competition?
At that time there were still only three of us. I was playing the bass on keyboards and singing at the same time. Actually we wanted to find a way to get into schools and prisons and share our message. A lot of it was just positive stuff, it wasn’t a full on ‘get saved today’ kind of thing. It was more stay out of drugs, stay out of the triads. But it was quite hard for us to get anywhere, because we were just so different. We were singing in English and when we did concerts we would have a translator, because we’d talk a little bit about ourselves and our backgrounds, introduce the songs, and that would be translated into Chinese. None of us spoke Chinese at that time. The Carlsberg Pop Music Festival in 1986 was a progression from that. It seemed like it would be fun and we didn’t really expect anything from it. But we ended up getting third place and that helped to give us more exposure.
We also played on the street every Saturday night at 7 pm at the Star Ferry in Tsim Tsa Tsui, by the flagpoles right at the corner of Star House. We also got a permit to play every Friday night by the fountain in Tsim Tsa Tsui East. We just played in the open air and a few hundred people would just gather and watch. We were doing that from 1985 onwards. I’m amazed how many people come up even now and say they saw us down there. There were some steps at the Star House corner and we put the drums up there. Finally, we managed to talk Star House to into letting us run a wire out from their power supply and set up a PA and lights. We used it every Saturday night for around a year.
We got discovered at Tsim Tsa Tsui, by Armando Lai 韋然 , who was passing by one night. We’d started to do some Cantonese songs by then, like Alan Tam’s 譚詠麟 Friend 朋友 , which was really big at that time. When we sang that, people would tune right in. So it was a kind of progression from jazz, to English pop, to Cantonese. Armando Lai didn’t have a record company. He thought we had potential and he tried to market us but nobody was interested, so he set up his own record company to record us. We recorded an album and gave it to Polygram to listen to. They thought it was cool and took it. We put out two albums with Polygram on the Phillips label. City Beat 城市節拍 (1988) had English and Cantonese versions of the songs on either side of the album. Runaway 逃 (1989) was all Cantonese. We stayed together until 1991 and released two more albums on Silver Planet - The Time Is Now 新人類搖滾 (1990) in Cantonese and Goodbye (1991) in English. So we did four albums altogether, one mixed, two in Cantonese and one in English. The last album was mostly English versions of our Cantonese songs.
Where did you play once you’d started to put out albums?
The album opened the door, because we got into the charts and appeared on TV. We were able to get into schools very easily. So we did all kinds of schools. We did prisons, housing estates, refugee camps. We also did normal kinds of concerts with other bands and singers. We played at Rick’s Café on Hart Road in Tsim Tsa Tsui. That was a big live music venue at that time. Eugene Pao 包以正 had a band called One Finger Snap there. When we finally got there, we felt like we’d arrived! We were involved in an English TV show called Fizz-Biz that was presented by a guy called Edward Bean, who also used to do a lot of concert promotion. Our drummer Jym Kay was the host of another programme on TVB called Solid Gold and we’d be on that once in a while. There was a show with the same name in the States at that time and they pretty much followed that format. When we started to release Chinese albums, we got on TVB Jade. We signed a contract with them. They did our music videos. They shot the video of Tolo Johnny on location at the YWAM base on Borrett Road. On No Time we were playing outdoors at TST East. We went on EYT [Enjoy Yourself Tonight], and even the afternoon cooking programmes - they’d have a recipe and then a song from guys with long hair!
John Laudon: No Time
We played at the Hong Kong Coliseum a few times. That was really fun. For band shows, they’d put the stage at one end of the hall, instead of in the middle, and there would be five or six bands. Sometimes there were smaller scale festivals. I remember one at Diocesan Boys School in Mongkok out in the field. There were a lot of people there. That was a mixture of bands. Alan Holdsworth, a guitarist, did a couple of jazz festivals. Then there was a pub called The Mad Hoos in Tsim Tsa Tsui that was promoting live bands and we played there.
We also went to India in 1988. In Hyderabad, the last band that had been there was Uriah Heep, who had been there five years before. Five thousand people showed up to see us! We were billed as an American band, although I’m Canadian. The main thing was we were a white band, actually. We went to India twice, which was brilliant because there it’s all hard rock and we could really let loose. Here in Hong Kong it was all pop ballads and the audiences would applaud very politely. We just played non-stop for two and half hours, all English stuff, hits by Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and so on. We were in pain afterwards! In Bombay, we played at a place where The Police had just done a concert. But you didn’t really have to be known. They were just hungry for music.
What was the local band scene like in the 1980s?
We were so involved in the Chinese scene, I hardly remember English bands. Beyond were big back then – they had long hair until they went commercial. Then there was Tai Chi 太極 , who won the first Carlsberg competition. They were the two main bands. Other bands would be around for a year or two and then disappear. We also played with Danny Summer 夏韶聲 , Maria Cordero 肥媽瑪俐亞 , Raidas, Tat Ming Pair 達明一派 and Blue Jeans 藍戰士 . They were the main bands around. We were very removed from the English scene, because the band ended 1991 when the English scene was starting to pick up.
You were also at the 1989 All For Democracy concert at the Happy Valley racecourse?
That was huge. We wrote an English song for that, called Standing As One. We got 12 different artists to sing on it. We had been to Shenzhen to a university for a two-night show in May. At that time the students still had the upper hand. We had all our equipment in a big truck and they wouldn’t let it into Shenzhen. Then some of the student leaders came down from the university and said, If you don’t let it in, we’re going to make a fuss. So they let it in and we did the two nights. One night there was a Number 8 typhoon, but there were around 1,500 people each night. Then we came back and wrote the song and we sang it at the big concert at Happy Valley. There was Jacky Cheung 張學友 , Lowell Lo 盧冠廷 , Shirley Kwan 關淑怡 , Elvin Wong Chi Chung 黃志淙 , Florence Ng and some members of Beyond and Tai Chi 太極 . That was an amazing experience.
How did you learn Cantonese?
I was singing in Cantonese before I could speak it. Then we started recording in Cantonese and then we had radio interviews. Because I was the lead singer, they assumed I could speak Cantonese, and I said, ‘Well, not really!’ So theywould give me the questions and I’d write out the answers in romanized Cantonese. That was the push to make me learn. It was just learning as I went along, but the big leap was in 1992 when I got married. My wife is from Hong Kong and we basically speak Cantonese to each other all the time.
What is it like to sing in Cantonese?
For me, the challenge is that it is a tonal language, so you have to have the tones just right. And then there’s the enunciation. It’s very different to English. For example, you can have a singer like Bjork singing in English. You can hardly understand what she’s singing, but it is okay because it’s part of her package. Or if you hear a French person singing in English, it sounds okay. I don’t know why, but if you hear a Chinese person singing in English, it can sound kind of funny to me. But if it’s a French singer, then it seems okay. I don’t know why that is. But in Cantonese it has to be just right. There can’t really be any kind of accent. It should be clear. And you have to get it on key as well, because back then you didn’t have any software to fix that. The timing. And then there’s the feel. Those are the four factors. I’d be so focussed on getting the tones right that I’d forget about the feel. The enunciation is also important. You have to get the slides right. For example, a word like siu 小 [ small] is two syllables really, you have to get right and to fit in with the music. It’s very challenging. You may have to draw it out or you may have to sing it several times quickly. Cantonese is one of the more difficult languages to sing in, I think. And there isn’t a lot of freedom to improvise. You have to stick with the melody. The challenge for me is to get that right and then to get it feeling good and on pitch and on time. Also I am not really a singer’s singer. I don’t really like singing that much. As I said, I sang by default. So even up to today, I find it difficult. But, of course, there’s a lot of software you can use to fix things up now. There’s not so much pressure now. I can get the feel right and the enunciation right, then if the pitch is a bit off or the timing is bit rushed, I can fix that.
What do you mean when you say there is not much freedom to improvise?
Well, in English, for example, you can sing Watching you li-i-ive…, but if you sing Si seui fu nei-ei-ei… 是誰 負你 , it won’t sound right. You can’t really draw out the last syllable. It has to be Si seui fu nei. That’s the only way it will work. I’d try to do that, but then the producers would say, No, that sounds like Chinese opera! So you’d do something like Si seui fu nei errrrr…. That’s what some of the more western Cantopop singers, like Janice 衛蘭 , do nowadays. They’ll add something at the end of the line to fill in. English singers, like Mariah Carey, will also do that. Sometimes it sounds good. Sometimes it sounds tacky.
Armando Lai wrote the lyrics for a lot of your compositions. How did that co-operation work?
We actually wrote most of the songs in English first. So he’d take our English ideas and translate, not line for line, but he would get the general meaning. It seemed to work fine. He did a lot of other music, like stuff for kids. He’d write lyrics for people, but I don’t think he was ever really a mainstream pop lyric writer, so his lyrics were like my songs, kind of hit and miss! Maybe out of three songs one is great. The other two are just okay. That’s the same in English too. They’re not all awesome. Once in a while there’s a lyric that stands out. Fortunately he had one or two of those and those were the ones that did really well. I have a friend now and she can pretty much get it word for word. She’s amazing! Nobody knows how she does it. It’s not that easy.
Pretty much 95 per cent of the City Beat songs were written in English first. That’s what we had to do to get the feel, and so on. Watching You 守望你 , which was one of our biggest songs, wasn’t our typical style. I said, Hey, this is Cantopop, let’s just do a song, and I just blasted out the song out of the blue using all the formulae and cliché lines and they said, This is a great song! No Time 城市節拍 isn’t typical either. Part of the melody came from Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, a piano piece that I used to play. It’s minor key. That’s very Cantorock style.
How would you describe Cantopop in musical terms?
It’s very precise in the melody. It’s not so free. It’s often in minor key. Minor key melodies seem to fit Cantonese better, because they are often based on the five-note scales that are used in Cantonese opera. The rhythm would be straight, not too syncopated or groovy. Nowadays there’s more flexibility, but if you listen to Beyond and Tai Chi, it’s mostly minor key and straight ahead. Nowadays most of the pop songs seem to have descending lines. I write a lot of songs that way, because they sell. Actually I try to stay away from that, but when I do write one like that, it seems to sell!
What have been doing since 1991?
I started songwriting. The first song I wrote for the Cantonese scene was in 1989 for Alan Tam, Love Of The Only Kind 愛念 . He was with Polygram and they asked me if I had any songs for him. Originally, I wrote two English songs for him, Love Of The Only Kind and Winning Or Losing, because he wanted them for an album for Taiwan. Then they wanted them for his Cantonese album as well and that was a big hit. It sold 400,000, or something and I was very happy, because Love Of The Only Kind was the title song. It was the first song I’d sold and after being broke for so long, I could finally get some equipment. So basically, I’ve been writing songs and arranging. My main income has been from Cantopop. 1990 to 1997 were really the peak years for Cantopop and I managed to luck out on that.
One of the other songs I wrote was Hungry Wolf 餓狼傳 說 for Jackie Cheung. I wrote various songs for the ‘Four Kings’, Jackie, Aaron Kwok 郭富城 , Leon Lai 黎明 , Andy Lau 劉德華 . Some of those songs were on a CD I made in 1996, Believe In Love 始終相信愛 . These weren’t written with Armando Lai. I just wrote them for the record company. I’d write the melody and most of the time I’d do the arrangement. If it was for one of the bigger singers, the company would get one of the big lyric writers in. The lyrics were out of my control. In those days, I’d write out all the parts and take the sheet music into the studio. Nowadays, I do it all on computer and send them a CD. I just did a song for William So 蘇永康 recently, though, where I arranged all the instruments roughly on computer, but the producer wanted all real instruments, including a horn section and strings and drums and bass and everything. I played the guitars for real. I sent it online to a friend in Vancouver and he did the drums. We sent it to Chicago for the bass and to Los Angeles to record the horn section and then to the United Kingdom for the string section. It was all done online. They just uploaded all the tracks and it was all here.
A lot of people in the music business in Hong Kong started out in bands and were self-taught?
Yes, I’d never done arrangement before. Most of the people I know in the Cantopop scene have always played some kind of instrument. But arrangement has become the more lucrative thing, because nowadays selling a CD is pretty hard. I did do an English song, In Love With You, back in 1996 for Jackie Cheung and Regine from the Philippines. That was fun. I wrote the song and the lyrics and did the arrangement. It was great to be able to do an English song. It was on her album. I bet that the Philippines was the main market for that, except that it is a big karaoke song here. And then Justin 側田 and Kary Ng 吳雨霏 have done it a few times live recently. When we recorded the song, Regine just sat calmly in front of the mike and sang her part, and then Jackie, because it was in English, he was sweating. He sang his part rough and then he said, I’m going to do my part later. Too much pressure! Because she’s so amazing, she just sat there and blasted it off. So then we came in next time and finished his vocal.
How did you come to do that song?
I’d worked a lot with Michael Au 區丁玉 , Jackie’s producer, and that was just another project he was going to do. He asked me to write it, because I was his English connection and I happened to have that song. What really bugs me now is that Mariah Carey released a song in 1999 called Thank God I Found You, and the first two bars, the fifth and sixth bars, and the chorus were exactly the same as In Love With You. She would definitely have known about Regine and she would probably have heard that song. She’d been in Taiwan, the song was big in Taiwan and a lot of people compared Regine to Mariah Carey. I sent the clips to some lawyers, but the problem is that I only found out about it a year ago. That was also on Wikipedia, if you look up the song Thank God I Found You. It said that it was a rip-off from another song released a year or two before, but that song was also a rip-off of In Love With You. I listened to all three and they were right. The other song got all the way up to the 9 th Court of Appeals. It wasn’t as much like Thank God I Found You as In Love With You was and Warner settled with them. But the lawyers said that the problem for me was the time gap. It would have been a big investment too!
Can you tell us more about your work with Christian rock?
Well, here it’s been more pop. I think that a lot of Christian pop has not been up to the level of commercial pop, or it has been outdated. Also some of the songs are very simple so people can sing them in the churches. I also do songs like that as well, but I arrange them more contemporarily. So there’s never been much of a rock scene here. They wouldn’t accept it, I don’t think. Then City Beat came along. We were able to get away with it. We played in churches and we had long hair, but it was okay because we were Westerners. It’s like drinking beer. It’s okay that I drink beer, but they might not want to drink beer. Maybe they don’t like beer! I use that excuse all the time. If they knew North American Christians, they are like, Oh no! It’s a major sin.
Anyway, I think we brought Christian rock into the scene and now since the 1990s there are a lot more rock bands. It’s encouraging to hear people say, ‘I listened to you when I was young, that’s why I wanted to learn the bass, or something’. I put together a band a couple of years ago and the bass player, Ben Tse, a friend of mine, goes to a church called The Vine in Central. He’s a very professional bass player and he said he wanted to play the bass because he heard me when he was young. That’s great because these guys musically surpass what we could do. They really do things well. I am going to put a band together for a show in a church in a couple of weeks. I would like to put a band together permanently again. I’m just waiting for a bass player to come at the end of the year, from Japan interestingly! Maybe it’s midlife crisis, wanting to get out there and rock out! But playing in a band is really my first love, not sitting in a room arranging.
Is the Christian music scene in Hong Kong more local or more global at the moment?
Well it’s always a language thing, because most people like listening to Cantonese or Mandarin, not so much English. There is an English scene internationally, but some of it is so modern it’s almost too much for local tastes. The Christian music scene in the States is enormous. They have an audience of, like, 50 million people. There’s a band called Sonic Flood, who are very big in the United States, who play a kind of heavy rock style. It’s commercial in the United States but you wouldn’t find that kind of thing at all in the Cantopop scene. It’s a very big business, but musically that kind of music just doesn’t translate into the local Hong Kong setting.
How is Christian music distributed here?
It’s distributed mainly through Christian book stores, separately from mainstream distribution channels. There are 60 of them in Hong Kong. The main one is Elim Christian Bookstore 以琳書房 , who have a lot of the more cutting edge stuff for the English-speaking market. I just came out with a Cantonese Christian album, Better Than Life 曠野甘霖 , for the churches to use. I got a bunch of local Christian singers who are well known in the local Christian scene to sing on it. It was released a couple of weeks ago. It’s produced by an independent company, Eternity Music and distributed by Elim. You don’t need a huge company for the Christian market. It will probably sell a couple of thousand copies, which is okay for Hong Kong now. Some of these CDs sell pretty well, because there are not a lot of them. A best-selling Cantopop CD may sell 30,000, but a lot of them only sell a few hundred. The difference is that in the commercial market a CD is really just a stepping stone to shows and advertising and so on, but in the Christian scene the CD is pretty much the end. At the moment, there is some interest in distributing my latest CD commercially and I am talking to a couple of companies about that.
Most of the Chinese Christian music seems to be produced overseas?
Yes, there’s a lot of music from Los Angeles and Taiwan. There’s a company called Streams of Praise 讚美之泉 , who have a huge presence here, but that’s all in Mandarin. So there’s a niche for Cantonese stuff, so I am releasing stuff periodically.
There are also a few local artists, like Ivy So 蘇如紅 and Mimi Tang 鄧婉玲 . There’s also Eternity Girls. They are trying to break into the pop market. I see them quite often. They are younger and pretty wholesome. There are also a few Christian bands on the indie scene, like are Empty Tomb, Whence He Came, Uncle Joe.
Discography
CityBeat城市節拍 (Phillips, 1988)
城市節拍 - John Laudon / 韋然
守望你 - John Laudon / 韋然
追蹤 - John Laudon / 韋然
心的呼叫 - John Laudon / 韋然
土佬 Johnny - John Laudon / 江其昌、韋然
實況劇場 - Jym Kay/ 韋然
No Time - John Laudon / Sandra Jenzen
Watching You - John Laudon
Freedom - John Laudon
Heart Cry - John Laudon
Johnny Nerd - John Laudon
Welcome To The Real World – Jym Kay
飛利浦 (Runaway) (Phillips, 1989)
逃 - John Laudon / 韋然
表演過後 - John Laudon / 韋然
不投降 - John Laudon / 韋然
強 說 別離 - 陳華添 / 韋然
家 - 陳華添 / 韋然
都市方程式 - John Laudon/ 韋然
追尋 - John Laudon / 韋然
生命戰士 - John Laudon / 韋然
守望你 - John Laudon / 韋然
你知否 - John Laudon / 韋然
暖流 - John Laudon / 韋然（ CD ）
城市節拍 - 劉諾生 / 韋然
士佬 Johnny - 劉諾生 / 韋然
實現劇場 - 劉諾生 / 韋然
Believe In Love (John Laudon. Silver Planet, 1996)
出位
始終相信愛
將心交與你
這裡夜色真美
灰色都市
付上禱 祰
心愛
Hey You
Say A Prayer
Being With You
Feel Good City
Stranger With A Name
Re-released as Still Believe In Love on Sony-BGM Legendary Collection.
新人類搖滾 (The Time Is Now)
(Silver Planet, 1990) 友情永在
浪子
Reason to rock
告別昨天
新人類搖滾
變
勝敗乃兵家常事
佔領理想街
I want some money
懷想曲
Goodbye (Silver Planet, 1991) Forever Friends (JL) Love Of The Only Kind (JL) Watching You (JL) Running Home (DC) Lost In The Crowd (JL) The Show Is Over (JL) Don’t Give Up (JL) I Will Always Be There (JL) Runaway (JL)
Forever Friends was an English version of a track on The Time Is Now, Love Of The Only Kind was written for Alan Tam, Watching You was on City Beat. The remaining tracks were English versions of songs on Runaway. Chuck Eddy replaced Daryl Ching on this album.
Quotes
Jym Kay – “As a group we don’t want to omit anyone from our music, especially Cantonese speakers who, after all make up the vast majority of Hongkong people. We’re certainly not doing this in order to play exclusively to a Western audience.” ---TV & Entertainment Times , 26 November – 2 December 1986
John Laudon – “We don’t preach because we know that saying that God is good and so on all the time may be rather boring for some people…. But we make positive statements. We challenge the way people think and make them re-consider their priorities in life.” ---
SCMP 29/12/88
Jerry Marshall – “The last time we did a live show in Lok Wah Chuen many Chinese came along to see us sing. There were young kids and old men. Many of them went along with their whole family…. Some of them might think these Gweilos’ heads are soft but the atmosphere’s still good.” ---
Hongkong Standard (Buzz) 14 January 1989
Rick O’Shea (Commercial Radio DJ) on Standing As One - “The fact that it is English has allowed the non-Chinese speaking part of the territory to share in the sadness…. The song is bringing the various communities in Hong Kong closer together; I hope it helps the Chinese to realise that we do care about the future of Hongkong.” --- (no reference) 1989
Jym Kay – “It’s not a song of protest but one of uniting. It is more of a world cause and the song is more from a Western standpoint. If the students hear it, it will let them know the world is behind them.” ---SCMP 3/6/89
John Laudon – “One of the reasons we did the song in English was to try and reach out to the international community. Eng is a much more accessible language than either Cantonese or Mandarin and is spoken throughout the world.” ---Hongkong Standard (Buzz) 10/6/89
John Laudon – “The market here is strictly commercial, strictly pop. If you want to sell records, they must be pop. A huge English-speaking band like, like U2, may sell something like two or three thousand records in Hongkong, whereas a Cantonese album with probably sell around 25,000 to 30,000.” ---SCMP 10 April 1990.
Daryl Laudon – “It may sound strange, but there was a sort of calling on all our lives to be here, it was not something we did of our own thinking…. I don’t think we are worried about being successful, because we have a totally different motivation. We sometimes do concerts in churches, prisons, schools, it is like social work. We can, for example, draw people into the church, and sometimes you can see them changing for the better, and that is really fulfilling.” ---SCMP 10 April 1990
