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DJ COOL: Joe Ng does DJ duty every Friday night at Home, a club at The Riverwalk popular with teens and 20-somethings. -- PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
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JOE Ng does not want to reveal his age. 'It's an ageist society,' he says by way of protest as we haggle over this issue for the first five minutes of the interview.
For the record, the film composer and all-around champion of local music is 40, although you wouldn't guess it. With his rock T-shirt, black jeans and his artfully mussed-up hair, he exudes the air of someone half his age.
This, of course, stands him in good stead when he helms the decks every Friday at Home, a club at The Riverwalk frequented by energetic 20-somethings and Paul Twohill lookalikes.
But it also attracts the occasional unkind comment by people who are too eager to compartmentalise others according to things like, well, age.
'It's an ageist society,' he says once again, as he orders a whisky on the rocks. 'I was here one Friday night, taking a break from spinning, and this acquaintance came up to me and said, 'What are you doing here? You should be in bed',' he recalls, with a snort.
We are at Home on a quiet weeknight. It is 9.30pm. Occasionally, a club regular will walk by, recognise Ng, and come by to say hello.
Ng, as his friends will attest, is a denizen of the darker hours. The only album released by his erstwhile band, the Padres, in 1997, was titled Night because, said Ng at the time, 'it's when your devils come out. In a way, it is the perverse side of me'.
Indeed, it was an ungodly 1.30am before our interview finally wrapped, with Ng getting progressively more awake as the hours ticked on.
Today, his creative demons have been harnessed to breathe life into local movies as he carves a niche for himself as Singapore's foremost film composer.
His latest effort is the score for Gone Shopping, the Kym Ng and Adrian Pang starrer which is the debut feature film by director Wee Li Lin.
He has also scored all of director Kelvin Tong's four films, including the latest, Men In White, which was released last month.
Says Tong, 34: 'Joe's very different because he is more than a musician or a composer. He is also a music fan, a Singapore indie activist, a rainforest lover, a great joker, a film buff and a romantic to the core.
'I've met composers who see their work as merely that - work. I can't collaborate with them. I need someone like Joe for whom music is a passion and an addiction.'
Film scoring is a subtle process which takes place behind the scenes - a far cry from Ng's early dabblings with local film, which saw him front and centre of the camera.
Most Singaporeans remember him as the Mee Pok Man, the doomed necrophilic character he played in Eric Khoo's 1995 movie of the same name.
Says Ng: 'I was very into that character because he was an underdog and I've always rooted for the underdog.'
He also appeared in Khoo's short film, Carcass, where he had a sex scene which involved him baring his butt; and an episode of the TV series, Drive.
But acting was not his calling. 'It was always too hot under the lights,' he says. 'But I enjoyed the experience while it lasted. We all felt like a bunch of schoolboys climbing Bukit Timah Hill,' he says with a grin, recalling the camaraderie on the shoots.
His preferred mode of expression was, and still is, music. In the 1990s, he focused his energies and passion into creating songs for himself, as well as championing the local music scene in general.
He worked as a record executive, first with BMG from 1990 to 1993; and then with Rock Records from 1994 to 1997, learning about the music business and dealing with musicians, both local and foreign.
Mr Gary See, 51, managing director of Universal Music Singapore, was his boss at BMG and an early influence on him.
Says Mr See: 'Joe lives and dies for the local scene. He is the ultimate champion for his peers, a rebel with a cause. His love for local bands and his enthusiasm for all kinds of music made him a better executive.'
In 1992, a particularly good year for BMG with best-selling albums by its artistes Whitney Houston and Kenny G, Ng took his bonus money and put it where his mouth is.
'Instead of buying shares, I used the money to go to local band Stoned Revivals, whom I loved very much, and told them I would finance their first album.
'My deal with them was simple. I would pay for the recording of the cassettes - that was the medium in those days - and once I broke even, whatever was left would be theirs. I just wanted them to have a record out.'
He says he cannot remember how much he pumped in or how many cassettes were sold. All he recalls is making a loss of about $10. He would also put down deposit money for local bands' gigs.
At the same time, he was also making his own music. He formed and fronted Corporate Toil in 1986 and, later and more successfully, the Padres in 1994. The latter made a minor splash in the music scene here when its 1994 single, Radio Station, was picked up by the late British DJ John Peel, who played it on his BBC radio show, Multi-Track.
In 1997, Ng also wrote Fool, a Mandarin song that was a hit for Taiwanese singer Tarcy Su. The English version of the song, called Water, eventually appeared on the Padres' album, Night. In 1998, however, the band split up, citing creative differences.
Says Ng: 'My ambition was always just to play music, to express myself and whatever was going on in my life - my anger, the hypocrisy of the mainstream and how the adults I knew would let me down. All that still colours me today.'
Anger management
THANKFULLY, today, this anger has been sublimated - indeed Ng is probably one of the nicest and most amiable people you could ever meet - but his suspicion of all things phoney and conventional keeps him honest.
His mistrust of adults and his preference for the company of younger people hark back to the hard lessons of his growing up years.
He was born Ng Hock Sun in 1966, the second of three children. He gave himself the name Joe when, as a child, he discovered The Flintstones and became a fan of one of the cartoon's creators, Joe Barbera.
Ng's father, Yu Chee, owned a construction company and his mother, Kwee Lan, was a housewife. His elder brother Hock Hai, 43, is today an air force technician and his sister, Seok Joo, 37, a bank administrator.
Life was fairly idyllic as the family fortunes grew and the Ngs gradually upgraded from a shophouse in Chinatown to a pre-war flat in Tiong Bahru to a bungalow in Bukit Timah.
'My Dad built part of Changi Airport's Terminal One,' says Ng proudly. When his father died in 1982 of liver cancer, his world fell apart and the family entered a dark period.
'I was 16, it was a huge shock. I cried and cried,' he says. To make matters worse, says Ng, one of his uncles fraudulently transferred his father's shares to his name, to the tune of a few million dollars.
'For the next 15 years or so, we were in court contesting this. We won in the end, but it cost us a lot. It split the family apart,' he says.
Relatives would take sides with either his mother or his uncle, depending on who seemed likely to win the case at the time.
'I saw this with my own two eyes. I saw the hypocrisy in these adults. I was drawn to punk rock and music on the edge at that time because they mirrored all the angst and anger I was feeling about adults and mainstream society,' he recalls.
With the pressures of the court case and raising three young children, his mother soon succumbed to depression and severe mood swings.
'To make matters worse, neither my sister nor I was academically inclined, which added to her stress,' says Ng, who studied at Tiong Bahru Primary and Gan Eng Seng Secondary, before pursuing his pre-university studies at Beatty Secondary.
His brother had signed up with the air force and was hardly at home, leaving him to deal with and translate the legal documents for his uneducated and increasingly perplexed mother.
A heavy smoker all her life, she eventually died from lung cancer in 1997.
Says Ng: 'It took me a long time to get to where I am today where I can reconcile myself with mainstream society and why certain people do the things they do.'
Today, with his bachelor pad apartment in Cambridge Road - his newlywed sister, who had been living with him, will be moving out soon - he says he is the happiest he has ever been.
And he has no time for ageism and society's expectations. Young people, he says, energise him simply because they still get excited about new discoveries.
'I get annoyed when people hear a piece of music and say they did it better in the old days. I always defend new bands and new music.'
He is, of course, still fighting for the underdog and flying the rebel flag for Singapore's unsung music talents - like Alberta Leong, for example.
The singer of the closing track on Gone Shopping is a young unknown whom he discovered when trawling myspace.
And in a bid to promote local pop, past and present, his ad hoc band, localbarboy, plays only cover versions of Singapore songs.
He is also an ardent documentarian of local gigs and music, posting MP3 clips of bands on his www.localbarkid.com and www.myspace. com/ngjoe.
He says: 'I am still an idealist, but I've also grown up. As I get older, I realise what I really do best is serving other people's needs.'
sohchin@sph.com.sg
Gone Shopping opens on Thursday.
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