Local indie covers by LocalBarBoy

Former Padres frontman and "Mee Pok Man" Joe Ng's new band Localbarboy only belts out cover versions of local band music and "aims to create a karaoke-friendly environment at our shows, with lyrics on cue boards for the audience to sing-along". All this according to their MySpace site. Joe has also made recordings of localbarboy's shows available on his blog.

I am not sure how aware Joe is about the limits of copyright that he is pushing with this band project. And I am not sure that he cares either. My impression of the music scene in Singapore is that it is still a nascent community that draws little mainstream acknowledgement. Perhaps localbarboy's efforts may be a little naive legally, but I think Joe's got his heart in the right place. When there are few official channels to publicize and make local music known, you DIY. Joe's offering of the recordings of many other Singaporean bands on his blog is not only a community building effort on his part, but also harkens back to the days when listening to a grainy, poorly recorded bootleg recording of a live show. And as testament to Joe's community building efforts is the fact that members of the other bands that localbarboy covers often play on stage with them. In solidarity with Joe, (and perhaps a little foolishly) I offer you a sampling of a localbarboy show above. As evidenced by the reception of the crowd at these shows, there is lusty enthusiasm and familiarity for these songs. And to think that a couple of years back, local media had pronounced that the Singaporean music scene was all but dead.

This brings me to a "rockumentary" that was screened in the Detroit Flim Theater a couple of weeks ago and that we tagged along with Eric and Amy for. "It Came From Detroit" highlighted the Garage band scene that was at its peak during the 90s in the city. One line in the movie stuck in my head "everyone's band was like their own little gang, and there's all these little gangs intermingling with each other ..." Kinda sounds like Joe's little project here.

Oh BTW, the track performed is a song called "Siti" by former Singaporean enfants terrible, Force Vomit. The recording was taken from a show that localbarboy performed at Homeclub on 28th July 2006.