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Liverpool's Canto-pop trailblazer singing for big break
Liverpool's Canto-pop trailblazer singing for big break
Sunday December 02, 2007
Barry Cox's journey from working-class Liverpool to a nightly performance at a giant Macau casino all began in a chip shop.
It was there that the youngster, headed for a series of unremarkable
jobs in supermarkets and at call centres, made the unlikely decision to start learning Cantonese.
It was a move that has taken him all over the world, seen him triumph in Chinese-language singing competitions and flirt with the closed world of Canto-pop stardom. It may even result in a film being made of his life.
Now, the 30-year-old befuddles tourists and gamblers every night at the gargantuan Venetian resort singing his favourite songs in immaculate Cantonese, occasionally slipping into Mandarin, or his hometown Liverpool twang.
"I was doing a lot of dead-end jobs -- supermarkets, insurance companies that sort of thing -- and I thought 'What could I do to improve myself?'" said Cox, under the fake blue sky near the casino's replica of St Mark's Square.
Cox started learning Spanish, but after two weeks realised that everyone else in the room was a university graduate and would beat him to any job going.
"All of a sudden the thought came to me -- Chinese, that is the language I should be doing.
"Two or three doors away from my home was a chip shop run by a Chinese family. I thought 'I need to find a way to get in there'. So I went and bought a pie."
Cox began hanging around at the shop and asked about whether he could get some help learning Chinese -- he did not know there was a difference between Mandarin, China's national language, and Cantonese, the southern dialect predominant among Britain's Chinese community.
The shop's owner said he had a nephew who was staying with him and if Cox could help his relative with some English, he was sure the nephew would help him with Chinese -- which, as it happened, was Cantonese.
Soon Cox, who admits he was "not a brain-box" at school, was spending four hours a night in the chip shop learning new words, then he and the visiting nephew would head out drinking with a group of Chinese, Cox struggling to pick up the tones.
He started taking formal lessons at the city's Chinese community centre and even took a job in a Chinese supermarket.
"I was learning 24 hours a day," he says.
After about two years of struggling with the complex tones of Cantonese, a friend introduced him to Canto-pop music.
Cox, who had never been interested in music before, was soon saving up the 50 pounds (100 dollars) to see Canto-pop star Leon Lai perform in nearby Manchester.
It was a life-changing experience. Cox found himself riffling through Chinese magazines to find new recordings, and ordering them from overseas.
On a whim, he decided to enter a singing competition in Liverpool to celebrate Chinese New Year, performing one of Lai's songs.
"I sang it terribly but everyone applauded, I guess because it was so out there," he said.
With a typically bullish attitude, he was soon taking singing lessons, learning how to breath properly and perform in Cantonese. He also began entering -- and winning -- karaoke competitions, beating native Chinese speakers.
The success garnered national attention, with newspaper articles and documentaries -- one called "Romeo of Chinatown".
However, Cox realised that if he wanted to make a career out of Canto-pop, he had to move to where the market was -- Hong Kong.
Cox performed a couple of times on local radio stations and at corporate events, often as a novelty -- "My singing was still not as good as it could be," he says -- before he fulfilled a lifetime ambition and won a singing competition in Hong Kong, beating off bemused rivals to snatch a cash prize and the promise of a record deal.
Despite Cox's persistence, the record company refused to honour the deal, he says because they were unsure of how to market him as an entertainment commodity.
Nevertheless, he continued to perform across Hong Kong and southern China even though he feared that his chance to make it big had faded.
Now he is hoping his salvation will come in film.
Initial interest in making a movie of his life came from Miramax, the US film company. The idea was also pitched to director John Woo's Hong Kong-based firm.
But the project drifted until it was taken up by production company Atman Entertainment, which is hoping to pull together the 2.5 million pounds in financing to start filming in Liverpool next year, with Cox as the star.
"By learning Cantonese and becoming something of a local hero by singing in Cantonese, Barry brought the two communities together in a whole new way," said Ross Grayson Bell, the film's producer and script writer.
"He made us all see that we are really much more similar with each other than different. That is the essence of what we are going for in the movie -- the underdog who breaks out of his life to take on a whole new world and brings greater understanding."
Cox clings to the film as his best remaining chance of stardom.
"I have got all my demos and keep sending them to people. Maybe if the movie gets done, maybe it might be easier for them to give me a chance," added Cox, who is convinced the local record companies are still confounded about how to promote a white Canto-pop singer in a market dominated by over-styled look- and sing-a-likes.
"There is a little bit of regret. I know that I am good. A lot of people know that I am good," he says.
And despite the frustration, he has no doubt his decision to visit his local chip shop and buy that pie has paid off.
"The state of jobs in England, I would be lucky to get a job in a supermarket. When you go back, you see all of your friends doing exactly the same as 10 years ago," he said.
"I have got out of the rut. I do things and have done things that most people could only dream of doing," he added, toying with his Buddha-bead bracelet which he hopes will encourage a prosperous career.
Fijilive
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