The Mad Chinaman (1989)
Dick Lee

What is Singaporean pop?
Known for composing pop hits for Hong Kong singers such as Jacky Cheung, Leslie Cheung and Sandy Lam, as well as Home, that gold standard of National Day songs, singer-songwriter Dick Lee has grappled with that question in his albums – beginning with Life Story in 1974.
But it was The Mad Chinaman, released in 1989 on Warner Music, that really made people sit up and take notice of his brand of Singa-pop.
The album’s cover photo teased: Lee, now 56, was almost unrecognisable in full Chinese opera get-up complete with thick stylised make-up. What did Chinese opera have to do with English pop and what did the term Mad Chinaman mean?
Part of the answer was in the liner notes. In them, he wrote that “trying to identify the Asian in my Western make-up is enough to drive me crazy!”.
At its heart, the record was an attempt to map and probe his identity as a man caught between two cultures.
At the same time, it sought to answer the question of whether there was, or could be, such a thing as Singaporean pop.
These were big, possibly serious, issues but Lee’s musical inventiveness and sense of playfulness and adventure made the resulting album a sheer joy to listen to.
Take the giddily gleeful Mustapha. It was Lee’s tribute to Tamil movies and it even included dialogue from a mock chase scene.
The track featured singer Jacintha Abisheganaden, whom he would go on to marry in 1992 and divorce five years later, and delicious lines such as: “Honey, honey, sugar’s not as sweet/Oh, my papadam, you’re good enough to eat”.
This was pop, but done in a fresh way.
The lyrics were filled with familiar references to all things Singaporean; the songs were mainly in English but also had Mandarin, Malay and Tamil thrown into the merry mix; and the instrumentation was augmented by the use of ethnic instruments such as the erhu, the sitar and the tabla.
Many of the songs were built around familiar folk ditties and old favourites.
Rasa Sayang is a rap that built on the folk song of the same name. It is a feel-good homage to Singapore and it was thrilling to have prata, mee pok and chye tow kway name-checked in a song.
Lee also proved to have a knack for jazzing up old standards. An old Chinese number The Ding Dong Song, was given a new lease of life with a remix and the repetition of the spoken line “What is this thing called love?”.
Yet, for such a local record, The Mad Chinaman also turned out to be Lee’s breakthrough in the region, including the hard-to- crack Japanese market where it sold 12,000 copies within two months of its release.
What was originally planned to be his final album paved the way for him to move to Japan in 1990 to further his music career.
He continues to make albums which wrestle with the question of culture and identity for a self-professed banana who is yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
They include Orientalism (1991) and Singapop (1996).
Nothing has caught fire the way The Mad Chinaman did, and the album has become synonymous with Dick Lee.
He even named his 2004 autobiography The Adventures Of The Mad Chinaman.
He may have struggled with the question of what Singaporean pop is, but that poser is a no-brainer to anyone listening to The Mad Chinaman today.
(ST)