Growing Pain (Part II)

凡每個夢也要實現　管它有多麼遠

After achieving unprecedented success in Hong Kong music industry together in the 70s, Sam Hui parted way with Polydor amicably in 1983 and signed with a relatively new local label Contec Sound Media. Founded in 1982, Contec only had one artist up to that point, Paula Tsui, but her first record with them had received phenomenal promotion, including a never before TV commercial for an album release that featured her monster hit 隨想曲.

Contec was equally no expense spared their first collaboration with Sam Hui 新的開始. Released in late 1983, it was also the year music video has officially arrived as the new outlet for pop music. Banking on Sam Hui’s enormous popularity, Contec themselves, instead of letting TVB churn out run of the mill products, filmed a series of music videos for some of the songs in 新的開始 and booked an half an hour time slot in TVB to launch each of the videos.

Compared with the standard of its time, Contec’s music videos have much higher production budget and more sophisticated cinematography. For instance, part of 風中趕路人 was filmed in an empty MTR train. The filming of 氹氹轉 is a no-brainer, with its subject matter the boat ride in 荔園 comes as a second nature. The only problem was that the boats are only big enough for those whose age has yet reached double digit. So the public is thankfully spared from the image of Sam Hui cramping himself into that tiny raft. Instead the boat ride was filmed as a miniature toy with Sam’s figure superimposed onto it. As the song draws to its conclusion, the tempo of the video picks up and the image was shrunk and tiled over the screen, rivaling the extravagance of some Busby Berkeley musical. Such elaboration has rarely been attempted again in Hong Kong music- videodom. It is a shame that Contec’s music videos have never been available to public and are seldom seen again after their initial release.

In retrospect, Contec’s confidence on Sam Hui might have a little overstated because by then Sam was almost imperceptibly but surely slipping. The song 氹氹轉 was revered for the philosophical lyric “世事又好似船船 係最尾又變在前 前既也定會落後面 不必眼光太淺”, which enabled it to rise above a mere children song. It was also strangely prophetic – within less than six months after the video was broadcast, Alan Tam would have released two mega sellers, 霧之戀 and 愛的根源, and dethroned Sam as the numero uno in Hong Kong music scene.

One side note, net friend Terrence in his blog entry 《憶蓮》盒帶 [G-cassette] mentioned that The CBS original G-cassette had only been used in 憶蓮, 灰色 and 因你別離 three releases in Hong Kong music history. However, judging from the look of it, CBS seemed to steal the concept from Contec and packaged it as G-cassette themselves. What do you think?