The Juke Joint

I found these on a Youtube foray. I'm posting the links here because the owner of the videos didn't enable embedding.

The Quests doing the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction"

The Straydogs doing their song "Freedom"

The Quests and The Straydogs were just 2 of many bands playing the club circuits and producing albums in Singapore during the 60's. The main influences were the British and American bands, which isn't surprising considering our colonial history. It was my pleasure to have met some of the old hands from that era, in particular Dennis who now runs Guitar77. The pulsing bass line you hear on "Freedom" was laid down by him and he's shared many a tale about Singapores' music scene then. As a newly-independent state in the free-loving 60's, the authorities were obsessively conscientious about maintaining civil and social order. It was a time when sporting long hair was enough reason for a police spot check on the assumption that you were a "band boy". That also meant that you were a drug-smoking hippie. Jukeboxes were banned on the assumption that they would encourage the spread of hedonistic western lifestyles and this continued up till the 1990s.

Of course, Singapore has progressed from those days (the extent of which is still highly subjective) and our music industry has evolved into what it is today, for better or for worse. These videos are just a small glimpse of what it used to be like trying to make it big before Singapore Idol.