"Senior young man" Chen Shaoqi:

  It's music that chose me

  The profile of the well-known musician Chen Shaoqi's social account is "senior young man".

He has written more than 3,000 songs, and has produced 5 or 600 songs. He is the lyricist of songs such as "Song of the Sunset", "When the Wind Rises", "Cinderella" and "Traffic Light". ; He has served as a music producer, concert director, and film producer; at the same time, he is also a photographer, painter, and model enthusiast. His wide range of interests and infinite vitality make many young people in their twenties sigh beyond their reach.

  He is also one of the first Hong Kong entertainers to come to the mainland for development.

From the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return in 2007, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, well-known musician Chen Shaoqi has witnessed the progress of the country with his creations.

On the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, Chen Shaoqi brought the song "Before" and the series of micro-movies "Departure 2022".

  How will this "senior young man" who never stops looking back on his decades of creative career?

As a Hong Konger who has lived in the mainland for more than ten years, how does he view the relationship between the mainland and Hong Kong?

The following is his autobiography.

Only doing this thing for decades

  I am 57 years old.

In the past few decades, I have only done one thing, that is, creating.

  I have always considered myself a lucky person.

The first layer of luck is talent.

For me, creation is a bit like a pre-installed program for a phone, as if it was born with it.

When I was seven or eight years old, I started to find a box at the bottom of the arcade as a desk, and filled in the songs of the Beatles, Carpenters and other foreign bands with Chinese words, and the words and rhymes were well-thought out.

When I was a child, I still loved to draw comics. After I finished drawing, I forced my brothers and sisters to watch and listen to my stories.

When I was a teenager, I got money to buy my first film camera and started photography.

  The second layer of luck is luck.

My family is not very good.

But I am the youngest among the four siblings. After my elder brothers and sisters came to work, they lightened the financial burden of the family and gave me the freedom to choose a job.

I never thought about doing something to make more money. By chance, I was known by everyone because of my music, and everyone positioned me as a musician.

But I've always been a horizontal person, photographing, painting, modeling, and I never stopped.

Although these things are not profitable, I enjoy them: I have held art exhibitions and photography exhibitions, but the works are not for sale; I spent three years making a miniature model of Kyoto, Japan, which was completed last year.

Even in the music field, my identities are varied, and there is basically no position that I haven't done.

  Lyrics was my starting point in the music industry.

When I first entered the industry in the 1980s, the Hong Kong music scene was called "the time when the stars were shining": Brother Sam (Xu Guanjie) wrote grassroots songs superbly, Mr. Zheng Guojiang's lyrics were beautiful, Mr. Lin Zhenqiang was good at writing very deep love songs, Lu Guozhan The teacher's sentence "The earth is under my feet" (the theme song of the TV series "Qin Shi Huang" in 1986) made the emperor's domineering incisively and vividly written.

But I have always had an idea that artistic creation should make something different.

Therefore, the influence of my seniors on me is "reverse". I avoid the path they have traveled and make my own characteristics.

It is really difficult to forge a path in the masters of Yunyun, but now it seems that I have achieved it.

Some netizens commented that my lyrics have a cinematic and urban feel, which is true.

For example, when I wrote "Traffic Lights", "The Wrong Car", and "Break Up Is Always in the Rain", the lyrics of watching traffic lights crossing the road, taking a bus to the wrong stop, reuniting with an old lover on a rainy street corner, etc., are all very urban. .

For a while, relatively few people wrote about this urban style.

  I have my own creative method.

Every song will first find a creative motivation. When I first entered the industry, I was not proficient, so I would write the copy first.

Let's take "Traffic Light" as an example. This song wants to use traffic lights to describe the feeling of hesitation in love. I first write what each paragraph wants to express.

After writing it, read it later, and if you find it attractive enough, then start writing these contents into lyrics.

The more lyrics are written, I can gradually list only the main points; when I have written about 1,000 songs, the main points are already in my mind, so I don’t need to write a copy.

 Write a life diary for a singer with music

  I like to work with singers for a long time.

After getting to know a person, write a song for him, regardless of whether the song is popular or not, but it must be easier to "unify people and songs".

"Traffic Light" was tailor-made for Zheng Rong by me. She is petite. I think she can interpret the feeling of a little girl who is worried about gains and losses in a relationship very well.

If this song is sung by "high girls" like Chen Huilin and Gigi Leung, it will not be convincing.

  Sometimes, I even feel like I'm using music to write a life diary for a singer friend.

For example, Gigi Leung, when she was 23 years old, I wrote "My Favorite" to her, and made "Wen Qing" her label; when she was 25 years old, I wrote her "25"; when she encountered emotional problems, I wrote her "Love Song to Myself".

Another example is Jacky Cheung. It is said that I am the one who wrote the most lyrics for him, with a total of 109 songs.

  I have written so many songs, but a few of them make me feel mixed.

One is "Song of the Sunset" written to Sister Mei (Anita Mui).

This song and Chen Huixian's "Thousand Thousand Que Songs" are covered from the same Japanese song. The lyricist of the latter is Lin Zhenqiang. Although he "composes the same title" with him, I don't feel any pressure.

In fact, there were three or four versions of the Hong Kong music scene at that time. In addition to the two most familiar songs, the Blue Jeans band also released a version.

"Song of the Sunset" I wrote two editions.

The first version was an ordinary love song for men and women breaking up, but two or three days before the recording, Sister Mei said that she had just received Tsui Hark's "The True Color of Heroes 3" and wanted to recommend this song to the director, but the lyrics had to be overturned and rewritten. .

I drove out a new version of the lyrics in one day, and wrote about the inner struggle of the big sister in the rivers and lakes played by Sister Mei.

What I thought and wrote at the time were all movie characters. Who would have thought that more than ten years later, Sister Mei chose this song as her farewell song at her final concert.

In her last public performance, I sat in the front row watching her singing "Song of the Sunset" in her wedding dress.

That feeling has gone beyond the pain and can't be expressed in words.

  The other is "When the Wind Rises" written to my brother (Leslie Cheung).

This is the theme song for his farewell concert.

One day, I was having dinner with him and his mentor, Li Xiaotian, in Central, Hong Kong. At that time, I thought of the words "When the wind rises again" for a second, as if someone told me behind my back - my brother's famous song is "The Wind Continues to Blow", now that he is retiring, he might as well write a song "When the Wind Rises Again".

After my brother heard it, he quickly hummed the chorus.

He hummed and Li Xiaotian memorized it. In less than 20 minutes, the song was basically formed.

Li Xiaotian immediately sorted out the notation and copied a copy for me to go back and fill in the lyrics.

So when I wrote the lyrics, I didn't even have a demo (sample record), which is quite rare.

There is a line in the lyrics "I hope to send me off with warm applause", but I didn't expect that in 2003, when my brother's hearse drove out, the fans on both sides of the road cried and applauded him farewell.

  There is also a song "Leaving the Most Beautiful Person in the World" written for Luo Wen. After he left, everyone used this song to bid him farewell.

I still remember that I took a lot of the photos on that album for him.

  When I was writing the song, I never thought that something so sad would happen in the future.

The lyricist sometimes seems to be a prophecy, but in fact it does not feel good.

In those years, I witnessed old friends leave one by one, and superstars fell one by one. I still feel very sorry to listen to these songs now.

 HK Phil's surviving newcomers need a spotlight

  Over the past 20 years, many people have liked to say that "the HK Phil is on the decline" or even "the HK Phil is dead", but things can't be viewed this way.

The reason why Hong Kong pop music was so brilliant in the 1980s and 1990s was because we started early, so it could radiate to the whole country, and superstars such as Leslie Cheung were even popular in Japan and South Korea.

An objective analysis shows that Hong Kong’s popular culture has received disproportionate attention. At that time, Hong Kong had only 5 million people, but almost all of China and all of East Asia were listening to Cantonese, a language that can only be understood by reading subtitles.

Later, with the gradual development of the music scene in various places, there is no need for everyone to only listen to Hong Kong pop songs.

So it's not that the HK Phil is dying, but that the spotlight has shifted to other places after the millennium.

  I don't think Hong Kong ever left the stage, it's just that for a long time we became dancing in the dark where no one else could see it.

The saying "Hong Kong Philharmonic is on the decline" is arrogant: we can't fight for the market, but if we fight for the quality of the songs, Hong Kong may not lose.

Now the Hong Kong music scene is more blooming, and it is no longer the world of "fish ball songs" (songs that are easy to import, but have no connotation).

To a certain extent, contemporary young people are even doing better than us: because they could make money doing music back then, it should be done well; but now the market is sluggish and the return on music is lower, but they are still insisting .

  If the spotlight shines again, you will find that Hong Kong musicians are still excellent.

For example, a few years ago, Hunan Satellite TV put the spotlight on Deng Ziqi, and she was seen; now, the program "Sound Lives" put the spotlight on Yan Mingxi and Zeng Bit, and they were also seen.

In recent years, there has been a trend of "nostalgic Hong Kong style" among young people in mainland China. Many people have read and listened to old Hong Kong songs. I think there are several reasons: on the one hand, it is due to aesthetic fatigue. The songs are quite routine and repetitive, and the public will get tired after listening to them too much.

And everyone hasn't paid attention to the HK Phil for a long time. If you suddenly hear old songs like "Song of the Sunset", you will feel very fresh. Of course, this also proves that what we did back then did stand the test of time.

On the other hand, it is the guiding role of the media. From last year's "Bay Area Rising Moon" party to this year's "Sound Lives", the Hong Kong Philharmonic once again became the protagonist of the stage.

It has been the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, and now I see the lights on the HK Phil again, and I hope this "spotlight effect" can make the HK Phil go further.

 Write songs for the 08 Olympic Games and the Shanghai World Expo in the Mainland

  I came to the mainland around 2005 for a number of reasons: First, several superstars in Hong Kong have fallen one after another; second, I saw the mainland music scene rise after "Super Girl"; Hope to leave a little footprint in the mainland market.

  When I came to the mainland, I was in my 40s. If I continued to stay in Hong Kong, I could not worry about food and clothing with my royalties and my job there.

But I have a mentality of "collecting flash cards", and I hope that singers from different eras and different places can sing my songs.

I have always felt that there are many excellent musicians in the Mainland. I heard Yao Beina sing back then. With such a good voice, how could I not want to cooperate with her?

So I took the initiative to propose to Disney to invite her to sing the Chinese theme song "Let It Go" for "Frozen"; later, I heard Mao Buyi sing "Xiaoshou", and I thought he sang too well, so I invited him to cooperate with "Looking for it" The Chinese theme song of "Dream Ring Travel Notes"; the recently aired "Sound Unceasing", I am very happy to see that from 17-year-old Yan Mingxi to 70-year-old Lin Zixiang all sing my songs.

  From 2005 to 2006, I have started to receive job opportunities in mainland China one after another.

But I really got my footing in 2007.

This year, my luck is reflected again.

That year was the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, and it was also the year before the Beijing Olympics. The "Four Heavenly Kings" sang the theme song "Always With You" I wrote at the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to China.

After watching the performance, the leaders of the Olympic Organizing Committee immediately invited me and the composer Jin Peida to Beijing.

We spent the whole night writing "We are Ready" for the first anniversary of the Olympic countdown.

When the countdown reached 100 days, I co-produced with Xiao Ke (Ke Zhaolei) and produced "Beijing Welcomes You", which exploded as soon as it came out.

In October of the same year, the film "Painted Skin" directed by Chen Jiashang was released, and the theme song "Painted Heart", which was written by me and sung by Jane Zhang, also became popular.

In that year's China Mobile Ringtones Chart, there were two of my songs in the top three.

After that, my work in the mainland went very smoothly.

  Share a little secret of Beijing Olympic songs.

When "We are Ready" first came out, there were critics: Why use English?

Actually we designed it.

The first anniversary of the countdown must clearly tell the world that it is "ready", so "We are Ready" is in English.

When the countdown reaches 100 days, the theme of the song becomes "Welcome everyone to be a guest", so the first sentence of "Beijing Welcomes You" is "My door is always open".

  So, my third tier of luck is to catch up with this era.

Ever since I squatted at the bottom of the arcade to write lyrics when I was a child, I felt that music chose me.

Along the way, I encountered many great opportunities: I participated in the creation of theme songs for two Disney parks in China—Hong Kong Disneyland and Shanghai Disneyland, and I wrote songs for the return of Hong Kong, the Beijing Olympics, and the Shanghai World Expo... I was able to participate in person. With so many events, what do I regret?

After 25 years of return, young people must look forward

  Just mentioned, I wrote a song "Always With You" on the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return in 2007.

I still remember when I wrote this song, my starting point was "Thank you Hong Kong people".

There is a lyric "Thank you, small world, create world", I want to thank all Hong Kong people, whether it is music, finance, or manual labor.

It is because of them that Hong Kong, such a small place, can export music to all of Asia, become one of the world's financial centers, and have such a prosperous appearance.

  Now that 15 years have passed, I wrote the theme song "Before" for the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's return this year.

This time, I want to remind everyone: look forward.

"Before" is an inspirational song. In it, I wrote "In the face of this opportunity, in the face of hope, exercise well." Hong Kong has gone through various trials such as the epidemic. I hope that Hong Kong people can still maintain the spirit of forging ahead and improve their competitiveness. .

  In addition to "Before", I also served as the producer of the "Departure 2022" series of micro-films.

The protagonists of the film are four young people born in 1997, all 25 years old, connected with the fate of Hong Kong.

The movie shows how they made their own way in the face of the impact of career, love, family, friendship and the epidemic.

  As a Hong Konger who has lived in the mainland for more than ten years, I now feel an obligation to bring the real situation of Hong Kong people working and living in the mainland to the Hong Kong audience.

Sometimes I feel a little helpless: after returning to China for so long, many Hong Kong people still do not understand the mainland.

Last year, I made a documentary series "Starting Line", which also featured young people in Hong Kong.

I first filmed "Starting Line in the Harbor" to show the work and life of Hong Kong youth in the Greater Bay Area.

Some friends watched the episodes of Nanshan and Qianhai in Shenzhen and asked me, "Where is this? It's like Ginza in Japan!" In fact, it only takes 15 minutes from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, but their understanding of Shenzhen only stops at Luohu Commercial City.

In another episode, the protagonists are a young couple from Hong Kong who open a small street corner shop in Guangzhou.

I photographed the details of their lives, such as their residences and how their daughters go to school. Many people are seeing this real mainland life for the first time.

Before the 10 episodes of "The Starting Line of the Harbor" were finished, I received the task of filming "The Starting Line: Nationwide". Another film crew immediately went to Beijing, Chengdu, Wuhan and other 10 mainland cities to film the working and living there. Hong Kong people.

  This proves that my idea is correct: Hong Kong and the mainland need to communicate and communicate in order to understand each other better.

  Reporter Hu Guangxin