October 2007

Chet Lam 林一峰 has released eight full length CDs in Hong Kong and established a solid fan base on the Hong Kong music scene somewhere in the territory between indie and mainstream. Chet mostly records in Cantonese, although his best known song, The Best Is Yet To Come, has an English chorus. But we were intrigued by his most recent album Camping, which is not only recorded in English but also as indie as they come, with twisted acoustic interpretations of, among others, ABBA’s Dancing Queen, Madonna’s Crazy For You, and the latest in a long of line of recordings of The Boy From Ipanema. The album also includes three of Chet’s own English compositions, one of which, When He Sings, is worth the price of the CD on its own. In 2007 he also released an album of original Mandarin songs. We talked to Chet about music and language, starting with his love of the music of Janis Ian...

You were born and raised in Hong Kong. Can you tell us something about your family?

I am really from a grassroots family. I spent my first 14 years in Ping Chek Estate in Kwun Tong, but the medium of instruction in my school was always English, so basically I think that every student in Hong Kong is supposed to be bilingual, but it really takes a great deal to speak or use the language or to enjoy it, if you are really interest in the culture of the States or the UK. In my case, I learned most of my English from the US artists that I listened to. My hero was Janis Ian. Everything started from secondary school when I was really into the 70s singer-songwriter era and Janis Ian was the major influence. Basic training in school helped but it wouldn’t get anybody far. Like the Queen’s English or the not very useful kind of English, too formal. One thing I find interesting is the Hong Kong people’s written English or the reading ability is really good. In my generation, I am 31 years old now, my peers were really good in formal English, but in everyday conversations it was kind of not natural. And there comes an identity problem I think, not a problem but a phenomenon. We are taught British English, but the pop culture that we are exposed to is mainly from the US.

How did you get into Janis Ian? Was she popular when you were young?

No. There’s a Cantonese singer called George Lam. He covered one of her best songs, The Other Side of the Sun, in Cantonese. So when I started listening to other kinds of records, other than Cantonese or Mandarin things, I started from there. I really liked the melody a lot. So I found out about the record Night Rains from 1979. Somehow I just found the tapes. I went to HMV and asked friends. And I used to be a DJ at a commercial radio station. They used to have a library – they don’t have it now, can you believe it? – and the kept a lot of LPs and that was a good source. So I started exploring my knowledge of 70s singer-songwriter genre stuff and Janis Ian really was a major influence.

Did you know that the New Topnotes and Rowena Cortes covered At Seventeen in the 1970s?

No, I didn’t know.

How did you come to choose that song for At17?

At Seventeen was the song of a generation in the States. But people in Hong Kong who listen to English songs mainly go for the melodies instead of the words. But words are really important to me and I started studying the lyrics of that song in particular and started to explore the things that she was trying to say. Like At Seventeen is an awakening. It is not exactly the people at 17 years old, but really a stage of awakening. It really got me thorough a lot of growing up things. The lyrics speak to me. And I think the group At17 was somehow an awakening for Hong Kong mainstream music. So I just blended everything together.

At that time were you just listening to English songs or Cantopop as well?

Both. Mandopop too. We all started by listening to Cantonese music. Then we started to learn Mandarin and listened to Mandarin songs. Mandarin songs were big for a while at that time. Then English songs. They were like seeds planted in my head. Then as I was growing up, I was going through different things and the seeds started to grow, depending on what I needed at that time.

How old were you when you started writing songs?

Seventeen (laughs). Isn’t that interesting? Just a coincidence. When I was seventeen, I didn’t know that song or Janis Ian’s work. I heard that later. I really started to listen to English songs when I was 19.

So who were you listening to at that time?

Julia Fordham, Sting, Joni Mitchell, later, she’s kind of sophisticated, Leonard Cohen, later. Tom Waits later. I started from Janis Ian. Whenever I have a block, I just go back to her music. She’s my saviour! And Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, their lyrics are more important than the music itself. That’s a problem in Hong Kong. People don’t really care about words. So they really miss a lot. Recently I was in a record store and there are a lot of audiophile CDs. They are all covering these cheesy, very mainstream pop songs, and turn it into…not even easy listening. They really don’t mean what they sing. They just find it exotic. So this is really bugging me. When you sing a song, you have to mean it. You have to know why you are singing that line. Well, I’ve been learning too, so who am I to talk!

So how would you describe your music?

Chinese. Folk. I’m a folk singer.

Why do you say Chinese?

Cantonese is my mother tongue. The second language is Mandarin, and the third language is English. My work is really in three categories. The first is really Hong Kong style Cantonese songs. I make grassroots music when I am doing Cantonese, and on CDs, Mandarin a little bit. But when I’m doing English work, I play with the words and I play with the songs. It’s not very responsible. Because this is not my mother tongue and I can always just do it for fun. Playful

How do write an English song?

Ideas come first. I jot down all of them and link them together. I try to use my knowledge of English songs to shape them, to do the word play. But I came across some other obstacles, when I was doing the Camping album. When I am recording, as I said, I really have to understand what I am singing. But the delivery, that’s another form of art. The phrasing and everything is different when you sing in the studio, it’s different from doing it live. It’s so delicate. And I really needed to work on that. The first question I asked myself was, ‘Why?’. ‘Why do I have to record in English?’ Okay, because of my major influences and because of something funny. I just want to touch the untouchable and just have fun. Those songs are really campy classics. They speak to me in a funny way. People just wouldn’t listen to these songs in this way and the Hong Kong audience wouldn’t care. So I could just do whatever I wanted to. Only the clever ones could read between the lines. Camping is multilayered. It’s so ambiguous and I just had so much fun doing it. I would not do a Chinese album like this, because it’s just way to risky. The Chinese audience is so conservative. They just want to hear about plain love. But when I’m doing English, I can skip that cultural taboo. I can just go with what I feel. I feel so much more free. But that’s kind of sad, because I know that Hong Kong people just don’t listen to words.

We like your acoustic version of Dancing Queen. And also that you have to listen three or four times before you really get into the songs…

Thank you. It took two years to get the album into shape.

You said you recorded 24 tracks and ended up with 13 on the album. How did you make the choice?

Words.

What were some of the songs you left off the album?

Dusty Springfield’s Spooky, I love her. A very big one-hit-wonder, Mary McGregor’s Torn Between Two Lovers – it’s written by Peter, Paul and Mary.

Rowena Cortes also did that in the 70s, Theresa Carpio too…

I twisted them all. The last two lines of Torn Between Two Lovers, I changed to ‘Torn between two lovers / Feeling like a fool / Hold on a second / Who set all those rules?’ So this kind of little naughty thing, keeps popping up here and there. Only clever listeners will find out.

So you’ll do that in English, but not in Cantonese...

Not yet

You said that when you are composing, you start from ideas. Does that mean that you compose the melody to fit the words?

Yes. I don’t like filling in the blank. I like going with the flow. So when all the lines are written down, I like to see what it means and use the melody to bring out the message or the emotion instead of using words to bring out the melody. Music itself is not as important as words. For me that’s always the case. It’s a writing habit.

So it’s almost like writing a poem?

Yes, and I sing the poem.

How about composing in Cantonese?

In Cantonese it’s harder, because Cantonese has nine tones and it has a melody already. It’s like crashing two melodies together. So Cantonese writers are the smartest writers on earth!

On The Best Is Yet To Come you seem to use Cantonese and English style melodies for the Cantonese lyric and the English lyric. Can you explain the difference?

That song started from that catchy line ‘To kiss someone / To hug someone / The best is yet to come....’ Then I wrote the melody for those lines. Then the Cantonese part came later. The whole song was composed later. The Cantonese part has a melody that you don’t find in Western music. Cantonese melodies are kind of chopped up, da da da da da, they are like squares coming together. Western melodies are freer, they are more emotional. The example we were just talking about, At Seventeen. The first line, (Sings) ‘I learned the truth at seventeen...’, the words and the phrasing don’t go with the beat. But Cantonese lines have a form like the ancient Chinese poems, five words or seven words, there’s a special form for every kind of poem. But English songs don’t have that kind of form. So when it comes to singing or expressing your emotions, it’s not ‘square’.

Some of your songs have English and Mandarin versions...

That’s really because of my many influences and you just know whether it sounds right or not. Roberta Flack released an album covering Japanese pop songs in the late 90s and I knew all those songs, but they sounded so different because she just changed the phrasing and the accent of the songs. The English vowels couldn’t go with the original melodies so she changed them. I think that is really a work of art, blending those two things together. It’s so brilliant! Japanese words, Chinese words, they can’t sing right. But the difference is so delicate. You can’t really make an analysis. There are no special rules or guideline you can follow. You just have to listen to a lot of music so you know.

Sleepless with you , you have Cantonese and English versions....

Oh! Where did you find it? It was about 7 years ago, it never got published. This song doesn’t really work in English. That’s why I never released it.

To me the English version has a strong Cantopop feel to it

Okay, I wrote it in English. If I sang it the way I would in Cantonese, it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t sound natural. Maybe it’s just a personal preference. English songs won’t sound natural with every word going on the beat. (Sings the melody in Cantopop and English style).

Teresa Carpio told us that they correct Cantopop singers when they sing ahead of the beat or behind the beat...

Yes, it’s sounds dead if you do that in English. It’s a cultural difference. So blending both things together is kind of impossible.

You mentioned George Lam. He seems to be good at that. For example, his Cantonese version of Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl...

George Lam is clever. He doesn’t sing Cantonese songs in a traditional way. He doesn’t sing on the beat. He’s wierd, but he has style and people like his voice. But if other people sang in his way it wouldn’t work. So he’s a very special case. I just listened to his latest album. He has one English song with Teresa Carpio, ‘Close your eyes / Open your eyes...’ . (Through Your Eyes) That didn’t sound right to me.

Do you feel that your versions of the songs on Camping have a local Hong Kong flavour at all?

I don’t think it’s local. Local musicians would never do this. There has to be a five-minute drama in every song! I am no up to that.

But some of the things you talk about in your songs do have a local flavour, like you talk about the ice cream truck 雪糕車 , but not the music....

Yes, I am blending the two together. Different languages bring out different sides of me. Camping is just very outrageous, you know.

Maybe it’s something about the historical perception, but it seems like whenever a Chinese or Japanese artiste sings an English song, it’s called a ‘cover’ or a ‘copy’. What makes it into your version of a song?

It’s the way I read the words. It’s the way I see things. For example, Dancing Queen, is a seventies feelgood song. But the way I read it, it’s like a lonely boy who doesn’t want to confess, who thinks he doesn’t deserve to have fun, so he’s just hiding in the shadow. Of course, I’m not that boy. I’m having so much fun. Crazy For You is a cruising song. It is very cheesy eighties pop, but it could be so cruisy. It’s so much fun. If you read into the lyrics, you’ll see. You know, two people in the dark so close to each other. Just don’t be distracted by the eighties synthesizers. Rent, the Pet Shop Boys, written for Liza Minelli. Cool, Gwen Stefani. There are really a lot of layers on this album, but it all starts from re-interpreting alll the perception.

So what you are saying is that you read the words?

I read the words first. And then unpick the songs and bring out a new meaning.

Travel is one of the themes of your CDs. Does the theme of travel get into your music?

No, it doesn’t really. But when I am travelling, it gives me a lot of free time to write things over and over again and shape up ideas. It’s just a sense of space and being free. But in a cultural context, no. You know, some acts just can’t be brought to Hong Kong. I just came back from New York. I was there three weeks watching so many gigs. Those things just can’t be done in Hong Kong because people wouldn’t understand. They play with words. They have a local flavour. I just can’t explain. You just get life when you go to see certain concerts. That really helps a lot. And talking with different people with different accents. I used to be really conscious about my accent. Like where did you get this weird southern cowboy accent? Or where did your British accent come from? I think I started with a British accent and then I changed to an American accent, intentionally, because of the things I liked at that time. But now I don’t really care, because accent is political. Especially after I went to Singapore and talked with people there. They are confident and fluent and they speak Singlish. They throw in a lot of ‘lah’ and mixing different words together. And like in Switzeralnd and Germany the people all speak with a weird accent. But as long we understand each other it’s okay. And I think when your country is important, when people care about you, no matter what kind of accent you speak with, they will jsut listen to you without judging you. Anyway, I don’t really care about what accent I carry now, because I am really confident about myself. I just want to say things. If you want to listen, that’s cool. If you don’t...you’re missing a lot (Laughs). I’m not trying to please anyone.

Does that extend to grammar or choice of words when you are writing?

It shouldn’t be too wrong! But one major regret in my life is that it shouldn’t be Camping: Classics Reborn. It’s distracting. It should be just Camping. And there is one embarrassing spelling mistake.

That always happens...

Please ignore it. Mistakes like that should be avoided.

Does your music appeal to a particular kind of audience?

I don’t know. When I look at the audience when I am on stage, it seems to be mostly girls, young couples. They are outcasts, I guess. They think independently. People who like to think will listen to my music. University students, of course. From 17 to 30s, young adults. Forty-somethings won’t like me. But I don’t know why, old people like my music...my friends’ mothers and fathers.

Because your music is rooted in that seventies sound. And among that generation, ‘popfolk’ was really popular...

I am trying to find out why. Maybe when they get older, they have lived enough, they have seen enough. They just don’t really care. But 40 and 50 year-olds, they have strong values and strong beliefs. You just can’t convince them otherwise until they get older (laughs).

Your concerts sell out as soon as they are announced. You have a strong group of fans...

A cult following, yes (laughs).

Do you see yourself as being in the ‘indie’ scene or more mainstram?

That’s an identity crisis, right there. The mainstream people think I am indie. The independent people think I am too mainstream. So I’m jus tin middle. I don’t belong to any party, but I guess that’s a good thing. I’m a third kind.

You are a professional musician. Many of the indie bands have day jobs...

What I’ve been trying to do these few years is to bridge the gap between two worlds. I don’t belong to anywhere. It doesn’t matter, because I belong to myself. Maybe if I can just keep it going for a few years, more people can join me. This third kind can have a strong market and we won’t compromise too much and make a living by our talents.

Is it important to you that you do what you want to do?

Yes, very important. It’s all from me.

So how do you see the local indie scene?

There should be some quality control (laughs). Let me rephrase it... The audience should be educated. They have to know why to support the artiste they like. Indie music is like direct from the artiste to the audience without too many other things going on, like sponsors, like unnecessary promotions, doing game shows and stuff. Well, I could do game shows – just for fun, but not for promotion. And when listeners know how this game works and the money drawn into the market will be enough to support the musicians and the artistes and the labels, then that will be healthy. That’s what has happened in the States and the UK. The independent world is so big. Like Jack Johnson, they started Bushfire, and Bright Eyes, and the independent label ECM. They have a pool of money to get the business going.

I guess that’s difficult to do in Hong Kong?

Very difficult. The listeners just don’t have that sense. And the independent people, they just don’t care about money. Maybe they do but they just.... That’s not fair. Some independent bands really despise commercialism. They say when you take money, you are betraying the music. No, it doesn’t work that way. You have to make a living. You are just making an honest living with your music. Why not?

There are such people in Hong Kong?

Yes, some listeners. And the media.

Sometimes it’s difficult to know about the concerts...

That’s why! We are using the Internet. Myself, I have chetlam.com and LYFE music store so I have an outlet. We are kind of playing the game now in the Internet era and everybody is a media guy, basically. So we can really make use of word of mouth to spread our message and not depending on the mass media too much.

The problem for me in Hong Kong, compared to London or New York or even much smaller places, is that there is nowhere you can go and you know there’s going to be a good band there. Often there are four bands at a gig and three of them may be really difficult to listen to...

Quality control! That’s what I was talking about. I think the Fringe Club are doing a good job. But that money couldn’t support full-time musicians. That’s the problem.

Can you say something about language and multilingualism in the music scene?

English is fading away. It’s so sad. The majority will be Cantonese from now on, that’s for sure. But in Hong Kong I think we have the potential to link both worlds together. We have the history and the basic training. Many people in Taiwan and mainland China don’t speak English. They learn in their twenties, or something, voluntarily. I think though Cantonese and Mandarin will be more and more popular, I think the English audience has potential and, as a media person, I would really encourage my peers to work on that, because that’s the only way we can stand out from mainland cities.

So that’s something local to Hong Kong about your music! It’s multilingual, you use three languages...

Yes, I really have to work on this.

How many full length CDs have you made?

8

Which has been the most popular?

The debut album, Pillow Songs. It has my career song, The Best Is Yet To Come and it has been longest on the market. But then the third album is catching up. This is one thing I am quite proud of. With Cantonese albums, it’s like a bomb. They hit the market and then it’s done. But my albums have been moving steadily. Every month we have some new sales.

So how the sales for Camping? I am wondering if you a re suffering by recording an album in English...

Good. Much better than I expected. In this case, there is no difference. Maybe because my fans know my music already.

Do you ever collaborate with any of the older artistes in Hong Kong?

Yes, Rebecca Pan, we sang together on TV. She came to my concert, I went to her concert. She is so full of ideas. She is a great support of At17 and myself.