The Recording Industry in Singapore, 1903-1985

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past: some unfamiliar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

Hi, everyone. My name is Jimmy Yap, and I’m the editor-in-chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. It’s not commonly known, but Singapore used to be a major centre for recording music in Southeast Asia. One of the earliest recordings made here dates back to 1903. Before 1960, over 10,000 local recordings were made in Singapore. By the end of the 1960s, we had hundreds of labels here catering to every musical taste. With us today to tell us more about Singapore’s record industry is Ross Laird. Ross was formerly a sound archivist with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive. He was awarded NLB’s Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship in 2010. He’s also the author of From Keroncong to Xinyao, a new book that looks at the history of Singapore’s recording industry. Hi, Ross. Welcome to BiblioAsia.

Ross
Hello.

Jimmy
First of all, maybe in one sentence, can you tell us what exactly is your book about?

Ross
Well, it tries to fill out some of the background in that history you just mentioned, about the the record industry in Singapore.

Jimmy
The first recording in Singapore that we have, that we are aware of, happened in 1903. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Ross
Well, that was definitely the very first recording in Singapore. It was done by Fred Gaisberg, an American actually, but he mainly worked in Britain from the 1890s up until his death in, I don’t know when, 1980s or so.

Jimmy
Who did he work for?

Ross
He worked for EMI or originally for the Gramophone Company, that’s HMV to most people, which later became part of EMI. And he was originally what they called a recording expert, which was like a sound engineer, what we call a sound engineer today. His job was to travel around to various places, usually remote places at that time, like Egypt or somewhere, and do recordings for the record company. On that basis, he was sent out not just to Singapore, but to Asia. That first recording expedition you’re asking about was actually not just the first recordings in Singapore, but the first recording expedition which ever came to Asia. That’s why we know they’re the first recordings in Singapore because no one did any earlier commercial recordings. There were things like anthropological recordings made on cylinders, of tribes in Borneo or somewhere like that, but they were not intended for commercial release. So these 1903 recordings were the first attempt by any record company in the world to make recordings in Asia. They made recordings on the same expedition in Japan and China, Thailand, Burma as well as Singapore.

Jimmy
EMI’s reason for doing all these recordings was so that they could then record the music and sell it to these different markets subsequently?

Ross
Well, ironically the music was the secondary thing; the main thing they were interested in was selling their gramophones. They felt that in order to do that to the local people, they needed musical recordings in their own languages, and of things which they identify within their culture, like the Malay opera, for example. That way, people would buy the records, and then of course they needed a gramophone to play them on. The gramophone was the expensive item. So they actually tried to make the records relatively cheap to encourage people to invest in that, and then they would buy a gramophone. The gramophone company as it was at that time was one of the big multinational record companies. They started in London, but then they gradually spread out all the way through Europe, and then through the Middle East, just like a ripple in a pond. After five or 10 years, they were reaching the limits of what they’d already done in the areas closest to London. And now they were starting to look at markets ever further away, and that’s how they got the idea to come out to Singapore and other parts of Asia.

Jimmy
How did Singapore end up being a centre for recording music in Southeast Asia?

Ross
It’s like they say about real estate: it’s location, location, location.

Jimmy
In what sense was that?

Ross
I’m sure as your listeners may realise, Singapore is very centrally located when it comes to Southeast Asia. And in fact if you look at the way this recording expedition that Gaisberg did in other parts of Asia, including East Asia, Singapore was really the focal point. He came initially to Singapore, even though he didn’t record here straight away. But this was the first port in Southeast Asia they came to. From there, they took a ship to Japan, and then they worked their way back through China, through Thailand, and then back to Singapore. When they came back was when they made the recordings here in Singapore. So the whole thing was planned logistically based on Singapore as a base kind of thing. So that shows you that Singapore from that point onwards, and this was the case throughout the period when Singapore was a recording centre, was kind of a logistics hub for the region.

Jimmy
What were some of the key trends in the recording industry that impacted the industry?

Ross
Well, like any industry, it’s always evolving. When Gaisberg’s first expedition came here in 1903, it was a fairly primitive process. The equipment, for example, was very heavy and difficult to move around. Again, this was why they chose places like Singapore as a logistics hub. Because in those days, it’s not like now where you can record anywhere because the equipment is very easy to move around, you can even carry it in your hand. Back in those days, you needed a ship to bring it to the place where you’re going to do the recording. And then it would take all day to set it up somewhere, someplace you’re going to do the actual recordings in. It took a lot of work. So basically they couldn’t just travel around recording here and there. They went to one place, like Singapore, and then they would get others from that region to come to Singapore to all record in one place. So one change, an example of a sort of change you’re asking about, is gradually as the recording equipment became lighter and more portable, they could actually be more flexible in the way that they moved around the region. Although Singapore was still a central logistics hub, there were recordings made in other places as well, a place that had something unique about it, like Bali with its gamelan music, then they would make the effort to go to that place and record the artiste there.

Jimmy
Were these recordings done in recording studios?

Ross
Yes, they actually called them recording studios in the few press reports that describe early recording in Singapore. But they were not studios in the sense that we would think of today, where you think of a soundproof room, specifically custom-made for the purpose of recording, with a stack full of recording equipment and electronics. There’s nothing like that at all. It’s a very simple, kind of just a hotel room sometimes, or a room in a house which they’d rented, the record company had rented. At most, they would hang some curtains on the windows to keep out traffic noise from outside. In other ways it was no different to an ordinary room in a hotel or a house. And the reason for that was, in those early days, even though recordings were made in Singapore regularly over the years, they were only actually recording for a short period each year, maybe a month or two each year. That would mean that for most of the year, the room would be empty and unused. There was no point in having a permanent setup like that. Later on, they did have recording studios, but not until the late 1940s. In the early 1950s, the first air-conditioned recording studio was set up by EMI in MacDonald House.

Jimmy
We are talking about something like 80 years. I mean, your book covers something like 80 years of Singapore’s recording industry. But what were some of the key turning points in that period?

Ross
Basically, recording started here in 1903. At first, there were recordings done here maybe every two or three years. But by the 1920s, you were having recordings done every year. And that’s when the industry really started to become more permanently located in Singapore. There were many record companies based here. As I said, the record company was much more consistent in the 1920s and 1930s. But of course that all came to a huge halt in 1942. During the Japanese occupation, there was no recording done in Singapore at all.

Jimmy
Not even by the Japanese?

Ross
No. They did import some recordings from China, which were actually pressed in Japan, for the local market. There were Chinese performers, not local performers. There was absolutely no recording done here. The Japanese didn’t seem interested in promoting or continuing that kind of activity.

Jimmy
What happened after the war, though?

Ross
The next thing I was going to say was that the other effect of the war was, even after the war was over, Singapore was relatively devastated by the occupation. It took several years to resume recording activity. I think in 1945 when the Japanese surrendered, starting recording was not the first thing on people’s minds. A lot of people just barely survived and were more interested in getting their lives back together. More basic things like getting jobs and finding something to eat and things like these. After a period like that, these were much higher concerns than going out and buying records. So it wasn’t until about 1947 that recording activity resumed in Singapore. So you can see the war not only had an effect in breaking up that continuity of recording activity, but even affected the postwar period for several years as well.

Jimmy
What about some of the technical turning points?

Ross
Well, on the technical side, I did mention earlier about how the type of equipment in use gradually evolved. But after the war, there were even greater changes because whole new technologies came into play, such as, well… I should go back a bit. In the 1920s, electric recording came in. Before that, it had been acoustic recording.

Jimmy
Sorry, I’m not a recording engineer. What’s the difference between electric recording and acoustic recording?

Ross
Well, acoustic recording meant you sing into a horn, which then funnels the sound through the needle onto a mastered disc, and that’s used to press the records. But the sound is all generated simply by the strength of the voice. Electric recording means the sound is enhanced by the use of microphones. So this changed the quality of the recording. Some people claimed that if an engineer was very skilled, he could make an acoustic recording sound very lifelike, and some acoustic recordings are better than others as a result. But, generally speaking, electric recording picks up the voice more clearly and accurately. So you could say this was a reason for its introduction: to improve the quality of the recording process. In fact, I think that’s generally true. By the late 1920s and the 1930s, the quality of recording was quite high. But in fact what reduced the playback quality, you could say, is that the gramophones, which are used to play records, were still rather primitive. They really couldn’t get out all the sound that was in the grooves. It’s only now that we have modern equipment and we can play older recordings. We can hear the recording more clearly and fully, the way it was actually recorded.

Jimmy
That’s fascinating. So we can actually hear the record better now than people did 70 years ago.

Ross
Again, it takes some skills as a sound engineer. But someone who has that skill, who knows how to deal with older recordings, whether they’re acoustic or electric, he can process the sound in such a way that instead of just filtering out the noise, they actually retain the full range of the sound that’s in the grooves. And the sound quality is actually quite good, as I mentioned.

Jimmy
Very interesting.

Ross
Further developments that occurred. Electric recordings started in the mid-1920s. In the 1950s, you had tape coming in. By then they’d also introduced vinyl recordings. So the early shellac – fragile, heavy recordings that were being produced before the war – started to be phased out in the 1950s. They didn’t disappear straightaway because a lot of people still had equipment to play those recordings and they didn’t have a modern record player. So they continued to make 78s until the end of the 50s, up until about 1960 or ‘61. But gradually vinyl records took over and became the dominant media. The combination of using tape to record on, and vinyl to press records on, meant that you could make records more cheaply and easily. Again, it wasn’t just the old recording equipment which was heavy and cumbersome; the equipment used to manufacture records was also heavy and cumbersome, and expensive. Only a big record company could afford to do that. In the 1950s, you could press records very cheaply because the equipment needed was much more simple, portable and easier to use.

Jimmy
Was that the reason, then, that by the ’50s and ’60s there was an explosion, as it were, of music?

Ross
So these led up to the event you’re talking about as an explosion, which is quite an accurate way to describe it. Because, as you mentioned in your introduction, by the end of the 1960s, there were hundreds of labels in Singapore. Prior to these technical changes coming in, there were only a few big multinational companies, very few local companies could afford the cost of pressing records, or entering into the record market in a meaningful way. At most they actually hired EMI to press records for them and to record for them. So you might find some independent labels, but they didn’t do the record manufacturing. And they didn’t do the recording; that was done by a company which had those facilities. Each small record company couldn’t afford to do that.

Jimmy
Ross, it sounds like with cheaper equipment and cheaper manufacturing processes, it became easier for companies, as you say, to record local artistes. Was there a downside to all this?

Ross
Well, everything has a downside, I think. The answer is yes. Because not only was it easier for small local companies to record and manufacture records locally, but it was easier for basically criminal groups to cash in on that and produce what were called pirated records at the time. Usually, these were purely copies of existing commercial recordings by both larger companies like EMI and even smaller companies, local companies. What they did was they cut out the cost of the recording process and simply pressed copies of the exact same record, which they sometimes disguised with a new label and a slightly different cover or pretended to be some different record label when in fact these record labels didn’t exist. They were purely an attempt to steal the rights to the record from the company that originally produced it.

Jimmy
That’s fascinating because I remember growing up as a kid and listening to pirate cassettes. I didn’t realise that was a pirated vinyl.

Ross
That was a further development in the technology. By the end of the ’60s, tape was not only being used. Well, originally, it was only used in recording studios because it was expensive and you needed expensive equipment. I mean, it was cheap relative to the previous way of recording, but it was still not something that anyone could afford. Very few people had tape recorders in the 1950s. But by the 1960s, as usual with most technology, it becomes cheaper and more affordable and more widely disseminated. By the 1960s, a lot more people did have tape recorders. That meant I could play back tapes as well. And because tape is actually cheaper to manufacture than even a vinyl disc. It was attractive to offer some records not only in disc form, but also in tape cassette form. This was a gradual process. It was not that common in the late 1960s, but by the mid-1970s the technology had evolved even further. You had things like Walkmans, which came out, I think, in the late 1970s. That totally revolutionised the way people listened to tapes because they didn’t just need a machine, they could play them at home; they could actually, as the name suggests, walk around listening to music on a tape. This meant it was much more popular, much more accessible. So by the late 1970s, tapes were actually taking over from pressed records on vinyl as the preferred medium, you could say, for recordings. That’s one of the reasons for the decline later of the record industry: because people were no longer buying records in the same way as they had for the previous 60 years or so.

Jimmy
We talked about the explosion of music in the 1960s, the explosion of music labels in the 1960s in Singapore. I think a lot of of people might say that was one of the heydays of Singapore music. One of the local bands that was very popular at the time was a band called The Crescendos and they were first local band to be signed by an international label. What impact did The Crescendos have on the record industry in Singapore?

Ross
Interestingly, it was a rare case where you can point to one event as having had a very major effect on the way things developed. Prior to the recording of The Crescendos, even EMI, although they were making a lot of recordings in Singapore, they basically stuck to the same genres that existed before the war: keroncong music and some variations on that, like joget and so on, and Chinese pop music. They didn’t make much effort to record the local bands because they felt that younger people who were interested in rock and roll and so on could just as easily listen to that kind of music on imported records by groups from the US or the UK. Those records were also imported into Singapore and sold here. They felt there was no need for them to record music that was freely available by more famous and therefore presumably better groups elsewhere. What happened when The Crescendos recorded was, their first record, Mr Twister, actually outsold the American hit version of that song. No one had really anticipated that. They were, in fact, shocked that a local group would become so popular. Of course, this event opened the eyes of the record companies to the fact that recording local pop groups or rock and roll bands or things like that, which wasn’t a genre they had bothered much with before, could be a profitable exercise. So once they realised that there was money to be made recording local pop bands. From then on, it didn’t happen straightaway, of course, it took a year or two for that to sink in. But since that was in the early ’60s, when The Crescendos were recording here. By the mid-‘60s, many local bands were starting to record. From that point onwards, from the mid-‘60s to the end of the ’60s and up until the early ’70s, that’s when you got that explosion of interest in local music of all kinds – including pop music, it was a big part of that. Simply because the record labels, both the bigger ones and the small independent ones, could make money out of them.

Jimmy
Would it be accurate to say that that was the golden age of the record industry in Singapore?

Ross
Definitely. I think the period 1965 to 1975.

Jimmy
It sounds a confluence of things, right? You’ve got cheaper recording equipment, cheaper pressings, local bands.

Ross
Exactly. It’s wrong to pick on any one element of that and say this is the reason. Most things are a combination of reasons, they’re a complex combination of reasons. So yes, it was the fact that technology was making records easy to produce, cheaper to sell. There was also an explosion of musical activity in Singapore during the 1960s. There had always been a lot of music done privately. I mean, in those days, a lot of people played music at home or sang in choirs, or they performed in charity concerts, there was a whole range of outlets for people’s desire to perform. Not much of it was recorded. But in the 1960s when they realised that recording local artistes could be profitable, that’s when they started looking around at all these different groups, singers, different artistes that were performing anywhere. Why don’t you make a record? So this is the origins of the golden age, so to speak, because all of these factors came together to result in a vastly increased amount of local recording. From the mid-‘60s onwards, the amount of recording done in the decade, from that point onwards, would have been 10 or 20 or 50 times as large as the amount of recording in Singapore done prior to that in the previous decade or rather the decade going back, say, to the mid-‘50s.

Jimmy
We talked about some of the technological changes: cheaper equipment, vinyl, tape. What other major technological changes were there in the recording industry?

Ross
Well, stereo recording came in at the end of the ’60s, or rather it was more widely available from the ’60s. It had existed in theory from the late 1950s, but most recordings up until the late 1960s were mono recordings. Mono, of course, is one channel. Everything was recorded on one channel. In the 1960s, gradually stereo recording became more popular. By the end of the 1960s, virtually all recordings were made in stereo and certainly as you went on into the 1970s, it just became the normal way of recording. The record industry used this as a way of marketing. They were getting people excited about the fact they could now hear stereo recordings and encouraging people again to buy stereo equipment so they could hear that new sound phenomena. It was hugely popular and exciting at that time. This was another example of the record industry finding a way to market things to people to encourage them to buy new record players so they could hear stereo sound properly. And that translated into buying more records.

Jimmy
We talked about Singapore’s golden age being in the ’60s and all that. But after that Singapore’s music or record industry sort of declines. Why did that happen?

Ross
Well, once again, it’s a very complex set of reasons for that. There’s no one simple explanation. In fact, by the end of the 1970s, only a very few of the many original or smaller private labels that existed in Singapore were still active. Most of them had ceased because, as you mentioned, there was a decline in sales. As far as the factors go, there are things like changes in taste in music. Disco came in, for example. People preferred to go out somewhere to dance in a discotheque. They didn’t necessarily want to buy a record and listen to it at home. So people complained in newspaper articles published at that time that people just stopped buying records. They preferred to go out and see a band in a club, a nightclub or a discotheque. Of course, this had always happened. But it just seemed to be that it became more and more that people were less interested in buying records. Changes in tastes like that have a big impact on what people are consuming, and how they consume them.

Jimmy
What about technological change? As I mentioned earlier, I used to buy pirated cassette tapes. Did music piracy have an impact as well?

Ross
Well, it did. That was another factor, in fact. You’re correct. What happened was that the fact that pirates were in effect skimming off a lot of the profits of putting out a new record. Even big record companies like EMI, and again this is backed up by interviews with record company executives in the newspapers at that time, they talked about how they’re doing less recording because they felt it was not really worth putting resources into doing a lot of recording since in many cases the profits were reduced substantially by the fact that any recording they put out was going to be pirated. Even recording artistes said the same thing. They said it was not worth putting out records because they put a lot of time and effort into doing that, but they didn’t make anything out of it because the pirates would skim off so much of the profit that they didn’t make much out of that record.

Jimmy
Right, because everybody was just pirating the much cheaper pirated tapes.

Ross
This is another factor in the decline of the record industry. Even a major international company like EMI complained often and frequently that their profits were being affected by this activity.

Jimmy
So I fear that I am responsible, not single-handedly, the decline of Singapore’s recording industry. Tell us a bit about about yourself. You were previously a sound archivist with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. What did your work there entail?

Ross
Well, actually it was fairly broad in scope. I did a lot of cataloging of records in the NFSA collection, but I also produced reissues of recordings on CD. The NFSA also published several of my discographies of Australian music. I researched Australian popular music from the 1950s up to the end of the ’60s. Those periods always interested me because of the style and quality of the music. That’s some examples. Working at a sound archive is not just poring over piles of dusty old records, you can actually do things to make people aware of those recordings or even introduce re-releases of selected recordings to people who might not otherwise be able to hear.

Jimmy
I have an important question: CD or vinyl?

Ross
I’m a vinyl person. Don’t like CD. But they play a part in promoting the older music. So I wouldn’t say I’m totally against a CD re-release because I have produced them myself. I think they can be quite a valuable way of introducing people to music, but I hope they’ll go back and listen to it on vinyl because the sound quality and sound experience is quite different.

Jimmy
Ross, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to us about this. Now we’ve come to the part of the podcast interview where we just ask very quick questions so that people can get an idea of the person who’s being interviewed. So without thinking too much, who would you consider is the most interesting person in Singapore’s audio history?

Ross
I’ve always been fascinated by a man called Tom Hemsley, who was an Englishman but came out to Singapore in about 1910. He was very important in the local industry. He’s the one who first recorded P. Ramlee and Poon Sow Keng. Anyone that can perform the role of introducing two such famous artistes must be an interesting person. I have been in contact with his family and looked at his photograph albums, for example, but his children don’t know much about his career, and he never left anything in writing. So I wish I could talk to someone like that.

Jimmy
What are you reading these days?

Ross
Well, I never read just one book at a time. I’m one of those people who read three or four books simultaneously. I dip in and out of them depending on not just my mood, but what’s suitable for that moment. Some things are nice to read after lunch when you’re having a nice glass of wine or something. Other books you read late at night just before going to sleep.

Jimmy
Complete the sentence: history is…

Ross
Fascinating.

Jimmy
And BiblioAsia, our magazine, is…

Ross
Fascinating.

Jimmy
All right, Ross, thank you very much for joining us today on BiblioAsia+. Ross’s book is available at the National Library and of course it’s also sold at all good bookstores around Singapore. Ross, thank you very much for joining us today.

Ross
Thank you for having me.

Jimmy
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Ross Laird, "Local Music Reaches a Crescendo: The Singapore Record Industry in the 1960s," BiblioAsia 19, no. 2 (2023).

Ross Laird, From Keroncong to Xinyao: The Record Industry in Singapore, 1903–1985 (Singapore: National Library Board, 2023). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 338.4778149095957 LAI)

Joseph C. Pereira, Apache over Singapore: The Story of Singapore Sixties Music, vol. 1 (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2011). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 781.64095957 PER)

Joseph C. Pereira, Beyond the Tea Dance: The Story of Singapore Sixties Music, vol. 2 (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2014). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 781.64095957 PER)

Tan Sooi Beng, Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera (Penang: The Asian Centre, 1997). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSEA 782.1095951 TAN)

Tan Sooi Beng, “The 78 rpm Record Industry in Malaya Prior to World War II,” Asian Music 28, no. 1 (1997): 1–41. (From JSTOR via NLB’s eResources website)

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Gibson Analytics. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Ross for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.