The news that singer-songwriter Liang Wern Fook was awarded the Cultural Medallion last Tuesday came rather as a surprise. I had assumed the 46-year-old had already been the recipient of Singapore’s highest accolade for culture and the arts.

After all, he was the seminal figure in the xinyao Singapore folk movement which began in campuses and hit its peak in the 1980s. His influence rests on five albums released between 1986 and 1992, and songs he wrote for others. One of them, Lian Zhi Qi (Love’s Refuge) sung by Jiang Hu, topped the singles chart for an astounding 29 weeks in 1986.

Much that Liang wrote about were part and parcel of my growing up years as they revolved around school and friendship.

There is the classic Xi Shui Chang Liu (Friendship Forever) with its carefree harmonica and guitar opening: “When we were young, who didn’t have dreams/Without realising it, you revealed your heart’s ambitions to me.”

It was probably the first Liang song that I heard and I still have this one memory associated with it.

A group of us were hanging out after extra-curricular activity, as it was still known then, and we ended up near the Padang, singing songs on the steps of City Hall. Under a darkened sky, we sang: “Shooting stars fly by in the night, imagining the road ahead/The breeze listens to our countless aspirations.”

This is one of those moments you will always remember and hold on to because it is just so perfect, even if there were no shooting stars in sight that night. The future held so much hope and promise that one could almost taste and touch it then.

But he was no starry-eyed optimist. He looked further and imagined: “Many years later, we meet again/We all have tired smiles/I’ll ask my friend, when will you play for me again/Will it still be the same, will it still be the same?”

He did not sugar-coat the future to come and there was the weight of would-be nostalgia already mourning the loss of those youthful days.

His bittersweet songs made one smile and ache at the same time, and grateful that someone could put these thoughts to paper and then set the indelible words to unforgettable music.

Little wonder that in a 2003 poll by the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (Compass), Friendship Forever topped the list of the 10 top xinyao songs. More impressively, he had six other songs in that honour roll.

He was, of course, not the only one writing about such themes. Ocean Butterflies’ xinyao boxsets show songs written and performed by the likes of Eric Moo, Roy Loi and Hong Shaoxuan. They reveal how dominant Liang was in the scene as every other song is written by him.

He stood out also for the depth and breadth of his works. In songs such as Tai Duo Tai Duo (Too Much Too Much) and Yi Bu Yi Bu Lai (One Step At A Time), he proved to be an astute and witty observer of society.

The latter was an inventive song to boot as he weaved into the track a traditional children’s ditty: “The sun goes down and comes up again the next day, can it climb up slower on Sunday/Flowers wilt and bloom again the next year, which company is going to drop the axe this year.”

So what if he did not have polished vocals? That boy-next-door voice made his songs only more accessible as they seemed to be the intimate musings of a close friend.

He was also generous and self-aware enough to know when to let others sing his songs, personal as they seem to be. Zhi Shi Jing Guo (Just Passing Through) is a clear-eyed love song about bad timing and it was sung by frequent collaborator Koh Nam Seng.

You could see how Liang grew with each album, broadening his outlook from personal relationships to national identity in Singapore Pie (1990) to Chinese and eastern identity in Go East (1992).

However, I remain partial to his earlier work, when as a thoughtful young man in his 20s, he gazed upon the ordinary and the everyday and came up with timeless music. His genuine passion for friends, for society and for life was so palpable and compelling.

In the liner notes to The Name Of Love (1988), he wrote: “There are no answers here, I still believe answers have to come from everyone searching for them together. There is no anger or rebellion here, I still believe in compassion more... If you could turn over every song here, on the back of each would be a single word – love.”

He did not vanish from the music scene after his series of albums. There was a foray into pop as a songwriter with hits such as Kit Chan’s Worried and Andy Lau’s Everytime I Wake Up, but he was now far less prolific.

The 1996 musical December Rains, restaged recently, suggested a new trajectory while 2007’s If There’re Seasons was a show built around his existing songs. He has said he wants to continue doing musicals as they combine his two loves, Chinese literature and music. The thought of new material to come is a cheering one.

While Seasons did not quite do his songs justice, it did give a new lease of life to some old classics.

And that really is the best thing about the Cultural Medallion award, that it will introduce a new generation of the young and the young-at-heart to be moved by Liang’s heartfelt poetry and music.

(ST)