September 2007

Dragon Radio is a bi-monthly podcast out of Hong Kong, where Tony Reno has been playing the best alternative Asian music for more than two years. As regular listeners, HKpop wanted to hear Tony’s views on the alternative scene in Hong Kong and other cities in the region and especially in the use of English by Asian bands. We interviewed Tony by phone and this is what he had to say.

Can you tell us how you got started with Dragon Radio?

The original idea was to share the music out here with my friends back home in the United States. I have been traveling in Asia since 1997. Prior to living out here, I collected music whenever I traveled, whether it was to Japan, Korea, Thailand or elsewhere. Then about two and a half years ago, a friend of mine mentioned that he wanted to start a podcast on his server. So I figured that was a great opportunity to share the music that I found out here with people who do not live in this region.

And how did you get interested in Asian music?

I worked for a news company back in the States that covered Asia exclusively. My colleagues were Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Korean, Chinese, Tibetan, so it was kind of dumb luck actually. Had I been positioned in Europe, I would probably be doing the same thing, but covering European music.

And alternative Asian music?

My background in college radio was alternative rock music – the music that wasn’t being played on commercial radio at the time, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, early punk rock stuff. I find that the pop music genre here in Asia is pretty well covered, and I figured if I am going to cover one genre of music, I’d at least cover a genre that doesn’t get a lot of exposure. The other reason is that, the kind of music that I listen to in my native language. I’m not a huge Michael Jackson fan. I am a bigger Clash fan, a bigger Pixies fan. So this kind of music interests me more. I do the show, for people, but I also do it for myself and choose the music based on my own personal taste.

I wondered if there were any Asian bands in those days that especially attracted you. I remember how I got interested in local bands. I went to the 2004 Rockit festival and saw My Little Airport playing on the main stage early in the afternoon. There weren’t too many watching at that time of day, but I was just amazed by them. That made me look at more bands, to see what else was going on here.

Well, back in the States in the mid to late 80s, when I was in college radio, there were bands like Shonen Knife. At that time, they had just broken into the US market and they were singing mostly in English, but with a heavy Japanese accent. It was still quite unique, quite different. That was one of the first Asian bands that I heard before I came out here. But once I came out here, I’d just walk through the record stores. When I was in Japan and I heard this band called Dragon Ash – they’re kind of rock and hip hop. Except for the language, it was pretty similar to the music that I was already listening to back in the States. So the bridge to the Asian version was much easier because basically the instrumentation and the sound are the same. It’s just the lyrics that are different. So that’s actually what I tried to provide for my listeners - something that sounds similar but in a different language.

Then alternative Asian music is musically pretty much the same as alternative Western music? What I mean is this. You hear an Asian band playing and the sound is pretty similar to the sound of a western band. Does that mean they are copying? Or are they just playing the same kind of music for the same kinds of reasons?

I think it’s a little bit of both. There are certainly some bands and some songs that I’ve played that are, maybe not note for note, but, pretty close to 80 per cent of the song structure is like a Limp Bizkit song or an Oasis song. And the novelty only lies in the foreign language for my listeners. But I think that’s true of any band of any culture. Rock music is pretty basic music. You know, you don’t really go to school when you become a rock musician. You pretty much imitate your heroes. As you get better at the imitation, you grow, you kind of create your own music, but you are still feeding off your influences. So I think it’s pretty much the same out here. They are following the Western bands. But I think there will be more and more bands in Hong Kong that use bands like Beyond as an influence. So as time goes on, things will be more and more local, more and more Asian.

I think you travel around Asia more than we do. Could you say something about the alternative scene in other cities? Are we ahead or behind?

We are behind. I hate to say that because I love Hong Kong. But we are behind. The good news is we are growing. There are movements, like Chris B runs The Underground and that’s helped the local music scene immensely. Rockit has helped as well But Taiwan, Taipei in particular, Tokyo, even Thailand, I believe have more advanced and more mature alternative music scenes. Taiwan is a little more electronic and DJ, but they are more experimental than Hong Kong bands. I think the main problem that the HK bands have right now is they don’t have enough self-confidence. There are a few bands like the Pixel Toys, Qiu Hong and Snoblind who are doing something a little bit different. But unfortunately, I think the market is still saturated with commercial pop bands. In the last year or so, there have been a few bands who come across as punk and rock, but they are just commercial entities. I don’t even remember their names. The Hong Kong scene is still quite immature, but it’s getting better.

So what’s our problem? You mentioned the self-confidence of the bands, but do you think commercial organization is also an issue? I guess it’s is a smaller market here.

Yeah. There’s a much smaller market. The price of real estate has a lot to do with it. In some of these other places that I mentioned, with maybe the exception of Tokyo, there seems to be more stage space for bands to play. Here in Hong Kong, the bar owners want to make a buck, but there’s nobody interested in helping. No bar owner that I know is as interested in developing the music scene as he is in making a buck. So it would be helpful if there was one venue. There are actually a few like The Wanch, but they mostly focus on cover bands. I think one of the main problems is there isn’t a good medium size venue that allows local bands to have a regular exposure.

My impression is that it’s difficult for bands to get beyond that situation where they are just playing to their friends. Most of the gigs I go to, everybody seems to know someone in one of the bands.

Yeah, that’s true. That goes to the level of professionalism and the way they play as well. I met some bands during the Rockit audition that were very professional. And that impressed me. But they were in the minority. It’s not that they don’t take it seriously enough. But like you said, they haven’t broken out of their safety nets of playing in front of their friends. I think part of that is that they have never been paid. In the States, in a bar, you get half of whenever they collect at the door, or some of the bar money or whatever. But I don’t think they do that in Hong Kong. I think you play for free, and if you bring enough people into the bar, they invite you back.

Well, that’s a different scene, isn’t it? A guy who played in bars in Wanchai in the 80s told me that the band would get HK$1,500 a night – each person. In those days, that was good pay.

Was that original music or covers?

No, they were cover bands. But cover bands make more money, I guess.

I think it’s the same now. I don’t know how much bands who play at Dusk till Dawn or Insomnia get paid. They have pretty good professional bands. I guess they get paid pretty well. But the problem is that there is nothing for original music scene. I think that’s probably what’s more important right now.

Let’s move on to language. You prefer to play songs in where the bands are using their mother tongues, right? What’s the reason behind that?

For me, it’s to set the podcast apart. I decided that the Asian music that’s sung in English is so easily accessible already, wasn’t worth covering for me. I know this relegates it to a small audience, but that’s okay with me. That was part of it. And the other thing to it is, I wanted people to know that there were more than just bands out here covering English rock songs. It might sound the same, but at least the lyrical content is different. The intent and the stories are pretty much the same, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries to commit suicide or something like that…you know. But told in a local language, the local vernacular in particular, to me the song means more. When I found out some of the local bands that you had interviewed prefer to sing in English even though their English wasn’t that good, that kind of surprised me. It would be like me taking up singing and trying to sing in Cantonese.

Well, it seems to me one of the reasons they do that is because they can use English. And they feel like they can reach a wider audience with English, especially now that the Internet is so important in distribution. That seems be one motive.

Yeah.

But we’ve also interviewed people who say it’s just too difficult to write songs in Cantonese.

Yeah, I don’t buy that at all.

And we’ve interviewed people like Chan Ho Fung from Gayamyan, who said that’s nonsense because it’s really not so difficult to write in Cantonese.

Sure!

And he does write good songs in Cantonese. But some bands also tell us that English just seems to fit with the styles they play. One said that that singing rock in Cantonese is like singing Chinese opera in English…

Yeah, I can understand that for the younger generation who are further removed from the local rock scene. I guess Sam Hui was the first real example of Hong Kong rock. He was like the Elvis of Hong Kong. When he started sing rock and roll in Cantonese, many local people just couldn’t believe it. And they thought it was kind of sacrilege he was using their mother language to play rock and roll music. So I understand that when they are younger, they are further away from that. Maybe they are more comfortable with English than they are now with Cantonese. But speaking Cantonese myself, I know it’s a very colorful language. Bands like LMF, it was a perfect match, their slang use of the Cantonese language with hip hop. Qiu Hong, the band I mentioned before, their songs are great in Cantonese, I think there are many good examples of music done well in Cantonese. It might be more difficult to write in Cantonese. But for me, I would think that whatever language that person is most comfortable with in expressing themselves would probably be the one they’ll use. Maybe this younger generation of bands are just more comfortable expressing themselves in English. I guess, maybe they feel that Cantonese is too proper or too much like their parents’ language. They feel English is their own and that’s why they use it.

Yeah.

One thing I want to mention is that you don’t hear a lot of English in Taiwan and Japan. When you listen to their rock music, there isn’t a lot of English. But on the other hand, now that I think about it, in Singapore, it’s very hard to find a rock band that actually sings in their mother tongue. Last time I was in Singapore, I had a really hard time finding one or two bands singing in a non-English language. The level of English in Singapore is much higher than that of Hong Kong.

Because of our research, we may be inclined to think that there are more bands writing and singing in English in Hong Kong than there really are. So I just wonder what your impression of that is. Our feeling is that maybe more than half of the bands who are performing in venues like The Underground are using English…

The ratio? Yeah, I would agree with you. My feeling is probably 60% English, 40% Cantonese and/or Mandarin. There are a few bands like So What, an all girl band. I believe all their songs are in Mandarin. I interviewed them for Rockit, and they told me “we are singing in Mandarin because we know China is a huge market and we don’t want to limit ourselves to Cantonese.”

But that’s not the case in Taipei or Tokyo? We have been listening to some Taiwanese Bands, Echo and 8mm Sky - they have a few English songs, others in Mandarin.

In fact, it’s hard to find Taiwanese bands that sing in Taiwanese, which is similar to the Hong Kong scenario. But I don’t know enough about Taiwanese culture to know if the younger generation just isn’t learning Taiwanese. I would dare to say its probably mostly in Mandarin, second in English, third in Taiwanese.

Who listens to Dragon Radio?

Most of my listeners are from the U.S., but the second highest area is Hong Kong itself. I think that is partly because I am here and a lot of the promotion I do is quite local. People know about me here. Also I get listeners in China. It’s very interesting because unlike the United States, many Hong Kong rock music fans listen to bands from Japan, from Korea, from Taiwan and the Mainland. So I think after the U.S. and Hong Kong, it’s pretty much a mixed bag for the rest of Asia, Mainland China, Taiwan, and so forth. But right now, I have more listeners in North America.

Are you involved in the Hong Kong music scene in other ways?

I was a judge for the Rockit’ audition last year. There were two independent judges, myself and another guy. Basically, we were asked to pick some bands and so we created a list of the 10 or 12 bands that we thought should go on. Some bands were on our list that did not make it to the final, and there were some bands that we didn’t pick that made it on. I think we were a kind of buffer for the organizers to choose which bands eventually made it to the stage. It’s unfortunate because there were some bands who played quite well and never made it through, and there were some bands who really didn’t deserve to play and I think it showed on the day of the show. It’s a concern of mine. I would like to be involved with Rockit’ next year because it’s good for the rock community. But I’d have to rethink and re-evaluate my relationship with the organizer. What I hope to do is to let people know that it wasn’t entirely my decision who played on what day and what bands eventually made it through and what bands didn’t make it through.

I don’t know if you have impression that if you had a foreigner in your band, or if you are a foreign band, you have a better chance…

That’s interesting. I don’t know about that. We had some bands that were all foreigners and they didn’t go through. We had some bands that were local people, Qui Hong, Hardpack, for example. No, I don’t buy that. That’s an unfair assessment. There were a lot of purely foreign, Australian or English, bands who didn’t make it through.

Last question. What do you think we need to do to improve the music scene in Hong Kong?

I think one of the things that Hong Kong needs to improve, and this is up to the government, is to work on that noise ordinance. Find a venue where a band can play until 11 pm without having to deal with people complaining about the music being too loud. One of the problems in Victoria Park with Rockit is that even though they get the clearance, every year they still get a dozen or two dozen complaints for playing too loud. People complain that they invested so much money in real estate and they want to live peacefully and have a peaceful life. If you buy an apartment next to an open park and you complain about noise, whose fault is that! You bought the apartment. There’s probably noise almost every weekend. Even when there are show at the Coliseum of stadiums, people still complain about the noise. I think the government needs to step up and let the world know that Hong Kong can host a professional show and draw more professional rock bands into Hong Kong. I think Hong Kong right now has a bad reputation. Luckily we have the Asia World Expo. It’s a little bit far…

And the tickets prices are high for a lot of local people?

The price of the tickets is expensive to me too. The Nine Inch Nails are coming and the cheapest ticket is close to US$ 75-$ 85. I like the band, but I just do not like to spend that kind of money and the time getting out there. So if the Hong Kong government could do one thing, it could create a small medium size venue inside the city that would allow a local band to open for and perform in front of an international act that comes in. There is a local band opening up for the Nine Inch Nails now – The Lovesong. I think that’s great and there should be more opportunities for local bands to open up for international bands and get that kind of exposure.

That was something that happened in the 60s? You had local bands opening for the The Kinks, Herman’s Hermits, and so on. Edmund Leung’s band …Huhh!? got to open for Suede in the 90s.

Yes, exactly. It happened to me in my college days. My friends’ band opened for the Pixies in a pub in Buffalo. Nothing ever came of it for my friend’s band, but certainly there are other examples where big name bands came in and they said, “Hey man, you guys are great! Why don’t we get you into our record label?” So I think for that to happen, Hong Kong really needs to put some effort in creating the right places.