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Baybeats Ever After: Beyond the Ending
Baybeats Budding Writers
Baybeats Ever After: Beyond the Ending
What happens to a band after Baybeats? Three former Budding Bands share their stories.
There was never really a day that Singaporean band Giants Must Fall ended.
No formal announcement or farewell show—as is usually typical of bands when they decide to move beyond a project. It just so happened that “people got married, people had families”, some other pursuits came up, and at some point the band simply stopped playing together as often.
When I asked frontwoman and vocalist Jean Low (artist name Ferry) if Giants Must Fall are still together, the answer sits somewhere between yes and no.
“There was never any formal, like, ‘we are not doing this anymore,’” she says. But there was also never a formal declaration that they were still doing it. Their last show was in 2014, seven years after they had been part of the inaugural batch of bands from the Baybeats Budding Bands programme in 2007.
But time is inconsequential. Ferry has songs she remains proud of creating with the band, and there are even some unreleased tracks for Giants she would genuinely like to still put out someday, if the circumstances align.
“When it comes back, it comes back.”
It is a strange answer, but perhaps an appropriate one when trying to figure out what exactly happens after Baybeats.
Over the past two decades, the Baybeats Budding Bands programme has seen generations of Singapore musicians enter and leave the programme, emerging into the scene going through its own changes from the years before. In trying to trace some of that change, I spoke to three former Budding Bands from three points in the festival’s history: Giants Must Fall from the very first year the Budding programme had begun in 2007, Tell Lie Vision from 2014, and Taledrops from 2023.
There is, of course, no singular Baybeats ending. Where one Singaporean band slows down, another tours halfway around the world. Some are only beginning to figure out exactly how far they want to and are able to go. It seems more useful then, to ask a slightly different question: What does being given a platform like Baybeats actually do for a band?
Giant stages
Back in 2007, the answer seemed relatively literal.
There was a stage.
Ferry remembers the earliest iteration of Budding Bands as a far simpler affair than its current version. You auditioned, got selected and were given the chance to play. There was no mentor attached to Giants Must Fall and no elaborate artist-development process that she recalls.
Before that, the band had already been playing together, albeit in much less glamorous circumstances. Several members knew each other through church, where they had played music for the children’s service. They had a handful of original songs and were picking up whatever performances came their way: schools, student events, small gigs, any stage that let them accumulate experience.
One of these performances, Ferry remembers with some amusement, was a Singapore Chinese Girls’ School graduation dinner. That was not necessarily something that could sustain a career.
But this was how the band worked then. Someone would say they had a show somewhere, and the band would go. Every performance was, after all, another chance to perform.
Baybeats was different then, mostly in scale. Suddenly, a young band with a small repertoire was being put on a festival stage and introduced to a crowd scaled in the multiples from their usual size.
Looking back, Ferry thinks they were rough. They were very rough, in fact. But the retrospective embarrassment almost proves her point. The value of the platform was not that Giants Must Fall had already become some fully formed version of themselves. They had not. The value was that someone decided there was enough there to gamble on to give them space and an opportunity anyway.
Every opportunity after that provides a core need for any upcoming artist: visibility. Someone sees you play, someone tells you they like the songs, somebody else asks you to play somewhere else.
“All these small things,” Ferry said, affect how someone thinks about the possibility of doing music at all. In 2007, maybe that was enough.
Tell my vision
Tell Lie Vision began with a considerably shorter runway.
The band came together around 2012 for a competition by Thunder Rock. The plan, as they tell it now, was more or less to enter, hopefully win some money, and then be done with it.
They were not done with it.
The competition forced them to write original songs on an extremely tight timeline. And they managed to win the competition. But there was something else the band members felt in there, and they were encouraged to continue. “You need to fail faster,” frontman and guitarist Vikkash says. Trying is free. Everyone sucks at the start anyway.
They began doing it for themselves, but somewhere along the way came the realisation that strangers knew their music the way they knew their own.
The band remembers one of their earliest “real” fans arriving at a show and singing their songs word for word back when they had only played a few shows and had no material released digitally or anywhere else. It caught them off guard. These were songs that you had to have heard regularly live to have known the lyrics so well. And somebody outside of themselves knew it.
The realisation then became “Oh. Actually can.”
By the time Tell Lie Vision entered Budding Bands in 2014, the programme itself had grown too. They recall receiving mentorship from scene veterans by that point, and were already moving within a local network of bands, spaces and musicians they had come up with in their generation of the scene.
Already no strangers to the scene, the band found that more of everything came after Baybeats. More gigs. More recordings. More opportunities. As the band's resume grew, so did their investment—time, equipment, rehearsal rooms, commitment. They began crafting a vision for what a Tell Lie Vision show should actually feel like.
They were particularly insistent on that last part. “We really, really focused on showmanship. We want to have that experience, not just like—look at you play this solo, or you play that chord,” Vikkash says. Being technically good was not enough. They wanted the live set to feel big. It is all about the showmanship.
And of course eventually, there were the tours. Australia. Malaysia. Philippines.
One Philippines trip in particular sounds, in retrospect, almost like somebody describing a fever dream. The band landed in Cebu, got into a van whose driver they remember as terrifyingly fast, made their way to a port, hauled their equipment onto a boat, and eventually arrived at Bantayan Island. Their accommodation had one king-sized bed for five people. Then they walked down to the beach and played to a crowd they remember numbering in the thousands. And they barely recorded any of it.
At the time, they had not yet realised how prudent it would be to have a photographer or videographer there documenting things properly. It is not something a newer band knows to expect or plan for. Now they are left only with the recollection of what the show felt like.
It almost feels like different lifetimes, the band that formed to win a competition and the one later dragging gear onto a boat to play overseas.
Baybeats, of course, did not magically cause all of that. The festival gave a platform for the bands that did the work. Treating it as a straight line from Budding Band to success gives the platform far too much credit, and the band far too little. It sits somewhere along the way, providing visibility, mentorship and a goal to look forward to.
Tell Lie Vision’s idea of success now sounds surprisingly uncomplicated. “It has to be fulfilling,” Vikkash tells me. Part of it is legacy, if only to one day be able to show their children proof that, guitarist Hairul jokes, “last time ah pa very cool.”
Of the tale
By 2023, when Taledrops entered Baybeats’ mentorship programme, much of the advice they received had already become part of their practice.
Among the people encouraging Taledrops to apply for the programme were Tell Lie Vision themselves. But TLV also cautioned them not to see Baybeats as the be-all-end-all, speaking of their own experiences touring and the other things a band could do afterwards. Reminding them that the scene was much bigger than one stage.
Tell Lie Vision had once been the younger band looking at the people before them. Less than a decade later, they were becoming part of what another band could look towards.
Taledrops, however, were not entering Baybeats just because they wanted the stage.
The band had already begun getting more serious about what they wanted to do before applying. Having originally started as friends playing covers, they slowly moved towards original music after being encouraged to write some of their own. Later, they organised their own two-day show at an actual factory—micro factory—titled Shut The Factory Up. This was their entry into the wider scene and prompted the band to take their music seriously.
The relationships within the band changed. Before, they described operating largely through convenience. A gig comes up, so they meet. An opportunity appears, so they try for it. Now, they have their own space and equipment. They plan what they want to do and make time for it because they have decided that it matters.
Baybeats became part of that intention. Taledrops describe feeling like they were operating within their own bubble. They could rehearse and listen to one another, but there are limits to how much five people inside the same project can tell themselves about it. Baybeats seemed like the clearest route to structured feedback on the music and their direction. It was no longer just visibility and mentorship—Baybeats became an active channel for feedback and improvement. “It made us realise how much we didn’t know, and I think it’s really important to know how much you don’t know,” vocalist Pearly put aptly.
This is where the difference between 2007 and 2023 becomes particularly obvious.
It takes a village (and a rehearsal room)
The interesting thing about following three generations of bands is that the change does not only happen within Baybeats.
The entire ecosystem around it changes too.
When Ferry thinks back to the scene during the heydays of Giants Must Fall, she remembers something simultaneously established and still quite small. There were regulars. People went to each other’s shows. There was a community that valued local music.
But the visibility was different.
Social media had not yet made it as easy for a band’s filmed content, gig photos, or random show clip to land in front of somebody entirely outside the usual crowd. Ferry describes the scene then as developed, but lacking an ability to reach the wider public.
By the time Tell Lie Vision had come around, social media had become an important part of a band’s visibility. Beyond that, their version of a real infrastructure was also more literal.
For years, the band paid for rehearsal spaces, moving from one to another before eventually spending a period without a room at all. More recently, they have been using an office as a makeshift rehearsal space. Because without the room, where does the band go?
Singapore is small, space is expensive and bands need somewhere to exist before they can ever reach a stage.
For Taledrops, gaining their own studio (incidentally, right where TLV used to have their old one, where they had met) was, similarly, one of the most important things that helped them become more deliberate.
Then there are the people.
While organising Shut The Factory Up, Taledrops were approached by long-time scene veteran, Gary from Boplay Photos, who offered to document the show simply because he cared about archiving the scene.
The band, not yet knowing much about the scene, initially did not know who he was.
But Gary came down, photographed the event and shared stories and advice. Bits of knowledge about the ecosystem and business of performing music that are only accumulated from having been around longer. Now, Taledrops talk about photographers, videographers, sound crews and the rest of the people surrounding live music as its “backbone”.
The bands do not exist in a vacuum, and neither does Baybeats.
So, did it work?
This is perhaps where the question of “success” is contested.
If a platform succeeds only when every band that passes through it becomes huge, then most artist-development programmes anywhere would probably fail.
But if the point is to increase what a band is capable of doing next, the answer becomes more complicated.
Giants Must Fall did not become a permanent, full-time institution. But Ferry does not talk about that period as wasted potential. She talks instead about everything learnt through it: skills, people, ways of seeing things, opportunities that opened into other opportunities. Even within the scene, she moved on to playing in other notable bands like FERS, and eventually moved forward with her own independent projects.
When I ask her about “making it”, she rejects the phrase almost immediately. She called it ‘accumulation’.
“What are you accumulating as a person, as an artist?” she asks.
Many times we get caught up in the need to solve the existential problem of what it means for a musician to succeed, but that is an unsolvable question. Accumulation gives another way to measure the usefulness of a platform.
What did the band leave with that it did not have before?
For Giants Must Fall, a stage large enough to make music feel like a real possibility.
For Tell Lie Vision, mentorship within an increasingly established network, followed by years of learning the rest through doing.
For Taledrops, structured feedback at a time when the band already knew it wanted to take itself more seriously.
None of these are guarantees. While Baybeats gave the stage for one night, and the access to feedback and mentorship leading up to it, it cannot guarantee longevity, a career, or any kind of permanence. That is maybe too much to ask for a platform.
It can, perhaps, make the next thing easier to imagine. And Taledrops are already imagining it.
After Baybeats, the band initially focused on playing locally, and have since gone on to tour multiple locations, including Taiwan and Japan. Looking outwards, thinking more strategically about where it makes sense to spend their limited time and resources. Which cities respond to them? Where might an audience exist? At the same time, Pearly is quick to add that “home is still home."
Ever After
At the end of my interview with Taledrops, I ask if, having gone through mentorship themselves, they now feel qualified to mentor anybody else. The answer came very quickly.
“Absolutely, no way,” Jingmin, Taledrops’ bassist, states.
They are happy to share advice. They can talk about what they have learnt. But to call themselves mentors still feels unfamiliar.
“Maybe 10 years later,” Kiara, Taledrops’ drummer, jokes.
It is also, within the history of this programme, really not very long at all.
Years after Giants Must Fall were given their own early opportunities, Ferry found herself walking past the Esplanade Concourse, where she heard a young band playing their originals. She found herself advocating for that same band to be given a stage impressed not necessarily by their skill, but with their conviction. The pianist from the band later told her that “It really fundamentally changed him” and now he does music production. That experience performing live was what made him feel like doing music was genuinely possible. All because of one person’s endorsement.
Similarly, Tell Lie Vision would later become one of the bands advocating for Taledrops to try for Baybeats, while reminding them that there was more to do after.
Perhaps Baybeats Ever After is less about where every band eventually lands then, and more about this strange handover that happens somewhere along the way.
Someone gives you a stage. Someone tells you your song could be better. Someone shows you the rehearsal room, or photographs your gig, or tells you which promoter to talk to, or points at a possibility you had not considered yet.
Then the show ends.
You go and do whatever comes next.
And eventually, if you stay around long enough, somebody newer turns up and asks you where to go from here.
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