Door (1986)
Liang Wern Fook
Listening to Liang Wern Fook’s first album, Door, is like opening a door into the past.
The Mandarin album, put out 26 years ago, is the very first solo album by a xinyao (Singapore folk) artist as it is entirely composed and written by one person.
The norm up till then was for xinyao singers to put out compilation albums featuring compositions from different writers.
Liang, now 48, was a key figure in the xinyao movement which bubbled up from Singapore campuses in the early 1980s, and for this and subsequent contributions, he was awarded the Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s highest accolade for culture and the arts, in 2010.
As a songwriter, he went on to pen pop hits such as Kit Chan’s Worried, while a new generation of listeners has been introduced to his works through 2007’s If There’re Seasons, a musical built around his existing songs, and instrumental versions of his songs in discs released in 2010 and last year.
As he reinterprets his past works, it is also timely to take stock of them in their original versions.
Door is refreshingly free of the slick arrangements associated with pop music nowadays and there is an earnestness to the lyrics that can sometimes seem almost touchingly naive.
Delve deeper and you will revel in the joy of a singer-songwriter discovering his voice, and in the process, shaping a music movement that is uniquely and distinctly Singaporean.
His four subsequent albums would all revolve around the concept of the solo singer-songwriter.
From the very beginning, his concerns as a singer-songwriter went beyond mere navel-gazing as he pondered the state of society around him.
Side A of the cassette was Men Wai (Outside The Door), which was concerned with society at large, and side B was Men Nei (Behind The Door), which explored the personal.
On the title track, Koh Nam Seng sang poignantly: “Ah, opening the door and shutting it, shutting it and opening it/Who has the time to knock on someone else’s door/Everyone is successful, everyone is happy/Who still has the courage to open their heart’s door.”
The track Ah Ben Ah Ben painted a portrait of a directionless young man and playfully sampled the Malay folk song Di Tanjong Katong and even local band Tokyo Square’s Within You’ll Remain.
Bizarrely enough, the song ran into trouble with the authorities for including a few English words in the lyrics and was banned from the airwaves.
The good thing is that this probably led to a greater interest in the song and the album.
On Door, A Song For You and Where Are Our Songs? point to two threads in the burgeoning xinyao movement – the simple joy of writing a song and having it heard, and the fact that it was part of the ongoing search for Singapore’s cultural identity.
A Song For You was the first commercially released song that Liang wrote and it was originally included on the 1984 xinyao compilation album Hai Die Zhu Ri (Ocean Butterflies Chasing After The Sun). It was not part of the 1986 release but was included by Ocean Butterflies in the August 2007 re-release of Liang’s albums in a box set.
The lyrics are about the simple and irresistible delight of songwriting: “Write a song for you, sing out what I feel/Let my feelings of joy shower over the earth.”
Meanwhile, Where Are Our Songs bemoaned the lack of stories which Singaporeans could call their own, with its heartfelt refrain of “Where are our songs”.
Vocally, Liang is not the most polished singer but there is a homespun, modest charm to his pipes and the guy-next- door vibe only made his songs more accessible, as they seemed to be the intimate musings of a close friend on songs such as New Clothes Aren’t As Good As Old Ones.
While numbers such as New Clothes will be familiar to listeners from their inclusion in later collections and compilations, Door offers new pleasures even for diehard xinyao fans.
For example, My Feelings At 17:00, sung by The Straws, pairs a breezy tune with darker lyrics about the toll life can exact.
Door is not just a work of historical significance, but also one which continues to reward listeners today.
Step through it and you will be surprised by what you find.
(ST)