80s: Then and now

Monteiro the jingle man and jazz maestro

People know Jeremy Monteiro as the local king of swing and a Cultural Medallion recipient in Singapore, but few know he was the go-to jingle man in the 1980s.

While he held residency gigs at various iconic venues - he played at Tiara Supper Club in Shangri-La Hotel in 1981; Bistro Toulouse-Lautrec, run by the late Dr Goh Poh Seng, a Singaporean dramatist, novelist and poet, in 1983 and 1984; and the Saxophone Bar for three years from 1985 - it was his advertising jingles that brought him financial success. In that decade, his company, JJ Jingles, chalked up $7 million in revenue.

It all started with a brand of pimple cream in 1981. Veteran ad man Allein Moore, who was with Compton Advertising at the time, approached him to write a jingle for Innoxa 41. Monteiro's jingle impressed two more pimple cream companies, which came knocking on his door. He was 21 then.

The 1980s, recalls Monteiro, now 54, were an interesting time when he did things outside of jazz music - such as playing on pop records (he has backed singers on about 300 pop albums in the 1970s and 1980s, including Frances Yip, Anita Sarawak and Tracy Huang) and yes, writing commercial jingles.

He got married in 1982 and his son was born two years later. Varian, 30, is a counsellor and part- time model.

After the pimple cream jingles, a big client - Coca-Cola - came his way. At the time, Monteiro says, the authorities banned superlatives in commercials, so expressions such as "the biggest" and "the greatest" had to be reworked.

Coca-Cola's jingle for its "Coke Is It!" campaign had to be completely re-recorded because a line in the lyrics went "Coke is it/The biggest taste you've ever found". Monteiro was hired to produce the new jingle.

"We changed 'the biggest' to 'the big big taste'. We re-recorded the entire song and I think I did such a good job that it opened the floodgates to other big brand names," he says.

From 1981 to 1991, he wrote about 500 jingles for companies such as McDonald's, KFC, Toyota, Shell, Nescafe, Tiger Beer and Cadbury. He also composed jingles for the national productivity and national courtesy campaigns.

He reminisces with a chuckle: "The irony was, I wrote the national productivity song lying on a beach chair in Desaru."

But writing jingles was not all fun and games, he adds. "A jingle is not just about writing a pretty piece of music. It's a piece of marketing and about using music as a vehicle to reach your audience. The composer has to try to evoke emotions in the beholder, the tune has to resonate on a heart level and create a pathway to the listener," he explains.

He would ruminate on a jingle for days or weeks, even if the actual writing of the music took mere minutes or a few hours.

He was also involved in producing some of Singapore's iconic national songs. One of the most difficult songs he worked on was We Are Singapore (1987), which contains the exact words of the National Pledge in the bridge. It was written by Canadian Hugh Harrison, who also penned Stand Up For Singapore (1984) and Count On Me, Singapore (1986). Other than Mr Moore, Monteiro says ad-man Mr Harrison also contributed to his success in jingle writing.

"Hugh wanted the words of the pledge inside the song and he wanted them to be sung. It was hard because the pledge is written in prose and not poetry. But we managed to make it work," says Monteiro, who was in charge of orchestration.

In 1990, he wrote his own national song - One People, One Nation, One Singapore, which he most recently performed with local jazz singer Rani Singam at Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew's lying in state at the Parliament House on March 27.

By 1990, Monteiro had already been bitten hard by the jazz bug. In 1988, he played at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland with his band, Monteiro, Young (late jazz double bass player Eldee Young) & Holt (jazz drummer Redd Holt), who were two original members of the Grammy Award-winning Ramsey Lewis Trio. Their 55-minute performance received a three-minute standing ovation in a concert that was televised in many countries.

It put Monteiro on the world map. "I didn't become famous overnight, but I was not so unknown anymore. I was finally seen and heard," he says.

He was the first South-east Asian to perform at the annual jazz festival and was invited by Montreux founder Claude Nobbs, after being introduced by the late Fabrice de Barsy, who owned Saxophone Bar. Mr Nobbs later called the 1988 performance "one of the great concerts of the first 22 years of Montreux".

This was to be the harbinger of Monteiro's rise as Asia's foremost jazz musician. Today, he has more than 30 jazz albums under his belt and a packed performing schedule in Asia and Europe. When he is not performing, he spends his time composing and practising on the piano.

Last year, he released his music book, Jeremy Monteiro Compositions - A Selected Anthology Of Works. He also released two new albums, one of them notably being Jazz-Blues Brothers with Italian ace organist Alberto Marsico.

Monteiro also toured China as a featured guest soloist of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra and premiered a new composition titled Lion City for the EFG London Jazz Festival. Most recently, he produced and released the debut solo album, Falling In Love Again, by home-grown jazz singer Melissa Tham.

On Aug 7, he will perform at the Sing50 concert at National Stadium, celebrating 50 years of Singapore music.

He wants people to know that the curtains are not coming down on his career yet. "My journey in music is far from being over and things are getting very exciting for me on a global scale these few years. I don't want to be remembered as a relic from the 1980s," he says.

Staying power of Tokyo Square's Within You'll Remain

One of the most famous local songs in the 1980s was performed by a band who never had an album of their own.

Tokyo Square's signature song, Within You'll Remain, was one of nine songs on Class Acts, a compilation album released by WEA that also featured works by home-grown bands Gingerbread, Heritage and Zircon Lounge.

With its mix of Oriental and Western instrumentation and a guzheng opening riff, the song was a runaway hit. Class Acts sold 23,000 copies within the three months of its release and is said to have gone platinum (500,000 units) over the years.

But there are some things you probably do not know about Tokyo Square or Within You'll Remain.

For starters, the track did not receive much airplay here when it was first released in 1985. According to frontman Max Surin, 64, it was only after it topped Bangkok's pop charts in January 1986 that the song became an earworm among the Singapore audience.

It was also never quite publicised during the band's heyday that at least one of their members had been involved in drug abuse - one reason the band often changed their members and also why Surin said in a 1987 interview that the band were "going down the rain".

In 1993, a former keyboardist, John Choo, made headlines when he died of methanol poisoning at a drug rehabilitation centre.

And if you think that the band members - the original line-up comprised lead singers Surin and his half-sister Linda Elizabeth Dana, guitarist Peter Han, saxophonist Henry Pereira, drummer Tony Fonseca, keyboardist Clarence Tan and bassist Peter Idil - became rich and famous because of the smash hit, you are wrong. Only half of it is true.

Dana, who is in her 50s, says with a wry smile: "There was no fortune, only fame."

Surin adds: "Each of us received the first one or two cheques and then, no more. It's not that the recording company didn't pay Tokyo Square... The fault was within the band."

It turned out that the contract between the band and the recording company had been signed by only one person and was not countersigned by the other members, so the signatory was not legally bound to distribute payment to the rest of the band members. Surin prefers not to name this person.

"We were naive. We were too eager to cut our first song," he says, adding that the debacle is water under the bridge.

"I didn't take it personally. The album gave us a big break and helped my career. Instead of condemning this person, I should be thankful."

Within You'll Remain was written by Hong Kong musician Donald Ashley and recorded byHong Kong pop-rock band Chyna.

Tokyo Square's producer, Reggie Verghese, a former guitarist with popular 1960s local band The Quests, handpicked the song.

Surin recalls: "He was specifically looking for a song which sounded ethnic because he thought it would do well in the Singapore market."

Verghese was right. After some tweaking and Tokyo Square's version of the song topped the charts, the band found themselves inundated with requests to play it every night when they were performing at Rainbow Lounge, a theatre disco lounge owned by the late Dr Goh Poh Seng, a Singaporean dramatist, novelist and poet, and located opposite Hard Rock Cafe in Cuscaden Road.

They performed the song during television appearances and Surin remembers singing it from the top of a cherry picker at the monthly Orchard Road Street Party in the 1980s. At the 1987 National Day celebration, Tokyo Square was invited to perform Within You'll Remain, where they sang "Wo ai ni, Singapore" in the chorus.

At the peak of the band's fame, Surin was hailed as Singapore's version of Prince, with his smooth vocals, thin moustache and flamboyant style. Once, he even wore purple calf-high boots while performing Within You'll Remain at Rainbow. Dana was easily recognised by her trademark mini skirt and sweet voice.

Contrary to popular belief, the band were not formed by the siblings. Instead, Dana and Han started it before roping in the others.

After Class Acts, the band were featured in another compilation album - which also involved Speedway and Gingerbread - titled Canton Rock, under Hype Records in 1986. It had 10 English covers of Cantopop hits by Hong Kong artists Alan Tam, Sam Hui and George Lam, but none of the songs matched the phenomenal success of Within You'll Remain.

In 1988, the wife of a nightclub owner in Tokyo was so taken with the song that she tracked the group down in Singapore and convinced her husband to offer them a contract. Most of the original Tokyo Square members, including Surin, could notgo as they had commitments in Singapore. Dana quickly assembled a new group to take up the offer.

They performed in Rosemarie Club, located in Tokyo's swanky Roppongi district, and Nanja Munja Club in Nagoya for two years.

But Within You'll Remain never went away. After Surin struck out on his own with Ken Lim as his producer in early 1987, he continued recording different versions of the hit on his solo albums so as to gain recognition among his audience, which spanned different markets across South-east Asia.

"We had a techno version, a ballad version, a rock version and a Thai ethnic version. We replaced 'I love you' in the chorus with 'chan rak kun'," he says. He rejoined Tokyo Square in the same year.

Today, he and Dana are the only original Members of the band remaining. Surin is a resident singer at the singapore-owned Modz Bar in Chengdu, China, while Dana is the resident singer at Swissotel The Stamford's cocktail bar, City Space.

As for Tokyo Square, Surin's eldest son, Adam, 29, is the bassist, and Dana's husband of 10 years, Fazli, 42, is the drummer. Local musician Mayuni Omar, who is in his 40s, plays the keyboards.

Surin is married and also has a daughter, Nadia, 25. Dana has no children.

Not surprisingly, the group are still asked to perform Within You'll Remain at reunion gigs.

How does it feel to be a one-hit wonder?

Surin says good-naturedly: "There's no harm in being a one-hit wonder. Many one-hit wonders are still performing and entertaining."

And from the looks of it, Within You'll Remain will stay around for a long, long time.

Where: National Stadium

When: Aug 7 Admission: $20 tickets at the Singapore Indoor Stadium's Box Office or any SingPost outlet. Go to www.sportshubtix.sg or call 3158-7888

Info: www.sing50concert.sg/

This article was first published on May 28, 2015.
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