Hebe Singapore Concert 2012
Resorts World Convention Centre,  Compass Ballroom
Last Saturday

Taiwan’s Hebe Tien has decidedly good taste in music.
This was not always evident in her role as one-third of the popular girl group S.H.E churning out sometimes kiddy and playful pop. As a solo artist, there is no mistaking her ability to pick out winners.
On the 29-year-old’s two well-received albums To Hebe (2010) and My Love (2011), she worked with some of the best composers and lyricists in Chinese pop, including Sandee Chan, Deserts Chang, Chen Hsiao-hsia and feted indie band sodagreen’s Wu Ching-feng.
They came up with songs that showcased the grounded sensuality of her voice. While a good number of them were about the well-worn topic of love, Tien also showed an adventurous side on unexpected charmers such as Utopia and Flower and even tackling conservation of the environment on To Hebe.
Live in concert, she handled the coloratura on Flower with ease and, in general, proved that the nuanced and full-bodied sound on her second album did not come about via electronic fiddling.
Her two solo records belie an impressive number of memorable tracks and she duly delivered them including My Love, You’re Too Much, I Think I Won’t Love You, Love!, Please Give Me A Better Love Rival and Still Want Happiness.
They covered various aspects of love but it sometimes felt as though Tien herself remained a little aloof from the material. She seemed to be singing about love than from her heart.
Filling out the two-hour-plus concert were a good number of covers, which provided some of the highlights of the gig.
Taiwanese diva A-mei’s explosive Kai Men Jian Shan (a Chinese idiom meaning to get straight to the point) was slowed down and slinked up, while Swedish singer Lykke Li’s sultry Dance, Dance, Dance was sweetened by a tambourine-shaking Tien.
She sounded uncannily like the pristine-voiced Faye Wong on a rock-out version of Sandee Chan’s Nicholas and then took on Wong’s To Love, which featured a blistering guitar solo.
She stumbled on British band Florence And The Machine’s Girl With One Eye, though. Tien is simply not vicious enough to pull off a line like “I’ll cut your little heart out cos you made me cry”.
Besides, by covering one too many such unfamiliar songs consecutively at one point, she lost the interest of the sold-out crowd of more than 5,000, though never the easy rapport with them.
After the song What To Say, which included a line about “squeezing out a career line (cleavage)”, she joked that she should be using her sheng xian (voice) instead of her xiong xian (cleavage).
When a supportive female fan yelled out “Your chest is large enough!”, Tien mused “I thought you guys were passionate but more conservative” before graciously thanking her admirer.
Finding success on her own apparently has not been at the expense of her bond with S.H.E. This was most apparent when she sang the touching You, a song about group-mate Selina Jen, who was injured in an explosive accident on a film set in 2010.
While Tien did not take on any of the group’s hits, she told the audience that she missed performing with Jen and Ella Chen. Loud cheers erupted when she mentioned that she was looking forward to a new album release from the trio this year.
They should take Tien’s lead in picking songs.
(ST)