UGLYM3N

what a gig it was…

today, we play in ji gong birthday bash at taman berjaya night market area in alor setar, kedah. the gig was announced and arranged like 6 months ago. it was a classic chinese mini concert held during festive chinese seasons to celebrate certain kind of occasion. and tonite is the 3rd night of the birthday bash and the stage is a typical chinese “kor tai” (performance stage) famous throughout malaysia and held at chinese hotspots i.e. places where you have a lot of concentration of chinese. ji gong deity is a monk whose compassion and sense of humour uniquely identify him from the other deities and gods. ji gong deity has helped uglymen in our difficult path of producing and releasing our debut album last year. as a kind gesture, ji gong invited us to play at his birthday, we AGREED immediately.

the atmosphere was nice but alor-”city status”-star town is indeed a quiet place where crowd is usually stingy with their applause. well, alor setar people are shy, ok? uglymen is a contaminated bunch.

soundcheck (band rehearsal on stage) was a bit unEXPECTED and funny. the sound system and performance was contracted to “khai sien” whose boss is affectionately called “ah beng”. when i called him in the morning to ask the time of our rehearsal, he told us to come at 3pm or 4pm to let the soundman know how and where to setup the drums and amps. i was like “huh? i thought you were doing this for the past 20 years and you are asking me where to put the drums and amps?”. usually, for local chinese mini concert, the usual performances are loaded with scantily clad underaged girls in tight bikinis jumping and singing. in this 21st century, there's hardly any band playing live in alor setar. why? cause people dont care if beyond is playing or metallica is playing or green day is playing… all they care is loud techno music with girls jumping around. live bands are hard to maintain. live bands lead difficult life where they have to work during the day and practise their butt off to every familiar pop songs from radio. apart from that they need to play any songs in any key for the whole night with minimal pay. they play more than 3 hours but paid lesser than show girls (according to my cousin ah lai who used to play bass in the 90's as chinese live band accompaniment). and event organizer dislike setting up live band equipment cause there's a lot of hard work, setup and equipments needed to produce a good show. currently, it's karaoke all the way. it's such an easy setup where you just need a VCD player with a TV on stage for the singers to sing along. live band is hard life. there's no luxury in it. uglymen can afford to play live cause we earn our little salaries during the day and the love of music push us to do what we love to play and sing. for chinese mini concert, u play for money not fun. and to be honest, this is the first time in my limited life that i did not see any male performers, sigh. if i got enough money, i want to give to ah hooi to undergo sex change. ah hooi looks pretty naturally.

the drums and amps came at 6pm. can u believe that? luckily ah leow and ah wei (both aspiring drummers) were at the scene to setup the drums. this is one of the few times that we need to setup the drums while the soundman was eating his dinner. haaaa… ai cai lah…

uglymen minus michael (he's working at that time), ah leow, ah wei and ah beh have already reached. we were kinda pissed off as we were “expected” to setup the drums, including miking the drums and amps. i was a bit annoyed cause in our agreement, we were supposed to be there for rehearsal and perform at night. but i knew that i can't make anything better if i were to go against them (sound crew). i just smiled and pulled the guys down to eat dinner. i might sound evil but these people were paid to do their job. all performers and sound crew were paid. uglymen? we did not ask for payment, we just told the organizer, anything you'll give/provide, we'll accept. the dinner was nice though. and after performance, they were so nice to present us with a red packet (ang pow). money is nothing but the thought of having to repay ji gong back by performing for him is our ultimate satisfaction.

show started at 8:45pm with poor girls not having enough money to buy clothes came dancing and singing to loud techno music. uncles and oldmen became viagra-free by looking at these girls. every song was “techno-tized”. mike can from work at 9.15pm. we went up stage at 9:25pm and oh my god… we dint see gods but underaged girls wearing ONLY black bras and panties cause they were constantly changing their outfits… i quicky grab my handkerchief and stop my nose from bleeding. those girls were cute man… i was ogling at their drainage systems, so deep…

we started off with shaolin kungfu and:
- robot
- sor low (fool)
- bubble tea
- super horse (sam hui cover song)
- missing you
- domido
- happy birthday to jigong
- beyond medley (medley of beyond cover songs)
- ciak kaki (eat yourself)
- si ai bin (love song)

honestly, i think that our last singapore gig was tighter than tonight's gig. we can feel it but ah beh, our long time super fan told us that our sound was great down the stage. we played a few mistakes here and there but overall it was a good show, in our opinion. michael specially wrote a birthday song dedicated to ji gong HOWEVER there's not seem to be much enthusiasm from the crowd over the song — only the workers and organizers of the birthday bash were singing along the birthday song with us. i was kinda feel awkward cause if it was NOT because of ji gong, the crowd won't be enjoying these free shows. well, that's how people think, i guess. or maybe i just feel that people should be grateful for what has been given/provided to them. this is called “courtesy”.

surprisingly i spoke rubbish a lot cause mike asked me to, so that he can tune his guitar every two songs. i dont know what to talk cause the crowd was quiet. we got some feedback from youngsters. not many uncles and aunties enjoy or knew what we were doing. they just hope that “when this band gonna end? i wanna see the girls”. overall, we did a decent job but we guess that our kind of music was not the cup of tea that the crowd might like. crowd loved pop songs, pretty girls and exciting dance movements.

small portion of crowd loved most of our “movement” songs such as robot, sor low, super horse, beyond medley and si ai bin. our friend ah beh specially brought his cam corder to record our performance. he hope to burn it into VCD and sell to unsuspecting guys for fortune.

special thanks to (in no particular order): ah leow, ah beh, ah wei, tap fatt, our ex-bassist ah lai & his wife, my cousin a bassist also name ah lai, ric tan ah long, ah lynn, lee2, ah yin, zheng yang, sar chim, hooi's friends, mike's friends and all those friends whom we didn't mention. we love you all.

photos by ah yin but blur and did not capture the band in full cause she's sitting at the far left.