I remeber it so clearly.I love my childhood.I had a really good time from the start of the 80's.I felt as if everything was wonderful,every day was exciting,i felt "fresh".Waking up in the morning wasn't a problem.Then one day in 1986 my father moved to a different state called johor.So the whole family had to go.I had to go to a different school so i needed to get a schoolbus.My parents arranged it for me.I was 10 years old then.I was a very good looking kid i must say.Anyway my parents found a bus driver.This was the turning point in my life ...Everyday on the bus as i go to and from school he would pop in a pirated cassette of the hottest dance music of '86-EUROBEAT.At those times,piracy was rampant.One could find cheap RM3 (U$ 1) cassettes around of the hottest songs of that time.Let me tell you about my bus driver first.He was a middle aged man around 38 maybe 40,a typical chinese man.He was a very nice fellow as he never beats the kids up in his bus,unlike some other drivers i know.He was a lot of fun to be with.The songs that he would play are the modern talking songs like "bells of paris","you're my heart you're my soul","cheri cheri lady" and many more.He also played many more songs from the pirated cassettes like "don't cry"-ken laszlo,"more than a kiss"-micheal bedford,"touch in the night"-silent circle,"cha cha cha"-finzy kontini,"swiss boy"-lou sern,"love spy"-mike mareen,"tokyo town"-sarah,"gonna give my heart"-london boys,"touch by touch"-joy,"tonight"-ken laszlo,"in the heat of the night"-sandra,"geronimo's cadillac"-modern talking,"hello"-joy to name a few.These were the most popular eurobeat songs in asia ever.There were even chinese language versions of "cha cha cha" and "in the heat of the night"!I remember playing around with my friends on the bus pretending we had laser guns when "love spy" by mike mareen was played.Also i remember waiting for the bus and then i get on it and i could hear the song "don't cry"remix by ken laszlo playing and it goes like "open open open o-o-o-o-open" and the bus driver having little knowledge of english would sing along with it saying"mouthing mouthing mouthing" in the same style as the stuttering remix of "don't cry".It was really fun to hear him imitatting the stutters.I loved the music so much i even borrowed the tapes he played in the bus.Well ,the music influenced me a lot,i loved it then and i started to search for it in supermarkets.There was one time i was searching for the songs in the supermarket and i heard the song 'give me your love tonight"by sandy wilson and i immediately said to my father thats the cassette i want!.He bought it for me.The title of the pirated cassette was "HOLLYWOOD EAST STAR TRAX".It was a non stop remixing of eurobeat in hollywood east.It was extremely common in asia in the 80's to have a stuttering kind of remix where words are repeated without giving a chance for the singer to end the word.Examples are "what my heart wanna say"the boat remix by roger meno where he goes "i know you do,ba-ba-ba-ba,maybe in time,your looking for,maybe in time you're looking fo,maybe,maybe may yor may yor ",then there is also "touch by touch the 87 mix" by joy which goes like "ba-ba-ba-ba touch byee tou - tou -touch".Another song i remember is "do you really need me "by k.b caps which goes like "the night is right,do ya,the sparkling night,his hiss hissss...".Eurobeat had the quality of being "over the top" with it's emotions conveyed,another reason why i love it.I think 80's rock like starship,heart and the bangles had that sound,but eurobeat is especially important to me.Then in '88 my family moved back to the state i came from,selangor.At that time i started to wacth music videos of america's top 10 and remember watching videos of "never gonna give you up"-rick astley and "i should be so lucky" -kylie minogue.I loved those songs then.I was 12 years old by then.The 80's was coming to an end.I don't know what happened at that time,but my passion for life was slowly dying off.Maybe it was puberty or the loss of innocence or something.This was '89.The music was slowly changing.By 1990 eurobeat was gone.The melodic lines no longer graced the airwaves but a new kind of slow music was-hip hop and rap.I didn't like it at all.
In the 90's i became a "hardhead".Everything was going wrong.The dance music was lousy,but the pop songs were ok,and most importantly i lost the feeling of excitement for life that i felt in the 80's.At that time i collected the pop songs in the charts in '90 to '92.I liked songs by bryan addams,kathy trocolli and scorpions a.k.a the usual top 40 stuff.At that time i totally forgot about eurobeat.Then one day in late '92 i was searching for cassettes in a local supermart,and i found a cassette titled "do you remember dance classics" and decided to buy it because i saw ken laszlo's name there.When i saw his name there , i began to remember something like a lightbulb flashed in my head.Could this be the songs i once heard in my schoolbus in '87?.I decided to take a gamble and bought the cassette.To my suprise,it was exactly the type of songs that i heard on my schoolbus,except they were now original copies.I thought they only existed on pirated tapes.When i listen to the songs,i felt a strange kind of deja-vu,like all the good memories coming back to me.I loved it!.So from that moment on in '92,i vowed to myself ,find eurobeat music whatever it takes...