Composer & Lyricist: Taufik Batisah

In 2004, Taufik Batisah made history by becoming the first-ever winner of Singapore Idol in a final round that drew nail-biting tension and furious SMS votes across countless Singaporean households.

The premise of the global television competition that inspired the local edition was fulfilled in many ways by Taufik. He immediately became a household name in Singapore and Malaysia, with a handful of albums showcasing his vocal prowess across pop and R&B ballads, with a little jazz pop here and there to liven things up.

However, as the 2010s arrived, Taufik’s brand of crowd-pleasing pop balladry had begun to sound of its time. It’s clear that the singer was aware of this, as his 2014 album Fique, anchored by the single #AwakKatMane (which translates as ‘Where Are You’), shifted far away from his family-friendly Idol image into something more contemporary. Of course, with its title sporting a hashtag, it’s as obvious a signifier as any that Taufik wanted to do something new. And it worked.

At over 8 million views on YouTube, with flickering hi-hats and a rap verse by Taufik himself, #AwakKatMane became the singer’s first success at entering a new pop world influenced by club music. Berita Harian’s Haryani Ismail is still in awe of the song, not just for Taufik’s bold leap into trap-inflected pop, but for how it still sounds a decade later: “It’s a danceable number and created so brilliantly,” she says, praising it for being “very visionary for [the] TikTok generation” with its infectious hook.

These days, while Taufik may be a lot less active in music, his fans continue to celebrate his music—along with arguing over whether NCT 127 ripped off #AwakKatMane in their popular hit Sticker. (Skip to 03:08 and judge for yourself).

Composer: Iskandar | Lyricist: Iskandar & Maman

Despite their popularity in the 1990s, the music of Lovehunters available to stream is sparse, frustrating their most ardent fans. And there’s a lot of them—after performing their final show of original songs in 2011, the band is set to reunite this year for a concert, complete with an orchestra and a traditional Malay music ensemble.

Singling out Angel in the Nite from their catalogue for his vote, Rudra vocalist Kathir calls it “arguably the finest rock ballad produced by a local band”. The song is taken from their 1994 self-titled album, which remains their first and only one performed in English. Most of its 10 tracks were composed by the band, with one (Shed No Tears) notably written by Art Fazil.

The album was the band’s opportunity to reach out to a wider audience—not just by switching up languages, but by showcasing their diversity, ranging from soaring power ballads like Angel in the Nite to heavier, bluesy numbers like Whiskey Lady and Face of Destruction, along with a cover of Neil Young’s Heart of Gold.

Per The Straits Times, the ballad, which had been a radio favourite upon release, nabbed the Favourite Local Song award on local radio station Perfect 10, now known as 987. Alas, despite releasing several albums since, Angel in the Nite remains a song you can only find on YouTube. “It would be fantastic if this album were re-released for today’s audience to appreciate its timeless appeal,” Kathir adds.

Composer & Lyricist: Charlie Lim

In the 2010s, Singapore welcomed a new crop of young singer-songwriters who were slowly stepping out of their unkempt bedrooms with an acoustic guitar. 

One of them was Charlie Lim, an unassuming 20-something whose banter in between songs suggested he’d just woken up from a nap. In his songs, however, an assured voice was amplified—barely a year after the release of his 2011 self-titled EP, he began drawing adoring crowds at places like Esplanade and Blu Jaz. 

Music of this era had plenty of stories concerning heartbreak and loneliness, but Charlie’s music confidently stood out with the virtuosity of his backing band, the Mothership—which included in its line-up, among others, drummer Adam Shah, pianist Chok Kerong, and producer Evan Low (now known as Evanturetime)—and his ability to toe the lines between R&B, funk, pop, jazz and electronic music with incredible ease.

Charlie could capture a wandering crowd with his startling croon. It was his lyrics, however, that got people to listen closely—revealing someone who laboured to bury a lot of pain and resentment, which would otherwise be projected clumsily in lesser hands. His shy onstage demeanour belied the big and all-consuming feelings in his lyrics that were sometimes witty, sometimes caustic. At this stage in his career, it felt like two sides to a man that produced an interesting and conflicted whole.

It was with Bitter, taken from his 2015 debut album/double EP Time/Space, that these two sides began to bleed into each other with magical results. What begins as a solemn number, with Charlie whispering into the void about his loneliness, and the reason for it—“But when you put out the fire Iʼll just start it again / I guess Iʼll have to keep my distance for your defence”, he laments—morphs into an ensemble piece with a post-rock climax that’s become a show-stopper at his shows. Even when—another album (2018’s CHECK-HOOK) and two NDP songs later—he feels reluctant to bring it back.

“Charlie has written many iconic songs, but crowds at shows always harass him to play this one,” says singer-songwriter weish. “There’s something so universally affecting about its raw pain.”

Composer: Rasyid Juraimi | Lyricist: Arif Rot

At just 01:08, Blockhead F*** Off is the shortest song on this list – and arguably the angriest. 

The story of Wormrot is certainly not as concise as their songs. But it’s one many Singaporeans know for the band’s sheer dedication to touring the world—and in turn, garnering a fanbase across the globe—for more than a decade, famously making history for being the first Singaporean band to perform at Glastonbury Festival in 2017.

Often praised as one of the most accomplished bands in the metal subgenre of grindcore—where songs are short metallic bursts of unmitigated punk fury—Wormrot has instead spent the last decade expanding their sound.

And it’s Blockhead F*** Off that ushered in a more refined, but no less animalistic energy into Wormrot’s legacy. The opening track of their third album Voices, which introduced the world to the precision of then-new drummer Vijesh, Blockhead F*** Off sees the band turning away from the societal critiques and angsty screeds of past albums Abuse and Dirge to focus the vitriol closer to home. Vocalist Arif Rot has never sounded as venomous as he does here—whoever the “Blockhead” is out there, we hope you’ve made amends.

Of course, it’s not the lyrics that draw thousands to Wormrot shows, but the inclusion of Blockhead F*** Off on this list—voted by The Straits Times’ music correspondent Eddino Hadi as “a classic anthem from one of the world’s most premier grindcore bands”—is a small gesture to Wormrot’s astounding impact all these years. May they continue to rip apart many more eardrums for years to come.

Composer & Lyricist: Dick Lee

It comes as no surprise that Dick Lee has the most amount of inclusions on this list than any other songwriter.

The Cultural Medallion recipient and undeniable workhorse has been active in Singaporean music since the early 1970s, when he released his first album Life Story. As many would know, his career has hardly been limited to solo music, with an array of songs he’s written for other singers (including one that follows this entry on the list), along with composing for full-blown musical theatre productions, beginning with 1988’s beloved Beauty World.

Bunga Sayang comes from the musical Kampong Amber, which was first staged in 1994. Sharing the name with the famous kampong (village)—which was demolished by the 1980s—Kampong Amber told the rip-roaring story of two Peranakan families, one working-class and the other wealthy, and how their lives would intertwine with the help of a scheming matchmaker.

The singer-songwriter—who is also of Peranakan heritage—threw himself into writing its music and lyrics. And out came Bunga Sayang, which became the musical’s signature song, an ode to his Peranakan heritage and the kampong now lost to time.

The song has since transcended the humble production, which was directed by Glen Goei, and has become a local favourite among Lee’s fans and in the wider Peranakan community. Lee recorded a solo version of the song in his 1995 album Secret Island, and it was famously performed by Iman Fandi at the 2023 National Day Parade.

Composer: Dick Lee | Lyricist: Lin Xi

Nope, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. As mentioned, Lee spent a good part of the 1990s writing for many of Asia’s greatest singers. One of them was Leslie Cheung, the iconic Hong Kong actor who enthralled audiences across the region before his untimely death in 2003.

Thanks to his timeless work, along with roles in acclaimed films like Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Cheung has remained a cultural force in the decades since. And in 1993, Lee was enlisted to write a theme song for Cheung’s classic 1994 romantic comedy He’s A Woman, She’s A Man.

Cheung’s version of Chase features Cantonese lyrics written by prominent Cantopop figure Lin Xi and arrangement by Singaporean producer George Leong.

Chase is a ballad yearning for stillness, a song sung by a man afraid of time—and the object of his affection—passing him by. It’s a “really well written” song, Esplanade senior producer Tan XiangHui says in his vote, and a “worthy karaoke earworm” that’s stood the test of time. Lee recorded his own version of Chase a year later in the album Compass, which features recordings of Lee singing his own compositions in Cantonese.

Composer & Lyricist: Humpback Oak

For a good long while, the music of indie rock band Humpback Oak remained inaccessible to the wider crowd at large. After the 1990s, their music—originally released on compact disc—had been hard-to-find, occasionally springing up on Carousell for luxurious prices. In 2010, the band reissued the albums in a boxset titled Oaksongs with a compilation of rarities and demos. That, too, is now out-of-print.

In 2025, however, all three albums and the rarities disc landed on streaming with zero fanfare. In this SG60 year, perhaps it’s the perfect time to dig into the catalogue of one of Singapore’s finest rock bands—a band that could wallow in their misery but could also lift darkness into daybreak.

Their 1994 debut Pain-Stained Morning screams with echoes of the past: not only with their guitars and vocal harmonies resembling the Laurel Canyon folk music of the 1970s, but with The Quests guitarist Reggie Verghese behind the boards as producer, along with Heritage’s Atwell Jansen contributing a screeching electric violin on Lucifer. Upon arrival, Pain-Stained Morning slid effortlessly into Singapore’s booming alternative rock scene, but their articulate lyrics – which oscillated between open-hearted sorrow and the evasively cryptic—were what made audiences (and fellow musicians) pay attention.

Even then, when it came to this list, the simplicity of Circling Square is what voters zeroed in on. Less a heartfelt ballad and more a semblance of a fading plea, Circling Square has the band’s foundational elements in full haunting display. “His songs are bard-like and introduced the thinking person's perspective into our English-language pop music,” The Padres’ Joe Ng says of the band’s songwriter and frontman Leslie Low. 

More importantly, he adds, the music of Humpback Oak, as exemplified by Circling Square, showed how Singaporean musicians could “go beyond the caricatures of pop music and state approved campaign songs”.

Composer: The Great Spy Experiment | Lyricist: Saiful Idris

The soaring synths that begin Class ‘A’ Love Affair felt like a new dawn in Singaporean music. Specifically in the mid-2000s, a time when music fully became convenient and social media started to worm its way into people’s lives.

Here a new class of musicians emerged, with labels like Wake Me Up Music and KittyWu Records establishing themselves as home to bands treading new ground. At the same time, a little festival named Baybeats began to take flight as well. It was also when mainstream rock music’s ability to move ahead by drawing from the past became its clearest. 

To those for whom the 1980s were still fresh in their minds, the arrival of The Great Spy Experiment—a spiffy five-piece led by frontman and guitarist Saiful Idris—resembled the promise of a young New Order who magically brought post-punk guitars to chic dancefloors. Of course, the band were not beholden to tribute or nostalgia, as Class ‘A’ Love Affair demonstrated oh so effortlessly. 

Propulsive and lean, listening to Class ‘A’ Love Affair for the first time could make you feel like anything was possible, so well that the optimism and anxiety of a new decade was fully captured in it. The joy that comes from the band’s music can be attributed to the fact that they played together simply because they liked it: ‘I didn’t really care if people cared,” said drummer Fandy Razak in an interview following their 2023 reunion. “I just wanted to play again with these guys. Because I missed them.”

Composer: Peter Lee Shih Shiong | Lyricists: Kate Liao & Wu Yizheng

At the turn of the millennium, a little-known Singaporean singer named Stefanie Sun was pushed to the moon with Yan Zi, her debut album that was issued via Warner Music Taiwan. 

But why Taiwan? Word has it that in 1998, according to Chinese publication Sohu, Sun was studying at the Lee Wei Song Music School when Warner Music Taiwan chairman Zhou Jianhui paid a visit. Zhou got to hear just a sampling of Sun’s talent and wanted to sign her immediately—it was her father who told him that she must finish her education before exploring a career. 

Another version of the story is less glamorous: that the school’s founders simply recorded a demo tape for her and sent it to the label, which then enlisted Sun as an intern to run errands before she finally got her big break. 

It didn’t take too long, as Yan Zi was released in June 2000—it sold more than 400,000 copies in Taiwan within three months, reaching platinum in Singapore by September that year. Part of its success can be attributed to Cloudy Day, which reimagined a popular Hokkien folk tune of the same name into a stirring piano ballad, one about growing up and mourning the loss of childhood innocence.

The clever infusion of traditional folksong into Sun’s contemporary sound—along with a public image that countless writers would often lavish upon the phrase 'girl-next-door'—endeared her quickly to the Chinese-speaking population of Singapore and the wider region. “It’s the genius touch of adding the refrain 'tee or or / bey lor hor' (the sky is dark / it’s going to rain soon), taken from the Hokkien folk ditty, that gets all humming along,” poet and editor Yeow Kai Chai says in his vote.

“Two decades later, listening to it in a stripped-down, Covid-era live stream proves not only the song’s timelessness, but also the singer’s X-factor, a timbre which needs no embellishment.”

Composer: Daniel Castro Borces | Lyricist: Subsonic Eye

Despite the earthy, jammy indie rock that Subsonic Eye has nurtured all this time—close to a full decade, if anyone’s counting—it’s the subtle wonder in their lyrics that enlivens their craft.

Once the 2020s arrived, Subsonic Eye were clearer, sharper and more self-assured as they released their third album Nature of Things, an ode to our natural surroundings that, undoubtedly, threatens to disappear with each passing year.

It sparked a new era for the band, whose introspection pulls from their immediate surroundings, best exemplified in their latest album Singapore Dreaming. In retrospect, Cosmic Realignment, an early fan favourite, comes across as the first inkling of the band’s true prowess.

Included in their 2017 debut album Strawberry Feels—a small boy looking beyond the wild greenery behind him on its album cover—Cosmic Realignment had already been rinsed over by the band before they entered the recording studio. Back when homegrown bands began to embrace a dreamier form of indie rock, reaching for the heavens in an effort to resolve a deeply-rooted malaise, Subsonic Eye made Cosmic Realignment an anthem of resolution.

“And you push your way and it's always the same / The stars look different, never like last night's / You - Just like cosmic, just like magic / Getting me the same way”, the band’s vocalist Nur Wahidah sings as she glides in her turbulent daydream, all before coming back down to earth: “I'm way too old for all your rough games / Tough luck kid go on”. At this early stage, Subsonic Eye cleverly understood their adolescent angst as less a by-product of their confusion, and more a tool in helping to resolve it. Only then could they begin to venture into the wilderness.

Composer & Lyricist: Art Fazil

As a kid, Art Fazil originally wanted to be a football player. But it wasn’t just the game that drew him to the field: "I discovered I had a higher chance of getting girls interested in me through music than through soccer," he once said, smiling, in an interview. Fresh off his A Levels, an eager and confident 19-year-old Art strode into the office of WEA Records CEO Jimmy Wee with a demo tape of his music.

The music executive brushed off Art’s singing abilities, instead offering him a chance to write songs for other artists. Art declined, bruised by the feedback—then on his way out of the building, he bumped into Ramli Sarip, the frontman of hard rock band Sweet Charity and one of Art's idols. Ramli was offered the tape. A week later, he called Art over the phone to offer him a job.

So, yes, Art did end up writing songs for other artists. He also became Ramli’s roadie. In his spare time, he took up classes to improve his singing, eventually learning to work with his limitations. He then formed Rausyanfikir, a band that spawned two albums before Art found success as a solo artist. Rausyanfikir featured all three members sharing vocal and guitar duties, with Art alongside his friends Mohd Khair Mohd Yasin and Esham Jamil.

Dikir Fikir-fikir is taken from their second album Rausyanfikir II – Rusuhan Fikiran, which coolly built off the band’s growing appeal to the masses. The song—which sees Art and co. powering their folk guitars with a radio-friendly rock sound, complete with gated drum snares that would make Prince blush—is a rallying cry for Malay heritage and belonging.

“Dari mana asalnya kita / Cuba engkau memikirkannya / Dimanakah nusantara / Terletak di dalam peta dunia / Kelonggaran budaya timur / Haruskah barat dipersalahkan / Apakan tersungkur Melayu,” he sings, which translates to: “Where did we come from? Try to think about it / Where is the Malay archipelago located on the world map? / Eastern cultural laxity / Should the West be blamed? / Why did the Malays fall?”

With Dikir Fikir-fikir, Art managed to score a radio hit that wasn’t just catchy and crowd-pleasing – it showed the whole of Singapore and the region that Art could reach a wide audience through a message that came with some soul-searching.

Composer: S. Atan | Lyricist: Haron Abdulmajid

The six members of Black Dog Bone sported shoulder-length locks and frizzy hairdos back when it was banned in Singapore. That didn’t stop them from performing to adoring crowds here and in Malaysia. "The policemen and immigration officers recognised us and let us off," bassist Hamid Ahmad once shared with The Straits Times.

Formed in 1973, the line-up of Black Dog Bone performed Malay-language music that spanned different styles: from Motown to getai, blues rock to bubblegum pop. Despite their versatility, Black Dog Bone couldn’t convince EMI to give them a record deal until the success of their first album Sindir-Sindir Sayang (Love Quips), released in 1977 under local label Tony.

It was with Dulu Dan Sekarang (Then and Now), their fourth album and third with EMI, that solidified their superstar status—and they did it by embracing dangdut in their repertoire. The title track—composed by Hashim Said, famously known as S. Atan, with lyrics by poet Haron Abdulmajid—is unashamedly weepy and burning with desire, with lead singer Tahir Ali, better known as Jatt Ali, pleading for a lover to return to his arms.

The immediate appeal of the song notwithstanding—after all, there are many sentimental ballads on this list—it’s the performance of the band that makes Dulu Dan Sekarang a riveting listen. From the keyboard stabs of Michael Heng providing texture, to the flute of James Chai floating into the ether—all grounded by Hamid Ahmad’s danceable bass lines—it sets the stage perfectly for Jatt’s dramatic yearning. With the band still performing on occasion today, it’s clear that their chemistry was strong from the start. In a country where bands come and go, that’s a rare thing.

Composer: Eric Moo | Lyricist: Huang Huizhen

The heartrending genre of xinyao, a form of Mandarin balladry, was spun off of minyao, a form of folk music from Taiwan that became popular in student campuses in the 1970s. While the latter focused on Chinese heritage and resistance during a turbulent decade, xinyao was revolutionary in its own way—by shaping the foundations of Singapore’s Mandopop industry in the decades to come.

Long before the now-defunct Channel U’s Campus Superstar was a thing, students were able to compete for the spotlight by appearing on the radio show Our Singers and Songwriters, aired on Singapore Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio 3 (now Mediacorp’s CAPITAL 958) and hosted by DJ Lim Cher Hui, along with performing at public concerts and competitions.

It started in 1978 when Pan Cheng Lui, who would later establish a career as a venerable Singaporean poet and journalist, became interested in fusing poetry with music. His classmate Ken Chang, now more popularly known as the “father of xinyao”, happily joined him in his experiment. “Frankly, we were not motivated to study,” Pan said in the 2015 documentary film on xinyao, The Songs We Sang. “Our strength was in writing and composition, so we spent most of our energy on that.” Pan later initiated the campus concert series Poetry Music – Four Public Concerts that ran until 1988.

In 1984, a 12-track compilation album titled 《明天21》 (Tomorrow 21)—which was produced by Chang—was issued, showcasing the fresh faces of the Chinese music scene coming out of campuses like Jurong Junior College. These names formed the first generation of Singapore’s xinyao recording artists.

One of them was Jurong Junior College student Eric Moo, whose song 《邂逅》 (Encounter) enjoyed chart-topping popularity after debuting on Lim’s radio show. Moo was a member of folk band Subway, and 《邂逅》 (Encounter) was a surprise solo hit that rippled through Singapore for its exquisite traditional folk-inspired melodies and plaintive lyrics by Huang Huizhen.

As a student, Moo was just like Pan—when he first failed to enter junior college after his O-Level examinations, Moo spent his free time learning how to play the guitar. Once he finally managed to enter Jurong Junior College, he formed Subway and became much more interested in making music. By the time 《邂逅》 (Encounter) conquered the charts, he had yet to complete his A-Levels.

“This song is often acknowledged as the genesis of the xinyao movement that followed,” Music & Movement chief Lim Sek says in his vote. Later this year, Moo is set to perform a comeback concert in Singapore, four decades into his accomplished career.

Composer & Lyricist: Dick Lee

In a review of the new musical Fried Rice Paradise – The Makan Party, staged by Singapore Repertory Theatre, Straits Times writer Clement Yong quipped that the Dick Lee song has “the nine lives of a cat”.

The legacy of the novelty pop song cannot be understated—despite it being one of Lee’s most popular songs, it first appeared on record in his 1974 debut album Life Story, one that few people own and has never been reissued by Lee since. It was only with his second album, 1984’s Life in the Lion City, that his career began to take shape. So why has the song endured?

For one, the song first emerged the year before in 1973. A talent contest organised by cable radio station Rediffusion Singapore, produced by Vernon Cornelius, lead singer of 1960s Singaporean rock band The Quests, spurred Lee to write his own original song as an entry. “I wanted to write something as Singaporean as possible”, Lee revealed in a booklet of the 2010 staging of the Fried Rice Paradise musical. “And so, the little ditty about Bee Lean and her restaurant was born.”

According to Lee, it was his “liberal use of Singlish” in the lyrics of Fried Rice Paradise that led to its ban on radio that decade—“at a time when our Singaporean-ness had not yet been clearly defined, nor explored,” he noted. After Life in the Lion City was released as Lee’s second bid at stardom, Lee gave Fried Rice Paradise another shot with a re-recorded version, issued in a 1986 compilation album of the same name.

“I decided to revive that Singaporean-ness, but it didn’t work. It failed,” Lee admitted to Esplanade Offstage in 2018. He lamented its failure due to piracy, at a time when Singaporeans were able to acquire music for cheap through bootlegged cassette tapes. But the main reason was that “there was no interest from Singaporeans about being Singaporean”, he added. “Nobody cared at all.”

In retrospect, Lee was simply ahead of the curve. Three times was the charm when, after the success of the 1988 musical Beauty World, which had music written by Dick Lee and was itself filled with Singlish dialogue and lyrics, the arrival of Fried Rice Paradise, the musical, primed Singaporeans to appreciate the song for its supreme charm and catchiness. The rest is history.

Composer & Lyricist: Liang Wern Fook

If 《邂逅》(Encounter) started the xinyao movement, it was 《细水长流》 (Friends Forever） that made it a core part of Singapore’s national songbook. It also has a fan in former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who gave the song a shoutout in his 2014 National Day Rally speech. 

The song was first penned in 1977 by Liang Wern Fook, an early xinyao (literally ‘Singapore folk music’) songwriter. However, it was the 1998 rendition of the song—performed by singers Joi Chua, Leelian Chua and Tong Yek Suan, and issued in the compilation album Sing Singapore '98 - A Festival of Songs—that drew more audiences to the anthem devoted to friendship and unity.

So popular 《细水长流》（Friends Forever） has become that it was given a new spin once again earlier this year, as part of the SG60 celebrations. With Joi and Leelian—the former now an established singer-songwriter and actress, and the latter an established radio DJ,《细水长流》(Friends Forever) re-emerged with a punchy pop-rock arrangement by Jim Lim. Its music video was later shared by PM Lee on social media.

But it’s the original 1998 recording with the duo and Tong—who sadly passed away in 2019 after a tireless career in xinyao music—that shines with the hopeful spirit that Liang first envisioned, complete with a lonesome harmonica that ties the song back to its humble folk roots. 

“It's very difficult to pick one favourite Liang Wern Fook song,” says theatre composer Julian Wong in his vote. “His lyrics have such economy—he's able to say so much with so little, with maximum impact. And his melodies are always easy to follow. A true songsmith and poet!”

Composer & Lyricist: Johari Salleh

The 1980s were transformative for the music industry in many ways—the global shift to digital recordings, the integration of synthesisers in pop music, the public’s introduction to the compact disc and the Walkman. In Singapore, the decade ushered in a new era of promise for musicians, as the 1970s were marred by clampdowns and a public disapproval of alternative music.

Not for Rahimah Rahim. The singer and actress had already been a beloved entertainment icon by then, having released a string of successful albums. Her versatility and vocal range, a rarity in Singaporean music at the time, injected a welcomed dose of funk and soul into Malay pop music. 

“She does not employ vocal acrobatics often overused by torch singers,” wrote Eddino Abdul Hadi in an essay about Rahimah, in celebration of her Cultural Medallion honour in 2021. “Her strength lies in her ability to be in command of the little nuances in her phrasings and her impeccable sense of rhythm, a trait that she probably picked up singing jazz in her early years before she switched to pop music.”

Her music career in the 1970s was already a fusion of different styles. But it was with her beloved 1982 song Gadis dan Bunga (Girls and Flowers), taken from the album of the same name, that officially ushered Rahimah into a new decade. Dispensing with the analog grooves of her 1970s work, Rahimah instead drew from dangdut and 1980s pop music, synths and all. 

Not one to be carried away by shiny new toys, Rahimah recorded a song—written by Malaysian composer Johari Salleh—about a day in the life of a village flower girl. What makes Gadis dan Bunga a significant song in Rahimah’s catalogue is the balancing act of the contemporary and traditional—notably, a re-recording of Gadis dan Bunga from 2003 went viral on TikTok in 2022. Only a superstar like Rahimah Rahim could transcend generations.

Composer & Lyricist: The Stoned Revivals

In the 1990s, when the term 'psychedelic' already signified a nostalgic pastiche of ’60s rock music, The Stoned Revivals were the genuine article. To this day, the four-piece band counts only one studio album under their charge, 1999’s Golden Love Songs from the Evil Island of the Handsome Tropical Cannibals.

Its title, a real mouthful, sounds like it was lifted from a paper collage by a bored punk teenager: as if the first three words were cut from the album cover of an Air Supply greatest hits CD and glued onto the poster of a 1950s B-movie. And maybe 'handsome' was scribbled in because they felt like it.

The album’s contents are as heady and trippy as they come, and a culture shock in Singapore’s alternative rock music scene at the time—its 14 tracks play like a mixtape of indie rock, bossa nova, punk, jazz pop, trip-hop and lounge music transmissions.

The Stoned Revivals are 'psychedelic' in that listening to their music feels like digging through imagined remnants of the past. Frontman Esam Salleh once told Bandwagon that they were inspired by “Salvation Army cassettes that ranged from chamber music to Cantopop and cheap disco records from Sungei Road”. It wouldn’t be surprising if the band stacked together these old records and played them once, threw them away, fell asleep and attempted to recreate everything they heard the next day.

The band quickly amassed a cult following, which included The Padres’ Joe Ng, who was gobsmacked by an early performance by the band. He later spent his savings to produce their demo tape Soul Detergent. Two years before their debut album, the band gave the public a taste of their space-age freakiness with Goodil, a catchy and otherwise polished tune that shines with “incredible pop sensibilities, a funky underbelly of rock groove, smart horn arrangement and words that soar dreamlike,” Ng waxes definitively in his vote.

These days, while its memorable refrain of “Let’s fly away on a trip to Bali” reads less like a true promise of escapism and more a line lifted from a Scoot ad, the anything-goes spirit of The Stoned Revivals is the perfect example of a Singaporean band who could manifest their own sonic world by vibes alone.

Composers & Lyricists: Margo Sylvia & Gilbert Lopez

Alphonso Soosay, the drummer of Naomi and the Boys, could remember how the band had already begun to impress Singapore’s then-nascent music scene—even before he joined them. Formed by guitarist Robert Suriya, the Boys first came together in 1960 and cut their teeth on the circuit at night clubs and British military bases.

Yet, Suriya started to feel stagnant. “He had to come up with new ideas and new sounds to keep up with what was already happening in Singapore,” Soosay recalled.

In an interview with Andy Young—formerly of ’60s Singaporean garage rock band The Velvetones, band leader Suriya maintained that his sister Naomi, then 16, was selected to perform with them not because they were family. “She had a tremendous feel in the songs,” he noted.

One listen to Happy Happy Birthday, Baby!, the band’s cover of a doo-wop song by American group The Tune Weavers, and you’ll understand why. Ginette Chittick, DJ and member of shoegaze band Astreal, loves how Naomi and the Boys’ guitar pop cover was recorded as “a plaintive melodic plea for a love lost”, compared to the Weavers’ simmering, jazzy original.

In 1965, it was a chart-topping hit in Singapore and Malaysia. As producer Lim Sek noted in his vote, “It is also representative of songs from Singaporean acts of that era when mostly cover versions were recorded and, sometimes, in more than one language,” adding that his introduction to the song was a Mandarin rendition by singer Rita Chao. As bands like Naomi and the Boys brought lovelorn torch songs to the tea dances of Singapore, they helped ignite a movement that would soon find its own original voices.

Composer & Lyricist: Dick Lee

On the album Sing Singapore '98 - A Festival of Songs, sitting alongside 《细水长流》(Friends Forever) and recordings of Munnaeru Vaalibaa and Ramli Sarip’s Dondang was a little tune titled Home sung by Kit Chan. The 26-year-old was then a quickly emerging artist in Singapore’s growing Mandopop industry, which had solidified after xinyao’s popularity in the 1980s.

Home is often recognised as not only a National Day song, but the National Day song—the benchmark for patriotic balladry that all local parade songs ever since are measured by. So, of course, Home would be here. In the year the Sing Singapore album was released, Home was featured in the televised National Day Parade. Since then, every NDP has had a show-stopping musical performance of this song. Subsequently a Chinese-language version of the song was also recorded.

“I was living abroad at the time in Hong Kong and [Dr Sydney Tan] said, 'Would you like to take part [in Sing Singapore]?'” Dick Lee recalled to Hear65. “The theme of that year was the river—the Singapore River, which is why the river features so strongly in the song. I think my being away contributed quite a lot to the way the song feels: a little bit poignant, there’s a bittersweet, homesick quality in it. It sort of reiterated how home becomes more important when you’re away from it.”

In his vote for Home, poet and editor Yeow Kai Chai maintains that “nothing comes close” to the power of the song which, “nimbly sung” by Kit Chan, “hits, well, home”. “When she begins with ‘Whenever I’m feeling low’, the song captures the feeling of being together and not taking Singapore for granted.”

Composer: Rudra | Lyricist: Kathir

The Singaporean death metal band Rudra is often praised for carving their own niche in the seemingly endless void of heavy music with the microgenre named Vedic metal. Often, the distinction is thematic—in the case of Rudra, their songs are drawn heavily from Hindu scripture.

There’s also Indian classical scales infused into their breathless guitars, and traditional instruments weaved into their songwriting. Above all, though, Rudra stands as one of Asia’s most accomplished metal acts in the last few decades—due in part to their dedication to the craft, and to the consistency they’ve displayed across their 17-year output. 

To outsiders, Rudra’s music appears mystical and intriguing. To its four members, especially to frontman and lyricist Kathir, their craft is wholly devotional, spiritually and literally. “The sustainability of Rudra is a well-thought out process, and we have never been disappointed with what we have,” frontman Kathir told Bandwagon in 2019.

Hymn from the Blazing Chariot was selected for this list, with the track taken from their 2009 album Brahmavidya: Transcendental I, the second of three albums based on the Hindu scripture of Bhagavad Gita. The song “traverses sonic planes to reach spiritual depths”, praises Ginette Chittick in her vote, while weish is more effusive about the band’s legacy.

“Rudra are legends who coined, then popularised Vedic metal around the world with their transcendental melding of Indian classical music, Sanskrit mantras and Vedic philosophy into metal,” she says. “It makes me so proud that this was a genre birthed out of Singapore.”

Composer & Lyricist: Opposition Party

In the early 1990s, as Singaporeans began to hear ravings about a surging alternative music scene in the country, they could sample its sounds without committing to a full album purchase.

Such was the magic of a magazine sampler—then an exciting freebie that involved a free CD compilation of songs, sometimes written and recorded just for that disc. Singaporean magazine BigO, which had been charting the rise of independent music in Singapore from the late-1980s, issued the New School Rock compilation album with their March 1991 issue.

On its tracklist were two new songs each by three up-and-coming bands who could not sound more different from each other. There was the jangly pop reverie of The Oddfellows and the glacial synth-pop of Corporate Toil. Sandwiched in between them were Opposition Party, whose two tracks Impending Death and Crawl Out Alive were sequenced like a mid-album jumpscare for unwitting listeners.

It’s hard to say if that was BigO’s intent, but it certainly served the disruptive sonic intentions of Opposition Party well. The punk band, fronted by a man with the stage name of Francis Frightful, were formed out of dissatisfaction with societal norms in 1980s Singapore. While that has changed over time, the band’s reason for existing remains the same. “Even if it’s better now, the feeling of being an outcast has not left me,” Frightful admitted to NSFTV in a 2021 interview. “I still think I’m an outcast.”

To Singaporean listeners, Impending Death was Frightful sounding the alarm over a world gone mad. As with punk tradition, the band paints broad strokes to punch up and take aim—in this case, at warmongering politicians. Even though Opposition Party were Singapore’s first punk band, Impending Death leans closer to thrash metal, a genre that the band would continue to embrace over the ensuing decades.

Impending Death would also signal to others around the country that heavier music didn’t always need to breed six feet underground. It wasn’t the 1970s anymore, nor was it the ’80s—such music can blister with rage in the wide open, under our scorching sun.

Composers & Lyricists: Sezairi Sezali, Brooke Toia & Harry Sommerdahl

In 2009, a young 22-year-old hopeful named Sezairi Sezali won the third season of Singapore Idol, following the footsteps of past winners Taufik Batisah and Hady Mirza by swiftly delivering his debut album Take Two in 2010.

However, instead of building on momentum, Sezairi shuffled away from the spotlight. There was no clear reason, although in recent years, Sezairi has been open about his battle with anxiety that began in his Idol days. “Something started to happen with my body, I wasn't sure why,” he revealed in a podcast interview with radio DJ Jean Danker. “[I’d] vomit every time before going on stage.” He attributed the ability to manage his anxiety to the support of his partner, whom he married in 2016. That same year, Sezairi re-emerged in the public eye with a new self-titled EP. 

When talking about the follow-up to Sezairi in 2018, he told Hear65: “I feel like the turning point was when I started to be true to myself and be honest that this is what I like.” Making music on his own terms also meant that if it wasn’t ready, it wasn’t coming out. And so, the EP titled Undertones wasn’t released until 2020. By then, It’s You had enjoyed two years of modest popularity. That same year, with the pandemic closing off borders and physical interaction, his anxiety became debilitating to the point he lost his singing voice.

It took “writing songs that weren’t so depressing” that got Sezairi back in the pink of health, he told The Straits Times. This resulted in an album of lovestruck ballads titled Violets Aren’t Blue. But it was another ballad of his that suddenly caught traction in 2022: It’s You scored over 100 million streams on Spotify, making him the first Singaporean to achieve that feat. Today, its music video stands at over 110 million views on YouTube.

All these coincidences—from his marriage and comeback happening in the same year, to pure balladry being his way out of anxiety—spell it out clearly: love has been Sezairi’s muse. Judging by his output since, he’s been feeling it in his life more than ever. And that’s clearly surpassed any metric of industry success to him, Idol or otherwise.

Composer & Lyricist: Kick!

Long before John Klass became the voice of Singaporean radio, he entered local airwaves with a group named Kick!, the instructive exclamation mark adding zeal to the sudden domination of their single Jane. Klass was flanked by keyboardist Dinesh Bhatia and guitarist Jai Wahab.

The synthesised bliss that opens Jane never wavers as a helpless Klass yearns to return to the object of his affections. It’s a lovesick song as any, but a later verse uncovers the story that feels all too real for young Singaporean men. “Then I got conscripted, and I trained hard for you / Tried to keep you at bay / but little did I know that you'd go astray”, Klass sings.

There can be many reasons for why Jane became a smash hit for Kick!. But Klass—having since demonstrated his endless charisma as a solo singer, radio host, and all-around showman—was perceptive in writing a song that spoke directly to a uniquely Singaporean condition: the heartbreak that comes from serving the nation if you had to leave someone behind.

Jane remained Kick!’s sole hit. In May 2025, Klass bid farewell to his Gold 905 listeners, later revealing on social media that, for him, “it’s time to go home to the music”. Where this will end up is anyone’s guess, but a clip of new music sees Klass—looking shockingly youthful at age 55—singing about another love that got away. To Klass, music is a never-ending chase. And he’s got the stamina to keep running.

Composer & Lyricist: Plainsunset

For any indie rock band, having your most popular song come from your fourth album is an achievement in itself. It’s validation that, while you have most of your life to come up with your first album, you can spend the rest of your career refining your craft, even if it’s in front of the public.

In their self-titled 2008 album, Johari Window is the track that kicks it off. Named after the cognitive psychology tool, devised to help patients understand the rubrics of human relationships, the anthemic Johari Window comes across more like the trials of Sisyphus.

“You've been a part of me so long / Just not the part that keeps me strong / You've been a part of me and I know / That I will miss you when you go”, frontman Jon Chan sings assuredly in its opening. However, it’s its chorus of “To countless mornings to endless nights / You keep me waiting for you to get things right / While in the darkness or in the sun / This time my waiting has only just begun” that is sung over and over again that indicates the wait may last forever.

To many listeners, that hit close to home. The pride that comes with stubbornness was itself a form of rebellion against conformity—imbued in Johari Window, it brought young, maladjusted listeners closer together. “All of those memories are firmly intertwined with this song—a song that represents my mid-twenties, an era where unfiltered emotions were balanced with really good music,” artist Razi Razak says in his vote.

Composer & Lyricist: The CB Dogs

The core members of The CB Dogs were born after 2000. Yet, their brand of punk-flavoured garage rock is as old-school as it comes—belligerent, edgy and cocky. Performative? Maybe.

In their infamous 2020 interview with Mothership, they swore so much that the writer cautioned readers the publication “never had to censor so many swear words in a Mothership article before”. Later in their chat, the two members were asked if they wore their accessories—including a gold chain, sunglasses and jade bangles—to put on an image for the public, whether it was fans or random onlookers.

According to the writer, it’s all a facade. She probed further to ask if everything they wore was intentional—perhaps to feed into what their then-growing fanbase perceived them to be. "I don't know, eh. Am I?" frontman Gabriel Rui answered cheekily.

They may play inscrutable, but their sole release—a self-titled compilation album—is chock-full of beer-swilling anthems meant to be sung with middle fingers in the air. And it’s Johnny Tay that’s become a signature song—a hate letter to an 'a**hole' gangster looking to start a fight.

Considering it’s sung from the perspective of a schoolgoing teenager written by 20-somethings, Johnny Tay seems more symbolic of all the arrogant people you might have come across in life. For listeners, the lyrics of Johnny Tay is the monologue you have in your head as you grumble and let your Johnny Tay pass you by unscathed. The music of The CB Dogs, dressed in their classic ah beng get-ups, is escapism for those who feel unqualified to stand up for themselves—or those whose anger manifests in destruction rather than justice. “We all got a Johnny Tay in our lives,” says history and pop culture writer CT Lim in his vote. “So f**k you, Johnny Tay.”

But even The CB Dogs have to grow out of their adolescence. “We need to focus more on making some YUSOF ISHAKS and cannot dedicate as much time on playing guitar in SINGAPORE LAND,” they told fans on social media in 2025. In all-caps, they continued: “WHAT TO DO? NO MONEY NO HONEY!” Time will tell if they would sacrifice all of that just to pummel a new Johnny Tay in the workplace.

Composer & Lyricist: Ebiet G. Ade

By the time a young Art Fazil bumped into Ramli Sarip, the latter had begun to mentally check out of his band Sweet Charity. In 1986, the rock vocalist departed to start his solo career—not a massive shock to those who adored the band, having been drawn in from the start by Ramli’s instant magnetism.

Despite forming in 1969, making them one of Singapore’s longest surviving bands, Sweet Charity only released their debut album 10 years later. From 1979 to 1985, the band issued an album a year, up until Ramli’s departure. Their second album, Refugee, arrived with lead single Kamelia, a song that’s become a signature tune of theirs—even though, like a handful of other entries on this list, it’s a cover.

Kamelia was more of a facelift than a tribute. Sweet Charity came across Camellia 1 by Indonesian singer-songwriter Ebiet G. Ade, who recorded and issued the song in 1979. Ade’s Camellia is an epic prog-folk odyssey sliced in four parts, with the other three instalments released in his ensuing albums. Sweet Charity’s Kamelia, however, distills the suspense and gothic melodies of the original into a fiery power ballad.

“Sweet Charity spearheaded the wave of Malay rock bands that dominated the Malay music scene in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1980s,” says music writer Eddino Abdul Hadi in his vote. “Kamelia is one of their signature songs, a dramatic rock ballad that launched lighters-in-the-air singalongs.”

Composer: Mohamed Raffee | Lyricist: Elangovan

One of those spellbound by Sweet Charity at their concerts was a 10-year-old Mohamed Raffee. “They looked just like American rock heroes,” he recalled to Esplanade Offstage in 2021. 

At that age, Raffee already had a taste of the limelight. Raffee’s father, a professional musician named Syed Yakob, worked in India on television and radio. On trips, Raffee would tag along to accompany him to work and perform on, well, literally any instrument his father would pass him. First, it was the mandolin, then the drums, the bongos, a gong. “Any instruments I take, I play,” he said.

As a kid, being born into a musical family, he was taught folk music through Indian film soundtracks and the works of Greek singer Nana Mouskouri. As a teenager, he gravitated towards the West. His brothers Noor and Bashir would form a band with him to perform disco and funk covers. One day, his father—though happy to see his children carry on the family lineage—urged him: “Do not give up Tamil and Hindi music.”

To Raffee, Tamil music was limited to films, plays and traditional ensembles. He wanted to play in a band. As he entered the 1980s, Raffee’s taste in pop music was diverse—he had been a fan of Hong Kong singers like Alan Tam, along with Malaysian hard rock band Alleycats, and American funk groups like the Commodores and Kool and the Gang. There was no Tamil band making pop music.

Up to the challenge, Raffee, Noor and Bashir, along with their friend Daniel Sitranen, attempted to record an album as The Vasantham Boys, which they titled The New Horizon.

The initial excitement in realising their dream was quickly deflated, as Raffee faced rejection when he shopped the demo around to music executives. Then, devastation—the studio that the Vasantham Boys recorded in was sold off. When Raffee paid a visit to collect their things, he found that the master tapes for the album had been erased by the new owners. 

Years later, as Raffee prepared to leave for India to work—later linking up with A.R. Rahman, a man who would successfully forge links between Indian music and the pop world—he released his solo albums Breakthro (1993) and Karupayee (1994), the latter earning him radio play. 

Backed by his Vasantham Boys brothers, the 1994 album featured modern sounds like new jack swing and R&B mixed with his Tamil-language songwriting—experiments of the fusion sound that Raffee had always dreamed about. But it’s the title track that helped kickstart his commercial appeal: Karupayee (Dark Beauty), with lyrics written by celebrated Singaporean poet Elangovan, was “made something as close as to the original cinema songs [of Bollywood]”, Raffee said in an episode of PopLore, before adding with a wink: “But not too close.”

Composer & Lyricist: Eric Moo

Once Eric Moo burst into the spotlight with 《邂逅》（Encounter), he entered the music industry as a shining prospect. Naturally, this included television work—but like how his xinyao start involved forgoing school work, his theme song for the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation series The Coffee Shop (咖啡乌) had its own hurdles.

The title of the song 《咖啡乌》 is pronounced in Hokkien as kopi O, as how many Singaporeans would call it when they need a caffeine boost. These days, no one would bat an eye at a song with that title. In 1985, its Chinese title had “three little words that almost started a mini revolution”, veteran music producer Lim Sek reveals in his vote.

“In an age when the Speak Mandarin mandate was an iron-clad rule that governed our broadcast media, dialect references with vernacular connotations were strictly forbidden.”

The drama series, which followed a cast of working-class characters who frequented (or worked at) a heartland coffee shop—or kopitiam, was already a hit on paper. Moo was roped in to write and record its theme song. Lim explains: “He agreed on the condition that the title of his song is pronounced in Hokkien, rather than the Mandarin equivalent of ka fei wu. I can imagine the amount of paperwork needed just to obtain clearance for those three little words.”

Kopi O ended up an anomaly on Singaporean television. Dramas featuring dialogue written in Chinese dialect only became more common in the ensuing decades. But the theme song—and the series itself—was an undeniable hit. Says Lim: “So with Kopi O in hand, here’s a toast to those three little words that started it all!"

Composer: Yusoff Rahmat & Affendi Abdul Rahman | Lyricist: Yusoff Rahmat

The Beatles were a transformative force in 1960s music, although this is easier said in retrospect. However, their influence could be felt like a gust of wind amidst our humid climate as Singaporeans began raving about a new style of pop music called pop yeh yeh—with its name apparently taken from the hook of The Beatles’ She Loves You.

In his book A Narrative History of Music in Singapore 1819 to the Present, Dr Eugene I. Dairianathan has called this narrative into question—he added that, at the time, the French pop genre of yeye had begun to gain international attention. Plus, whether pop yeh yeh started in 1963 (the year She Loves You was released) or 1965 is still up for debate.

It’s the music spawned from this era that has provided insight into the way Singaporeans, and those across the causeway, responded to Western trends. With the influence of guitar bands like The Shadows and The Ventures, along with the carefree charm that endeared the Beatles to the entire globe, pop yeh yeh bands became stars.

The Swallows were one of the first to do so. Originally starting out as an instrumental outfit, playing backing band to various singers—including P. Ramlee—they had stabilised with the introduction of their own singer Ahmad Daud. However, Ahmad’s departure from the band in the mid-’60s meant they had to start from scratch.

When they met Kassim Selamat, their prayers were answered. Kassim brought with him his Bawean heritage—performing songs like La O Be and Nga Lompak A Go Go in Boyanese, a Malay dialect then rarely represented in popular music. It was one that spoke directly to many pop yeh yeh listeners who were Boyanese themselves. The song was written by Kassim’s brother Yusoff Rahmat.

Boyanese lyrics in popular music slowly disappeared from existence by the 1970s—at the cusp of a new decade, The Swallows announced their disbandment. According to Carl Hamm, a DJ and curator of the 2014 compilation album Pop Yeh Yeh: Psychedelic Rock from Singapore and Malaysia–1964 to 1970, the band broke up in protest against piracy. An unfortunate footnote, as the song—aside from a handful of obscure Malaysian compilation CDs—has since become impossible to own without shelling out hundreds for a vinyl copy.

Composer & Lyricist: Chen Jiaming

Like Eric Moo, Chen Jiaming began as a Jurong Junior College student with dreams of making music. Starting out in the xinyao scene, Chen continued his hustle into the emergent Mandopop music industry. He wrote 《如燕》 (Like a Swallow) as the theme song of The Little Nyonya, a Mandarin-language television series about the trials and tribulations of a Peranakan Chinese family in Malacca, Malaysia.

His pick to sing the melancholic ballad was Olivia Ong, by then a jazz pop artist with a repertoire of mostly covers of popular music and picks from the traditional jazz songbook. As a student, Ong had dreams to perform in a J-pop group—just before the Hallyu wave changed the way Singaporeans consumed hip Asian pop.

At age 20, Ong released two albums: Precious Stones, an album of English pop songs produced in Tokyo, where she was based at the time, and A Girl Meets Bossanova where Ong found her niche. “I was very mesmerised by the rhythm and the sexiness of the genre, and it stayed with me throughout my growing-up years,” she told Hear65. “I find bossa nova to be romantic, sexy, smooth, and even melancholic all at once.”

《如燕》 (Like a Swallow) is neither sexy nor smooth, but Ong took to the song immediately. “What resonated, especially with me, was this line in the song, '风雨中且让我盈步婀娜', which loosely translates to mean 'dance gracefully through the storm',” she elaborated. “This line strikes a chord in me because you know in life, no one goes through life without facing challenges, and I've had my fair share of them.”

The song propelled Ong to Mandopop stardom that, while it has seen her producing fewer albums compared to her jazz era, has nonetheless brought her a wider and more adoring fanbase.

Composer & Lyricist: Chen Jiaming

Another of Chen’s proteges is Mavis Hee, a Mandopop singer who faced a whirlwind of a career from the starting line, having been scouted and handpicked by the songwriter in a 1994 contest.

Her debut album in Taiwan, 《遗憾》 (Regret) shot through the charts and beat out Faye Wong’s 《菲靡靡之音》 (Decadent Sound of Faye), an album that reimagined the songs of Teresa Teng. Nicknames like “Singapore’s new Heavenly Queen” and “the Heavenly Queen killer” were pegged to Hee’s shining star, but the singer was uncomfortable with the lavish praise.

“I think I would be very upset if it had been my record company [that] created such comparisons because then it would have been exploitation of Faye Wong's name,” she told South China Morning Post in a 1996 interview, adding that she was a fan of Wong.

In the feature, the down-to-earth Hee struggles with the comparisons to Wong, who, at the time, was a pop star with a chic image and a personality drawn to the fringes. Hee opened up about the emotionally taxing experiences of navigating the industry—people who were “friendly and helpful” at first were happy to “backstab” her later—and how her career was possible because of the teamwork she had with people like Chen.

At a time when fans and the media were eager to paint Hee as a diva-in-the-making, Hee simply wanted to make music. 《城里的月光》 (Moonlight In The City) is the final track on 《遗憾》 (Regret), a stirring ballad that endures as a demonstration of Chen’s peerless songwriting skills. In a 2021 interview, Hee attributes its success to Chen too, and shrugged off her contributions. “I probably didn't ask too many questions regarding the song, about how I was going to interweave the emotions or how I see myself as this person singing or living this life singing the song,” she said.

Yet, it was Hee’s ability to throw herself into the unknown that gives 《城里的月光》 (Moonlight In The City) its expressive earnestness, arguably the main quality of the ballad. “It was like first love,” she remarked candidly about recording the track as a young singer, “you don't know what to expect.”

Composer: Flightsch | Lyricist: Yung Raja

As of writing, the top-voted comment on Yung Raja’s music video for Mustafa on YouTube is by his father: “I am proud of my son. I wish him to touch greater heights.”

The rapper, real name Rajid Ahamed, is unashamed of many things: his ambition, his talent, his taste for luxury. But he’s also loud and proud about his family. In the game of modern rap, where an artist’s motivations and dreams are spelled in bold and all caps, Raja practises gratitude. “Seeing this city through [my parents’] lens is truly a blessing because this is the life of their dreams,” he noted in an interview with Time Out Singapore.

Affable and larger than life, Raja is the son of first-generation South Indian immigrants, and his debut into Singapore’s hybrid rap scene—where styles often clash due to the relatively small size of the country—signalled the arrival of a charisma machine. “Doesn't matter where you from / And you'll know me when you hear me / And you know I keep it runnin / Like an energiser bunny,” he raps in the trap single.

In the song, many references are made to Little India and Mustafa Centre, the 24-hour shopping mall with seemingly endless hallways. Raja claims Singapore in 2018’s Mustafa, and his steady stream of singles ever since have seen him throw the gauntlet in the region’s rap scene as a Tamil superstar-in-the-making—one that undoubtedly a veteran like Mohamed Raffee would be proud of. His parents sure are.

Composer & Lyricist: Ger Ho

From the 1990s onwards, Mandopop became Singapore’s challenge to bigger territories like Taiwan and Hong Kong in Asian pop music.

It’s made stars out of Kit Chan, JJ Lin and Stefanie Sun, a reluctant artist like Mavis Hee, and a crossover talent like Olivia Ong. A young Geraldine Ho was aware of this when she tried her hand at making music. “If you wanted to make it back in the day, you had to sing in Mandarin in order to reach out to the Taiwanese and Chinese markets,” she recalled to TODAY in 2016, “which weren’t just bigger, but also a lot more polished and forward thinking in terms of marketing strategies.”

For an aspiring singer who feared performing in public, the prospect was terrifying. As a result, Ho gave music a shot, scored a minor hit, and then scurried away back into obscurity. Her sole attempt and a song in English, My Special Angel, originally existed as a demo she recorded while studying in Australia—she paid $400 for studio time to put it together. That demo was issued in the 1996 compilation album Dazed and Confused. Later on, it appeared in the soundtracks of Army Daze and The Teenage Textbook Movie, both hallmarks of popular Singaporean cinema.

The soundtrack for the latter was produced by John Klass, having spent years after the success of Kick!’s Jane in pursuit of his own solo career. In between Klass’ two polished pop ballads and songs by short-lived bands Elmo and Sugarflies was My Special Angel, a wistful acoustic pop song that could’ve easily enjoyed a life as a bedroom pop hit in the last few years—minus the studio backing band.

Ho’s reticence was perhaps too out of step with a 1990s Singapore, where making pop music was only possible in professional (and costly) studios—and promoting your music required you to face the public. In the TODAY interview, Ho expressed her astonishment at how far music-making had come. “Going the indie route means artistes have a lot more creative freedom and are in full control of their image,” she said. “Thankfully, with technology and the internet, it’s now so much easier to release music on your own.” Ho did the interview to promote her first song in 20 years, Missing You.

Composer: Cashew Chemists | Lyricist: Brian Chia & Yuji Kumagai

In the 2010s, Singapore’s music scene integrated fully with social media—whether artists liked it or not, a Facebook fan page was the best way to promote new music and concerts. Instagram, then a visual-heavy platform swarmed with sepia filters and hashtags, gave artists a chance to document their activities in the studio.

If you lived through this time, you can close your eyes and recall the countless 'Watch this space' teasers that bands churned out more than actual recorded music. With the touch of a touchscreen, artists could get their music out there without the backing of a marketing team. It was exciting, but it required a lot of work.

So it was a minor miracle that the breezy sounds of Cashew Chemists never sounded laboured in the slightest. In an early interview with the band’s lead guitarist Brian Chia, he revealed the reason for this: “We have a five-minute rule: If we take longer than five minutes to complete a song, we trash it and start over. The perfect song should flow in seconds.”

Originally starting out as a heavy metal band—and what that sounded like, barely anyone knows—Cashew Chemists brought Singaporean indie rock a healthy dose of feel-good rhythms and guitar melodies. With the disaffected croon of frontman Yuji Kumagai, the dingiest DIY venue could feel like a tea dance for the entirety of their set. Like their pop yeh yeh godfathers, Cashew Chemists were inspired to write songs like The Beatles. 

Fans were happy to sing along at every Cashew Chemists show, no matter the location. “Some of my favourite memories are of Cashew Chemists asking the audience to sing along, then a whole crowd of us screaming the iconic guitar riff like 'BIDUBIDUBIDUBIDU' as opposed to the vocal melody,” weish remembers in her vote for Over You.

Cashew Chemists followed up Singapore’s indie rock of the 2000s, which inspired visions of concrete buildings and city lights. Songs like Over You and Feel Amazing play like a detour from the highway into the beaches of Pasir Ris Park. The trip was brief—the band quietly disbanded after 2015’s Previous On… EP—but for many fans, it felt amazing.

Before rock music became the territory of old-man-yells-at-cloud.gif, it was the celebration of youth and the possibility that it could last forever. Radio Station, an early single by Singaporean indie rock band The Padres, captured that feeling in a Tiger beer bottle.

This was, after all, in a time when the magazine that covered Singaporean music was BigO, which stood for 'Before I Get Old'. Its editor and co-founder Phillip Cheah once said: “It's that moment of youth when we still have the will and energy for change. To write their own songs and to play their own music. We're not afraid of getting old!”

The opening of arts venue The Substation in 1990 opened up a new arena for alternative music of all stripes—heavy or dreamy, catchy or cryptic, good or bad. Music stores like Roxy Records and Dada Records stocked their albums. The radio, on the other hand, was cautious about this rising tide. Chris Ho, then a DJ on Perfect 10 98.7FM (now 987FM), provided some context in a 1996 documentary film made by Ngee Ann Polytechnic students. “[Radio stations] have to be very market-oriented… and ratings conscious,” he said. “So, in that respect, local music would seem to be neglected.”

It was this corporate attitude that BigO and countless bands rebelled against—Radio Station sounds like a transmission from a slightly different Singapore that would have them on rotation. Not that The Padres made the song out of resentment—still, frontman Joe Ng was forced to come to terms with dejection not just as a member of the band, but as a fresh-faced employee of record label BMG trying to get local bands into the live music circuit.

“When I knocked on the doors of pubs, live houses and schools and said we were gonna have a local band play at their spaces, and they’d be playing original music, their reactions were, ‘Hmm? Local music?’” Ng remembered in an Esplanade interview.That's when the frustration started to [come], and even a bit of anger. Why, for me personally, did it come [to this]?”

That didn’t stop him and countless other musicians. He added: “The only way forward was to keep doing it.”

Composer: Ronin | Lyricist: Najip Ali

Groove has always been in the heart of Najip Ali. In the 1990s, the fresh-faced 20-something was a familiar face to television audiences with Asia Bagus, a television variety show that showcased up-and-coming artists from the region.

To the Asian masses, Najip was a charismatic emcee with a pep in his step. To those who thrived underground and in backstages, they knew Najip as a multi-hyphenate—a dancer, choreographer, sartorialist and renaissance man.

Najip never professed to be a musician, but his imprint on Singaporean music moved beyond the television screens. In a Rice Media interview, Najip revealed that he likened himself to a figure like Malcolm McLaren, a promoter and manager who helped kickstart the explosion of British punk music by helping to form The Sex Pistols. “I like how people like Malcolm could move a group of people to do something. And these people whom you inspire will, in turn, keep you doing it.”

By the time Ali had thought about Ren-tak Oonik, his ability to galvanise creativity had begun to rub off on himself. The result is a rap song made for the Malay community, with shout-outs to the greats—Zainal Abidin, M. Nasir, Sheila Majid, boy band KRU—and an “anthem for celebrating one’s uniqueness,” Esplanade senior producer Hanie Nadia Hamzah said in her vote. If Najip spent his personal time helping to cultivate the art of friends, Ren-tak Oonik was his attempt at spreading the love to all who could hear.

Composer: JJ Lin | Lyricist: Eric Lin

JJ Lin is synonymous with modern Mandopop music. But he is Singaporean, after all—and the most relatable thing he could confess in interviews is that he’s still an English speaker at heart.

“With songwriting, I still feel as if I’m best able to express myself in English. It’s more direct and instinctive for me,” he told Prestige in 2022. “That’s just the language I continue to visualise in.” It’s Mandarin that requires more work. “You almost have to spend more time to think and plan words and phrases carefully. It’s more crafted.”

Thus, a credit to Lin’s unprecedented success has been his continuous grind—and it all started when he finished his National Service and the label Ocean Butterflies Music snapped him up. “Continuing to make stars is an art,” label co-founder, Lin’s early mentor and Mandopop producer Billy Koh once said to The Straits Times.

Lin’s career, which started with his 2003 album Music Voyager, could very well be Koh’s masterstroke. It was with his follow-up, 2004’s Haven, that got major attention across the region with the single 《江南》 (River South). “Up till today, any Chinese person can sing a line from the most representative song of the hottest of Singapore (Mandopop) singers,” Koh says in his vote, like a proud father cheering on his son. Mandopop lyricist Xiaohan also gave her vote to “the song that propelled JJ into a household name”.

In the early 2000s, Singapore was still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997. “About six months after it hit, Jimmy Wee’s Springroll (Entertainment, a record label) cut down the number of recordings and releases because everybody was cash-strapped,” Joe Ng recalled to Esplanade. 

“The number of gigs went down. A number of independent releases by other bands were also [scrapped], because there was no money. Everybody suffered.” The state of Singapore’s economy didn’t kill alternative music, but it did mitigate its spirit. 

Around the same time, the rowdy chart-topping bands that led the Britpop movement in the UK—bands that caused a ripple in local pubs and jamming studios—either disbanded or matured. A new term began floating around: 'post-Britpop', which had the optimism of the 1990s bands but left the booze and debauchery behind. The bands out of this era—Travis, Stereophonics and a young Coldplay—were even-tempered and friendlier to the public’s ears. 

Singapore’s Electrico, which first began life as short-lived indie rock band Electric Company in the mid-90s, labeled their inspirations for their debut album So Much More Inside to Bandwagon as “a hangover from [Britpop] and Indie”. This was a new millennium, and Electrico made music like their heroes—just with more studio polish and pop hooks.

I Want You, the first single off So Much More Inside, reached the top of Perfect 10 98.7FM’s charts, years after Chris Ho noted that “local music would seem to be neglected” by the radio station. Maybe Singaporeans who ignored its local alternative rock bands started to pay attention, or the argument by the scene’s flagbearers that radio exposure would be a net benefit was proven right. 

Either way, Electrico—who appeared in polo T-shirts and smart casual attire, a far cry from their disheveled predecessors—made headlines and drew crowds. Runaway, another single off the album, is exemplary of their efforts to appeal to a bigger audience. Its larger-than-life hook didn’t inspire one to break free from normalcy—it provided a remedy on a Monday morning before getting ready for work. In a new decade that sought to move on from the frightening lows of the previous one, Runaway gave Singaporeans the momentum to do so.

Composer: Stephen Zechariah | Lyricist: T. Suriavelan

Singaporean director T. Suriavelan made his debut with Joe: The Black Assassin, an independent action film that turned local haunts into the setting of a seedy city. The presence of its underworld begins to threaten the peace of a boxer named Krishna, who hung up his gloves to take care of his ailing father. Unbeknownst to his son, the old man is a fearsome contract killer—the titular Joe.

Rahul, played by Stephen Zechariah, is Krishna’s best friend who aids him in his quest to protect Joe. A professional musician and singer, Zechariah provided the soundtrack to Joe: The Black Assassin, with the song Saaral Mazhaiyaa scoring big with audiences and the wider Tamil music fanbase. 

Its music video shows the sequence in the film where Krishna imagines a romantic life devoted to his crush, Divya. Zechariah provides Krishna’s singing voice, lighting the character up as a man who starts to feel worthy of his dreams. The irony, as Zechariah’s Rahul is Divya’s boyfriend, with Krishna yearning from afar and Rahul completely unaware (spoiler alert: for most of the film, that is).

Saaral Mazhaiyaa (literally, 'Like the Light Rain') is replete with the escapist balladry that Indian cinema—in this case, Kollywood, the Tamil-language answer to Bollywood—provides with its vibrant and explosive songs. Notably backed by percussion by Mohamed Noor, member of The Vasantham Boys, the track was a harmonious collaboration between Zechariah and Suriavelan, who, aside from writing, directing and editing Joe: The Black Assassin, wrote its lyrics.

“We are always in sync, so work feels very seamless with him. We bounce ideas off each other even at 5AM in the morning,” Zechariah told Hear65. Saaral Mazhaiyaa stands not just as an expressive love song that still attracts new fans, but a testament to how the right collaboration can bear special fruit. Zechariah added: “I remember making songs with him in the most unforgettable situations, and we are certainly two peas in a pod.”

Composer: Lee Shih Shiong | Lyricist: Yi Jia Yang

In the same year that Mavis Hee stepped away from Mandopop, Stefanie Sun won Best New Artist at Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards. The song that catapulted her to fame, 《天黑黑》（Cloudy Day), won Best Composition, awarded to its writer Peter Lee Shih Shiong. It put the Singaporean on the Mandopop map as his apprentice’s star began to soar to the heavens.

Years later, Lee would find another promising young artist in Yida Huang, a boyish 20-something whose rockstar look was made approachable by his soft demeanour and gentle singing voice. Like Hee, Huang’s ascendance into the limelight with 《那女孩对我说》 (She Told Me), a winning single from his second album 《专属密码》 (Exclusive Code)’, urged the media to draw comparisons—this time, Huang was apparently the 'male Stefanie Sun'. Both Huang and Sun were graduates of Lee Wei Song Music Academy, but fans were occupied with comparing their appearance and singing style.

Huang, then a star in Sony Music Taiwan’s roster, worked to build on his momentum with two more albums, released in 2007 and 2008. It’s said that Huang’s mental health began to decline in the latter year, and the media had reported that he had abandoned his career to become a monk. Interviews with Huang during this period are few, but the musician resurfaced on occasion in the 2010s.

In 2022, a 43-year-old Huang appeared renewed as he entered the second season of television competition Call Me By Fire, where contestants—many of whom are established artists—were tasked to work together as performance groups. Having been away from the limelight for more than a decade, Huang appeared more comfortable with his celebrity.

"My motto in life is that I don't have to be the protagonist and I don't need to be brilliant, but every day has to be colourfuI,” he told Lianhe Zaobao. “I used to be imprisoned by my work and couldn't live my life, but now I enjoy every day. Even if it's work, I have to enjoy it."

Composers & Lyricists: B-Quartet

Bands like Electrico and The Great Spy Experiment embraced the new millennium with wide open arms, surging with optimism and verve that brought them crowds. A new decade brings new opportunities. And with it, anxieties—B-Quartet, out of any other Singaporean band in the 2000s, understood this the most.

To B-Quartet, the anxieties were creeping up in everyday life. It was harder to ignore, and even more difficult to comprehend, like a new condominium in the neighborhood where trees once stood. The band, comprising brothers and cousins, came together in their grandmother’s HDB apartment in the late-1990s. Bored out of their minds, they decided to make music. Boredom soon made way for deeper, complicated feelings once they entered a new decade. Luckily, they had each other.

At the cusp of 2008, B-Quartet were confident enough to write and record their debut album, Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address, an album filled with hope, sorrow, malaise and grandeur. Frontman Bani Haykal’s falsetto, often compared to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, soars and scatters more like a young Björk—his poetic lyrics were projected in service of rhythm and texture to the rest of the band’s dramatic rock instrumentation. 

When B-Quartet would sound loud and baroque, they could shrink back to a whimper in the next second. It didn’t feel like it was done for virtuosic effect—rather, it came across like the band cutting the cord on a musical idea when they felt its time was up. Discerning? Maybe. But it added to the skittish and adventurous quality to the band, where electronic embellishments could also crawl over beautiful melodies like a colony of ants. 

However, Shoebox, the album’s second track, swells from the first minute to build into a thunderous climax—whiny drone waves hover in the wide open as Haykal croons over jazzy piano chords, then guitars swerve in as the final touch. It’s here that the B-Quartet’s disparate ideas come into full focus. During their short lifetime, they had many ideas. Even if B-Quartet could not satisfactorily put them all to record, the ones that did ingrained in listeners the idea that something is always better out there. Like the band, they had to sit with discomfort to find it.

Composer: Asnadi Markop | Lyricist: A. Romzi

The Malaysian film A-Go-Go ‘67 sought to capture the vibrancy of the pop yeh yeh scene in full swing. Several bands were featured in the comedy, which told a simple story about two teenagers who worked blue-collar jobs in the day and played music at night. They could only do it in secret, as their parents disapproved of pop yeh yeh music.

In the film, several active bands at the time were featured, including a four-piece named The Hooks. A 15-year-old Sanisah Huri contributed vocals to its soundtrack. That same year, Sanisah teamed up with The Hooks for Si Baju Hijau (The Green Shirt), a song with lyrics by popular Malay singer—and collaborator of The Hooks—A. Romzi. The two forces would later record the song Ada-Ada in 1968. Two years down the road, the song would be banned from the radio as authorities accused the band of suggesting the use of marijuana in its lyrics.

Si Baju Hijau praised a different shade of green, with Sanisah singing about how it represented valour and duty. Sanisah would later perform Si Baju Hijau in the 1969 film Mat Toyol, a vehicle for comedian Mat Sentol.

Si Baju Hijau jumpstarted a career in music for Sanisah, who produced several EPs and albums through the 1970s, though without The Hooks, as her sound moved towards the styles of joget, pop, and keroncong. Her career became intermittent from the 1980s onwards, with Sanisah stepping away to focus on her personal life.

However, she remains alive and well today—in 2022, Sanisah performed a one-night sold out concert at the Esplanade Concert Hall in honour of her 50-year career in entertainment.

Composers & Lyricists: Matthew Tan and Bristow Hopper

In the 1960s, as the island’s pop and rock music scene was in the swing of things, a band named The Mandarins were starting out by performing covers in hotel ballrooms. As hired guns, they cut a record with Anita Sarawak in her 1969 EP With A Lot O’ Soul, with The Mandarins sounding in fine form as they added groove to Sarawak’s soul swagger.

The 1970s saw a clampdown on pop music culture—The Mandarins, not one to back down, pivoted. And they pivoted hard. In his own capacity, band leader Matthew Tan became infatuated by country music. The band, now named Matthew & the Mandarins, released their debut album Four Seasons in 1974, featuring covers of songs by Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Doug Kershaw. Country music was booming in Nashville, Tennessee—and Tan wanted to be there.

A year after Four Seasons, Tan packed his bags to travel to Nashville. He began to rub shoulders with other working musicians in the industry. When he got to meet Owen Bradley—a record producer and key figurehead in the Nashville country movement—Tan was told that, if he wanted to have a career in country music, he must write his own songs.

At a part-time job he worked at a Nashville hotel, the words 'Singapore cowboy' were suggested to him by his co-worker, another aspiring songwriter. He brought the idea back to Singapore—he went back to performing covers at Shangri-La Hotel, but his friends caught wind of this song idea and encouraged him to complete it. 

The title of Singapore Cowboy—the two words put together suggesting the fantastical—was inspired by Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, and Tan realised that Campbell’s vision of a cowboy was not necessarily one riding a horse with a lasso. The word 'cowboy' suggested an outlaw, and Tan certainly felt like it when he decided to pursue his own original country music in Singapore.

“Singapore cowboy, so far from my home / Bright stars and guitars but none of my own / Singapore cowboy, where do I belong? / Won't you sing a poor cowboy, another lonely song,” Tan sings in its chorus, backed by the Mandarins. He may have left his heart in Nashville, but Tan found success on local shores by finally believing in himself.

Composers & Lyricists: Force Vomit

An argument can be made for Siti as the greatest Singaporean anthem never made for National Day. Perhaps it’s due to the band’s name, which inspired angry letters to their mailbox by metalheads who felt misled by the two evocative (and to some, repellant) words on their first demo tape.

Force Vomit were once no strangers to provocation, with lead singer and guitarist Dino Vomit (aka Eddino Abdul Hadi) having had water thrown at him at a show—“I took it as a compliment because that was what punks were supposed to do, right?” he once said in an interview, chuckling. Back then, amidst an explosion of new alternative rock sounds, Dino, bassist Alvin and drummer Neng aimed to “not [sound] like other bands in Singapore”. Other aspiring musicians looked around for inspiration, but Force Vomit decided to look back.

These days, alongside The Pinholes, Cashew Chemists and the output of Kribo Records, Force Vomit can be seen as a stylistic successor to the region’s 1960s pop yeh yeh scene, a crop of fuzzy rock and pop artists, mostly Malay, inspired by British blues rock, psychedelic pop and The Beatles. Back then, Force Vomit’s wicked brew of surf rock guitars, bubblegum pop hooks, and punk rock mischief—in a time when pop yeh yeh was a distant memory etched in forgotten, dusty vinyl—ensured they really did not sound like any other band in Singapore at the time. 

And it’s with Siti, from their 2002 album Give It Up for the Trustfund Rockers, that they found their signature song: a life-affirming anthem about trudging through the hardest days. Its chorus “Don’t give up / Oh, Siti / Don’t give up” is both hugely catchy and cathartic: “Being an angsty teenager amongst a whole mass of people yelling those lyrics was really magical and empowering,” says weish, “like a collective promise to each other that, whatever our circumstance, we weren’t going to give up.” 

The titular Siti can be anyone of us, as fans would attest, and Force Vomit injected life and playfulness into a Singaporean rock scene that only started to grow out of its ’90s angst. “This isn’t just a spectacular song,” The Padres’ Joe Ng maintains. “This is a classic that will stand the test of time.”

Composer & Lyricist: Patrick Chng

The sound of The Oddfellows, as captured in their debut album Teenage Head, is the sound of total geeks rocking out. In 1991, when its lead single So Happy nabbed the number one spot on Perfect 10 98.7FM, it was a revelation unfolding in real-time.

The genetic make-up of The Oddfellows is part rock n’ roll worship, and part boyish earnestness—there was (and is, judging by his recent busking activities) zero pretension to the way frontman Patrick Chng believes in the power of music. As a teenager already feeling the struggle to fit in, Chng found respite in the way American indie rock bands like The Replacements and R.E.M., along with their own heroes like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, discovered that the world—though too small to contain their ambitions—was all that they had. 

When The Oddfellows released Teenage Head, it arrived with an album cover featuring an old childhood photo of Elvis Presley, distorted with what appears to be crayons or paint. It was issued to the public on August 16, 1991—the anniversary of Presley’s death. The 11 songs that comprise the album see the band filling in the blanks of their hopes and dreams with wistful guitars and a yearning vocal performance by Chng, who can sound grating on the ears of those who prefer vocal-led pop, or comforting to those who sound just like him.

Indeed, the production of Teenage Head gives the band a studio sparkle—night and day from their EP Mild, which they recorded with a single boombox in a rehearsal space. But the spacious reverb makes Chng sound like he’s captured singing alone in his bathroom, exploring emotions like he’s learning about them for the first time. They range from disaffection (Lost My Head, with Chng trying his best Lou Reed in the lines “Well I think I’m dead / Yeah I think I’m dead”) to resentment (Song About Caroline, a petty diatribe towards a woman who simply wouldn’t give Chng the time of day).

It’s So Happy that sees him and the band at their most unrestrained, with Dylan-esque harmonica by the late Abdul Nizam—whose main band The NoNames were Chng’s early obsession—and promises of a revolution incoming. When Chng attempts the high notes on its memorable hook, the limits of his vocal range are the most apparent. But that’s the magic of The Oddfellows: when it sounds like Chng is reaching for something totally unattainable, that’s when he finds his bliss, perfect pitch be damned. “Uncoordinated and messy, like all good music revolutions should be, the ‘90s was to me when everything came together,” Joe Ng articulates in his vote, adding that So Happy was the “shiny jangle punk pop song that led this charge”.

Composer & Lyricist: Liang Wern Fook

You would think that, by 1990, xinyao music had already thrived enough that it wouldn’t need to prove itself. In a genre of music made “by ordinary people for ordinary people”, as songwriter Liang Wern Fook reflected in The Songs We Sang, he believed its tenets shouldn’t be dictated by anyone else other than those who sought to keep it alive.

When Liang wrote 《麻雀衔竹枝》 (Sparrow with a Bamboo Twig), he already had multiple chart-topping hits under his belt—he only achieved that by writing in Mandarin. To Liang, the magic of xinyao reflected everyday aspirations, rather than providing an escape into a different reality. It’s authenticity, and the language it was written in was just as important an element as everything else on tape.

《麻雀衔竹枝》 (Sparrow with a Bamboo Twig) was a patriotic song, he explained, “but it didn’t conform to the bureaucrats’ idea of patriotism.” He continued: “The emotions that are tied to our memories of our country and childhood are deeply rooted and unchanging.” The song features lines written in Cantonese about “kinship and treasured memories of home”—with the sparrow providing a bird’s eye view of a bustling neighborhood—and it was inspired by a Cantonese folk song sung to him by his father.

For Liang’s attempt to add further authenticity into the growing scene of xinyao, 《麻雀衔竹枝》 (Sparrow with a Bamboo Twig) received a ban from radio airplay by authorities—it would only lift some 23 years later, longer than the country’s bans on shaggy hair and mosh pits respectively. In a brief moment, during 2025's National Day Parade, lines from the song were sung by Tay Kewei in its original language, before rapper Tosh Rock chimes in about “chillin’ at the coffeeshop with a cup of Milo”. In Singapore, some habits change, and some stay the same.

Composers & Lyricists: Pleasantry

Perhaps it’s the feeling of uncertainty in making music in Singapore that has compelled more than one band to include the song title of Swan Song in their debut album.

In 1994, Humpback Oak recorded one for Pain-Stained Morning, although backed by the help (and inspiration) of musicians from decades past. Twenty years later, Pleasantry would release a song of the same name in their debut album Synapses. While the indie pop band would make music with the assistance of veteran engineer Leonard Soosay—as have many Singaporean bands, past and present—their acoustic-driven sound was undeniably contemporary and carried with a sense of impermanence.

That’s a funny proposition for those who remember Pleasantry at the height of activity in the 2010s, when they were a regular presence across the few venues that Singapore offered—some of which are gone today. Inspired by the escapist indie folk of Beirut and Fleet Foxes, along with the shout-out-loud catharsis of Broken Social Scene, the liveliness of Pleasantry’s music was the result of feeling like the moment could end at any time. 

Impermanence inspires uncertainty. In the elegiac Swan Song, a relationship’s painful end isn’t even resolved with anger, relief, self-actualisation or indifference. “The book we wrote / Leaving a trace of memories / These words I read / I can no longer comprehend,” frontwoman Samantha Teng sings. When a relationship ends and a newer sense of self begins, the person you once were could seem like a total stranger. But it’s the coda to Swan Song, which Teng rinses and repeats with her bandmates—“I'll never know what you don't know / We'll never know what they don't know”— which reminds one that the unconscious act of forgetting itself can also be as painful.

“I believe many in the music scene have cried to this song—both in a live crowd and alone at home,” remarks weish in her vote, before adding “or in the MRT”, as if a memory of hers had popped up from the ether. Promoting this year’s Slow Burn, their follow-up to Synapses, the band admitted to Hear65 that the idea of making something new felt uneasy. They said, “There’s always that little voice in the side and front of our heads asking, ‘Will people still care?’”.

Composers & Lyricists: Benjamin Kheng, Jonathan Chua, Narelle Kheng & Sandra Teng

At the time, despite their relative newcomer status, the four-piece band The Sam Willows had nothing to prove by releasing a studio album. After releasing a five-track EP in 2012, which promised the quiet introspection of singer-songwriter music with the euphoric release of pop, The Sam Willows—comprising siblings Benjamin and Narelle Kheng, Sandra Riley Tay and Jon Chua—began branching out of their band into various pursuits. 

The 20-somethings were either entrepreneurs—Tay with a yoga studio, Chua with a music production house—or entertainers; by then, the Kheng siblings were acting in dramas.

They spent the two years following up their self-titled EP with gigs at local bars and music venues. They moved fast—in 2013, they were already performing at the F1 entertainment circuit. The Sam Willows started out “indie”—their first gig, a singer-songwriter night at Esplanade’s public library—but their motivations were clear from the start: they were always about pop music.

Take Heart, the title track from their debut album, transitions from urgent folk guitars to an EDM breakdown—not an anomaly, with Avicii’s chart-topping Wake Me Up having done it two years prior. For the album, the group flew to Sweden to work with producer Harry Sommerdahl. Since then, the group has long shed their flannel shirts and acoustic instruments to manifest what was essentially Singapore’s biggest pop group. Despite the bass drops, they didn’t evolve as much as they stripped things down to what already made the band appealing to fans.

My Special Angel singer Geraldine Ho once noted that if any Singaporean artists wanted to “make it back in the day”, they “had to sing in Mandarin”. These days, while their individual celebrity has long eclipsed their project, The Sam Willows and their English pop repertoire proved just how things in Singapore had changed by then.

Composers & Lyricists: Forests

In 2000s Singapore, the term ‘emo’ became commonplace as shorthand for rock music that bled mascara, hooking those who hated pop music but liked its pleasures. 

Lyrics became tattoos, t-shirts became a signal of taste in music and fashion, and emo itself became a blend of other styles of rock music. The fact is that emo, as a genre, has a much more complicated and interesting history than that.

Emo has its defenders, and in the early-2010s, a new wave of emo bands sprouted from the West, forsaking the fashionable 2000s and sounding more like their 1990s predecessors, ergo the resurrection of the term 'midwest emo'. Forests, though from Singapore, were quickly seen as a band like that with their 2015 EP worst beach vacation ever, circa 1997. 

Yet, in Tamago—the song from their debut album Sun Eat Moon Grave Party that still riles up fans at every show, both in Singapore and in the US—frontman Darell Laser yells: “F**k these songs from the midwest”. The three-piece, led by chief songwriter Laser, were not making a statement as they were simply (and cheekily) rejecting the West’s stranglehold and purity-policing over the genre.

Forests are also described as math rock, but the closest they reach to the virtuosic subgenre are the twinkly guitars and basslines they dress their anthems with. “We [listened] to Asian math rock and then a lot of American emo stuff so we tried to combine both elements,” Laser told music blog Grandma Sophia’s Cookies. 

What was a simple equation of music styles has become a winning formula for Forests’ songwriting, where Tamago and other songs like Kawaii Hawaii and Jazz Ruined My Life are fun sing-alongs. It’s Laser’s penchant for silly one-liners (just read those song titles again) that filters out those looking for an easy emotional fix. Ever since the frontman gave the middle finger to American emo, their biggest fans have made it tradition to yell at their shows: “F**k Forests”. The US has since responded in kind, with Tamago listed as one of Vulture’s Top 100 Greatest Emo Songs of All Time.

Composer & Lyricist: Regina Song

Virality in Singaporean music became a concept after radio charts ceased to exist and social media was here to stay. The surprise success of the cutest pair can be seen as a newer kind of virality: no longer only measured by numbers on Spotify and YouTube—two platforms that have become the norm for music discovery—Regina Song struck fame on TikTok.

How Song got here is not easily explained by a feel-good story of overnight success. That’s not just illustrating the reality of Song’s life pre-the cutest pair—where, as a 16-year-old student busy writing her own music, she took up part-time jobs to fund studio time. TikTok as a star-making platform is still being figured out by major record labels: Billboard reported in August 2025 that the continual struggle to gamify TikTok’s algorithm—the Rosetta Stone in generating virality—has resulted in professionals flooding the platform with burner accounts to boost new music.

So, if you want to know how and why the cutest pair became viral—and how it’s gotten over 50 million streams on Spotify, as of writing—you won’t get a straight answer, certainly not from Song. Like most of the music industry, the 21-year-old can only guess: “I always want to post something relatable, very goofy, very real,” she shared with Hype Singapore. “I used to be very focused on the result but I realised that I should just focus on putting out content that represents me as an artist. Being authentic, being real, trying to ‘sell’ my song, and following the trends—I think that’s how I gained more traction.”

Thankfully, with Song ready for the moment, she didn’t need to rush to capitalise on her big break—newly converted fans could already check out a full-length album, fangirl, which was released months before the cutest pair. The song got TikTok users enthralled with her bedroom pop balladry, one that communicates big feelings with laid-back guitars. Song may not have TikTok—or her career, for that matter—completely figured out yet, but she’s found a way to stay ahead: by ensuring more of her time is spent writing songs than creating content.

Composers & Lyricists: Serenaide

In 2005, when Joe Ng came across a song that featured the name of a neighborhood here, he was hesitant to pop it into his CD player. “Every time a Singapore song has a local word, name or colloquialism in its title, or in the lyrics, there’s always a collective holding of breath,” Ng says in his vote for The Girl From Katong, “with everyone hoping it doesn’t end up being cringey.”

To his surprise, he instead found the “perfect pop single”. Though he shares similar enthusiasm for other entries on this list, he’s not speaking hyperbole. Just ask weish—as one-half of electronic pop duo .gif, they covered The Girl From Katong for the now-defunct Lush 99.5FM station. Serenaide are a band “we hold very close to our heart,” they wrote in 2015. The Other End of the Receiver, the sole EP by Serenaide and one of .gif’s “favourite albums of all time”, is one whose deepest listeners still revere with a hush, 20 years on.

Zuremy Ibrahim and Mimi Yahya were two Singaporeans who were devotees of British record label Sarah Records—a short-lived home to a strictly underground movement of sticky-sweet indie pop. Sometime in 1998, the duo decided they wanted to form a band of their own, which then expanded with other like-minded friends.

The idea of writing their own indie pop melodies was more tempting than practising covers. “We realised it’s actually easier to play your own songs, rather [than] having to catch the notes on cover songs,” claimed frontman Pheyroz Yusuf in a 2006 interview before adding with a shrug, “Boils down to laziness, I suppose.” They didn’t even entertain the idea of playing shows—it was Force Vomit who, while promoting their second album Give It Up for the Trustfund Rockers, roped them in to open for them.

Upon release of The Other End of the Receiver, issued via Fruit Records—a Singaporean label that had an even shorter lifespan than Sarah Records—it was The Girl From Katong that listeners latched onto. The bridge of “Run over me, over you / She said run over you over me” is the perfect build-up to its chorus, where a simple smile from the girl of your dreams is cause for celebration. The entirety of The Other End of the Receiver is just as dreamy and arresting as The Girl From Katong, with the band’s “unfussy” songwriting chops, according to Ng, abundantly clear in songs like Midnight and Furry Animal Fury.

Serenaide “celebrated Singapore in such a gentle and genuine way” with The Girl From Katong, weish adds in her vote. Despite a brief reunion in 2011, Serenaide remained mostly inactive after The Other End of the Receiver. They’ve been leaving fans hanging ever since.

Composers & Lyricists: Linying & Evan Low

To bring The Other End of the Receiver to life, Serenaide enlisted the production work of a young Kevin Foo, who had just set up The Loft Studios—now Beep Studios—as a hub for musicians to record and write music. For a brief spell, Foo toured with the band as keyboardist, but the studio was his home.

As a university student, Foo tried his hand at studio production under the mentorship of Dr Sydney Tan, who has since been the music director for the annual National Day Parade since 2015. A year later, a singer-songwriter named Linying published her first recorded song, Sticky Leaves, a liturgical ambient-pop song about the joys (and woes) of seeing the world differently as you come of age.

“There was a lot of disillusion and disappointment for me growing out of my teenage years and learning to live life out,” the singer told Billboard upon release. Sticky Leaves was her way of “coming to terms with it” and realising there’s more to comprehend—“a worldly, fleshly, impermanent sort of beauty”, she illustrated—beyond what was in front of her eyes. 

A history major, Linying’s musings felt biblical and undeniably bookish, although the millions of streams of Sticky Leaves meant that her penchant for oblique language had a wide appeal. Still, in this early stage, it would have been far-fetched to assume she had a beloved NDP theme in her.

In the early stages of her career, Foo came aboard as her manager and released her debut EP Paris 12 under his label Umami Records. It was a friend of both Foo and Linying, Evan Low (stage name Evanturetime), who approached her to write what became The Road Ahead. Since 2018, Low had been a music arranger under Dr Tan’s direction for the annual parade.

She felt “apprehensive” about the challenge, she admitted to The New Paper. “All my life, I'd only ever been confident writing from my own experience. Because as an artist, that's the only truth that you're able to confidently convey.” The Road Ahead, instead, was spurred by learning about how it was at the frontlines of Covid-19. “I remember thinking, ‘Okay—it's not about me’,” she added.

Perhaps writing Sticky Leaves as a way to understand the world beyond her experience prepared her for writing a song like The Road Ahead, one that could truly resonate with the masses. Beyond the holiday season, The Road Ahead caught on as a dance on TikTok and had its YouTube comments flooded with praise.

Listeners missed out a small detail that had traces of Linying the bedroom artist: her vocal track in The Road Ahead is lifted from her initial demo, which had the ambient sounds of her air-conditioning unit running in the background. “Every time I tried to record it professionally, it never turned out as well.”

Composer: JJ Lin | Lyricist: Eric Lin

The music video for JJ Lin’s《不为谁而做的歌》(Twilight) begins not with piano chords, but an interview. Lin is seen pensive as he talks to Taiwanese personality Mickey Huang—whose welcomed return to the limelight in this clip has since been overshadowed by a grim revelation about his personal life. 

In the brief chat, Lin is asked by Huang about the people and things in his life he’s most thankful for. Lin pauses. “Most thankful for? Wow,” he replies. “There’s too many, just like the many people we don’t know in our lives.” The exchange becomes a transparent set-up for the heartfelt ballad, which translates directly to A Song Not Made For Anyone but is given the English title of Twilight.

To fans,《不为谁而做的歌》(Twilight) brought Lin back to earth—he was, after all, a meteoric Mandopop sensation who spent his first few albums imbuing his songwriting with sci-fi elements. It culminated in his conceptual third studio album, 2005’s No. 89757, which explored love through the eyes of a robot. “[I’ve] always played with themes of transcending and traversing different universes and planes,” he offered to Tatler Asia in 2022. 

The supersonic appeal of Lin lies in his seeming down-to-earth appearance—but he’s never made any pretensions about his aspirations. These days, Lin traverses different Web3 platforms and runs his own coffee-brewing business. In the midst of his ever-blossoming career, 《不为谁而做的歌》(Twilight), recorded with an orchestra at the Esplanade Concert Hall, was his “stop and smell the roses” moment—a ballad not for anyone in particular, but a tribute to people in his life who’ve made an impact on him, most of whom he can’t recall.

Lin spends most of his song searching for faces and names he once knew. It’s the music video that fills in the gaps, with vignettes of heartwarming moments of human interaction across different neighborhoods. Lin is not a spacefarer in《不为谁而做的歌》(Twilight)—he’s a sparrow, one who can only watch from above.

Composer: Shabir Sulthan | Lyricist: Shabir Sulthan, Alesha & Yogi B

Shabir Sulthan is known to local audiences as the tortured anti-hero Nantha from the Tamil television series Vettai. In real life, Shabir’s success as a music-maker and entertainer hasn’t come easy.

As a teenager drawn to crime, Shabir was involved in a lot of trouble. At some point, he decided he wanted out. “I didn’t want my mother to receive a call saying, ‘Your son is dead’ or ‘Your son is in prison',’” he recalled to Channel NewsAsia in 2020. Years later, Shabir would spend every last dollar he had on him—a brave move, especially as a 26-year-old father of two—to produce Singai Naadu, a song made for National Day to ensure that, finally, Munnaeru Vaaliba wasn’t the only Tamil song performed at these events.

The 40-year-old has since built a career in both Singapore and India, not least with Vettai, which first aired in 2010. Its fifth season aired in 2022, and Shabir produced arguably its most ambitious theme song yet.

Having done previous themes by himself, Shabir teamed up with producer Buvan, who arranged contributions by Malaysian rapper Yogi B—a pioneer in Tamil rap—Singaporean singer Eugenia Yip, of jazz group The Steve McQueens, and synth-pop band Riot !n Magenta. It’s a simmering brew of urgent Tamil rap, explosive EDM and cinematic bluster that comes not from digital beats, but the chenda, an Indian percussion instrument that “sounds like a war drum”, as Shabir described to Hear65.

The latest Vettai theme song comes together so well because Shabir, having spent a good portion of his career self-sufficient, could lean on Buvan and they fed ideas off of each other. Bringing in Yip—whose contributions to Vettai makes her the first English-speaking artist to perform on a Mediacorp Vasantham song—was Buvan’s idea: “It was one of those moments where it just clicked like, we came in, made some magic. It was beautiful for us.”

Composer: Tan Kian Chin | Lyricist: Wen Xueying

Xinyao songwriter Liang Wern Fook believed its music was “by ordinary people for ordinary people”. It was this that guided him to write《麻雀衔竹枝》(Sparrow with a Bamboo Twig), a song on this list that was sadly banned from radio play for many years due to its use of Cantonese lyrics.

You could say it was another xinyao song,《‘小人物的心声》(The Voices of Ordinary People), that telegraphed Liang’s intentions much more literally—a song that was friendlier to government regulations and could be sung at a National Day Parade without objection. A clip of a 1990s NDP featured in The Songs We Sang showed former President Ong Teng Cheong singing along, albeit shyly.

《小人物的心声》(The Voices of Ordinary People) had gone through a remarkable journey when its lyrics—written by Wen Xueying—reached the hands of President Ong. It was first sung by Wu Jiaming, a singer who enjoyed singing but didn’t exactly enjoy competing publicly in music competitions: “I felt really stressed out because I’m not good looking,” he confessed in the 2023 Mediacorp documentary series Unfading Stars. “I sang sentimental ballads but I didn’t look the part.”

Wu later found out that, upon signing a Singapore Broadcasting Corporation contract after his most recent televised win, his new employers too were uncertain about his marketability. So on various levels, the song was birthed out of disillusionment. Wen found it difficult getting a job in 1985. She felt she “couldn’t find [her] purpose in life amid the sea of people” while passing by Kallang River, she told Channel NewsAsia.

By writing 《‘小人物的心声》(The Voices of Ordinary People), Wen wanted to channel the strength that ordinary people like her could find, despite feeling insignificant. The song later became the theme for popular ’80s Chinese television series Neighbours. By performing 《小人物的心声》(The Voices of Ordinary People), Wu managed to build himself a career in music, even if continuing to be centrestage didn’t relieve his stagefright. “I don’t like feeling the audience focusing on me,” he said on Unfading Stars. “I like feeling free and being in the background.”

Today, Wu continues to be a working professional musician and teacher. Perhaps strength isn’t discovered through transcending the feeling of insignificance—you can try finding strength in spite of it.

Composers & Lyricists: Electrico

When David Tan wanted to explore forming a band again—after the brief lifespan of the Electric Company—he rounded up his old friends and met a new one: Daniel Sassoon, whose alternative rock band Livonia had just broken up.

Livonia was cut from a different cloth compared to Electric Company: their influences were more obscure. Their band name was taken from an album by UK darkwave group His Name is Alive, and their sound inspired by the (then) deeply uncommercial genre of shoegaze. Sassoon also had more experience performing live. Tan and Sassoon hit it off. 

Tan was a lot more serious about this music thing, and Sassoon had a wide array of tools to help him get there. “We would borrow [Sassoon’s] guitars and then everyone would play them just to get the tones that we liked,” recalled producer Leonard Soosay in an episode of PopLore. Sassoon had a new vehicle for his craft, and Tan had a new group who took music just as seriously as him.

In 2008, after two successful albums with the group, Sassoon left Electrico. He was honest about his departure: “Electrico was always a pop band at heart,” he told Yahoo! News. "I've always wanted to bring more of an edge to it, to try to make it a bit more cutting edge and different. But the reality was, because of the focus on the commercial and melodic nature of stuff, it wasn't always possible."

Indeed, Electrico managed to draw mainstream attention because their songs could move and shimmy beyond what was considered 'alternative'—even if 2008’s We Satellites dialed down the pop hooks in favour of longer instrumental passages, anthems had become their specialty.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, then, that Electrico would ever be considered to write a National Day song. But the idea of a 'rock song' involved in national festivities was simply unheard of. The band took up the challenge, totally aware of the glitch in the matrix they stepped into. “You can't afford to be too self-indulgent, obviously,” he shared in a press conference promoting the song. “You can't be too profound with lyrics.”

An interesting coincidence, then, that its members’ next big step also followed an economic collapse: this time, the 2008 financial crisis that rocked the world. Tan revealed that they were approached by the NDP committee to “empower the population in this time of crisis”. The end result, What Do You See, avoided “telling people to stand up for Singapore” and, instead, “[to challenge] people to ask themselves what they see for the future of Singapore.” The song was sleeker and more immediate than anything they had done before. 

What was the country’s first-ever rock anthem for a National Day Parade became an experiment of mass consumption. Channel NewsAsia’s Erin Lin described it as “an interesting alt-rock composition, but it failed to find mainstream appeal”, reflecting the reception at the time. In his vote, music producer Lim Sek doesn’t mince his words: “The lack of cringey nation-building slogans makes this my favourite.”

Even though parade songs returned back to feel-good stadium pop after, it was the first time artists from an independent scene were called up to represent a nation. If Electrico were never given that chance to try, it’s hard to say if other craft-minded artists like Linying and Charlie Lim would ever grace Marina Bay’s floating platform. In that year of uncertainty, What Do You See represents something rare in NDP’s history: a gamble.

Composer & Lyricist: Tanya Chua

What Do You See may be the first rock song to be chosen for the National Day Parade, but it wasn’t the first to sound like a rock song.

That would be Where I Belong, which opens with a smooth guitar lick like the break of dawn. The 2001 NDP song was written and performed by a 26-year-old Tanya Chua, who had been shuttling between Singapore and Taiwan as her career in Mandopop began to take flight.

Unlike her contemporaries Stefanie Sun and JJ Lin, Chua did not come up through the usual routes to Mandopop stardom. Chuawho recently described her young self as a “rebellious emo-rocker chick”—performed at local pubs and cafés as a polytechnic student working to get her diploma. She fronted several bands including Made in Singapore, which was led by a post-Tokyo Square Max Surin. Chua was then scouted by artist manager Lim Sek, who signed her.

Chua wasn’t someone who felt “wild passion” for music: “All I knew was that I didn’t want to be in a desk-bound job,” she confessed in a 1998 interview, following her win at the songwriters’ competition Asia Song Festival. But once she decided on doing it, she was all in, even when she was underestimated by her peers in the industry.

“At that time, I was treated more like an ignorant young punk,” she said. “Veteran musicians would have their own school of thought while I, being the 'uneducated' one in music, couldn't communicate ideas I had.” Undeterred, she bought a guitar and some chord books to start learning. 

By the time she was writing Where I Belong, Chua had a handful of albums under her belt, a record deal with Universal Music Taiwan, and a growing public profile. Her first two albums, both recorded in English, comprise original songs she wrote, save for a startlingly faithful cover of Joni Mitchell’s I Don’t Know Where I Stand. 

Chua, who was used to writing songs in English, had the help of Mandopop’s songwriting veterans when it came to her next two albums, 1999’s Tanya and 2000’s《记念》(Memory). When it came to Where I Belong, she found it “tough” to find the words—until, upon a return home, she passed by “the rows of trees” along the road out from Changi Airport that sparked its lyrics. “Now when I go back to Singapore, I need to see those trees first before I get into the city,” she told Kiss92’s Joshua Simon in 2021.

Though written and recorded by Chua, Where I Belong’s anthemic grandeur was polished by arranger Iskandar Ismail, whose protege Julian Wong gave his vote to the song. “It was so musically different from everything that came before it—in a good way. Tanya Chua's vocal style was so unique, and there was no mention of ‘Singapore’,” he says.

Composer & Lyricist: Siva Choy

Out of all these 60 songs, Why U So Like Dat? is one of the shortest and most important inclusions. It’s also the silliest.

The MC Siva C in question is Siva Choy, whose legacy in music goes back to the 1960s when he performed in The Cyclones with his brother James Choy. A blues man through and through, Choy made his way through Singapore’s music scene performing ragged and groovy R&B with songs like Oh No, She Didn’t Say. Choy was prolific—he and his brother joined The Checkmates, another band of that period, formed a project with The Quests’ Vernon Cornelius, and recorded two full-length albums with The X-Periment.

The common narrative is that Singapore’s music scene faced a clampdown once the 1970s arrived. For Choy, he had an inkling of what was to come based on what had happened before—in particular, the policies of former Minister of Culture (and writer of the national pledge) S. Rajaratnam, who once announced days into his role in 1959 that Radio Singapore programming would no longer feature rock and pop music. 

It wasn’t just the outlawing of rock music that rubbed Choy the wrong way. As schoolboys, Choy and his brother were asked to perform in a children’s concert, where segments were programmed based on cultural performances. The two Choy boys were picked to sing and represent the “Western element” of the show, he shared in an oral history interview by the National Archives of Singapore.

They were excited at the opportunity, especially when learning Rajaratnam would be in attendance. However, during their performance, which saw the brothers perform a Western pop song, Choy recalled seeing the minister in the audience with a “total blank look on his face as if he was absolutely uninterested in what we were doing”. After the show, Rajaratnam appeared onstage to meet the performers. 

According to Choy, Rajaratnam shook the hands of “all the Chinese, Indian [and] Malay performers” except for them. “He looked at me straight in the face and did not put his hand out,” Choy remembered, adding that the incident “really affected me considerably”. Years later, during a time when presenters were only allowed to speak “BBC English”, he was astounded when he saw Singlish jokes performed on television, complete with “ethnic jokes”. 

The short-lived show inspired Choy and stayed with him through to 1976, when he recorded his own Singlish comedy album Wrong Number with members of the band October Cherries during extra studio time. Wrong Number was published and pressed in New York in an attempt to avoid any local bans. It was never officially sold in stores—each member was given 10 copies to give away to family and friends, who then made copies on cassette tape for others.

One of those who heard a copy and loved it was the head of Warner Music, Jimmy Wee, who would later help usher in the careers of Dick Lee and several Singaporean bands. Wee goaded Choy to record a follow-up album, which resulted in Why U So Like Dat?, which would go on to sell over 50,000 copies on its original cassette release, along with a reissue on CD in 1998. The skits were performed by a motley crew of voices chosen by Choy—jazz singer Faridah Chang, photographer Low Wee Khim, a group of polytechnic students, and his Wrong Number comrade Srirekam Jay Shotham. 

Aside from Chang and Shotham, these people had not stepped foot into a recording studio before, let alone record an album. “We simply dragged people from the corridor with, ‘Eh, we need your voice lah!’” Choy once told The New Paper. It took him 15 years to follow up Wrong Number with an album of Singlish jokes that actually sold copies. He spent most of his life remembering how his younger self felt crushed by a snub—maybe the album’s title was the question on his mind all along.

Composer & Lyricist: Peter Wong & Donald Ashley

In his capacity as record label executive, Jimmy Wee was a champion for Singaporean artists. “He was [championing local music] as much as he could, because there wasn't any existing stuff,” Joe Ng recalled.

His passion project became Class Acts, a compilation album that announced a new homegrown music that could be marketable and appealing—or the latter, the candid class photo on the album cover showed musicians waving to the camera.

The tracklist is a mixed bag of sonic styles—Heritage’s progressive rock, Zircon Lounge’s glacial post-punk, Gingerbread’s power balladry, and Speedway’s synth-powered hard rock—but their assembly signalled a sea change in Singaporean music. “The message in the story is that you can’t keep a good band down,” Speedway’s Patrick Lee said in an introduction to the music video of his band’s Class Acts contribution, Breakaway.

It was one track on the album, Within You’ll Remain, that became the album’s breakout hit by pop rock group Tokyo Square. A cover of a song by Hong Kong hard rock band Chyna, the inclusion of the guzheng in both versions and the Mandarin line in its chorus was almost primed for introducing Tokyo Square as an 'Asian band' to the West. The 'ethnic' sound of the original song stuck out to producer and former Quests guitarist Reggie Verghese.

"He thought it would do well in the Singapore market," remarked frontman Max Surin to The Straits Times. Funnily enough, according to him, the song first struck big in Thailand before it caught on locally. Tokyo Square never recorded a full-length album, appearing instead on Class Acts 2 and continuing to perform at various bars and venues in Singapore, and even at the National Day Parade in 1987. “With its braiding of Chinese and Western instrumentation and a guzheng riff, everyone was just cooing the chorus ‘Wo ai ni / I need you’ till the cows come home,” remarks poet and editor Yeow Kai Chai in his vote.

Music & Movement chief Lim Sek remembers the impact of Within You’ll Remain: “Suddenly, every local record label started to release compilations by local bands and the clubs where these bands performed became popular entertainment night spots,” he says. “In the meantime, the recording of this song started to appear on countless counterfeit compilation cassettes all over Southeast Asia, paving the way for local bands to get regional gig offers."

The success of Within You’ll Remain gave its members a long period of opportunities to perform—sadly, the recording itself didn’t provide any income. "Each of us received the first one or two cheques and then, no more,” Surin recalled. The fault lay with a member signing their contract without passing it to them. Surin and his half-sister, band member Linda Dana, instead made a career out of being performers. “The album gave us a big break and helped my career,” Surin reflected. “Instead of condemning this person, I should be thankful."