Frances Yip is Back Below the Lion Rock

55 years ago, Frances Yip Lai-yee turned up at the TVB studios in Kowloon Tong to audition for a talent contest. The act was meant to be a trio including the choirmaster at the Catholic Cathedral in Caine Road — a fun-loving Italian priest called Father Monti — plus Yip and her then-husband, a gifted classical guitarist. “Father Monti taught me how to sing in other European languages and we were a popular trio,” says Yip. “We would appear doing free concert singing – folk songs, anything in the parishes for weekends and somebody said to me: ‘Oh, they have this show on TVB.’”

But not everything went according to plan. At the TVB audition, the trio became a solo after the other two failed to show. Peggy Jen Ping-ping was organising the contestants. The assistant and later wife of Robert Chua, who had helped found TVB and was the creator of the live entertainment show “Enjoy Yourself Tonight” (櫻花 – 歡樂今宵) asked what Yip’s talent was and then led her to a man at a piano, who played a note as a cue. Yip sang a line of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and was then told she could go home.

Thinking that was it, she was surprised two weeks later when the call came: “You’re on, on Thursday.” Hair, nails and a “decent dress” later, Yip sang live in front of a panel of judges including soprano opera singer Barbara Fei Ming-yi and singer and actor Sam Hui Koon-kit. Heading the panel was TVB’s new musical director, composer Joseph Koo Kar-fai. 

“He said: ‘Oh, she sings very well’ and gave me full marks,” says Yip, 77,  of the show that would launch a 40-year collaboration with Koo.  The contest in April 1969 was sponsored by Sharp Electronics and Yip won a black and white television “that I then had to lug home as they didn’t do deliveries.  Mind you, it was only a portable, but still very, very heavy.”

Yip has now recorded over 100 albums and performed in more than 30 countries.  She lives in Sydney, but is currently in Hong Kong to mark her 55th anniversary in the business with her Gratitude series of concerts next month at Queen Elizabeth Stadium. 

Her WhatsApp photo shows a black and white picture of a little girl with a bob haircut, Yip aged four, when she attended a Methodist kindergarten in Gascoigne Road in Kowloon and was already giving live performances. “I sang a lot,” she says. “I was a bit of a show-off as a child, so I have photos of me in school conducting the band in kindy and performing in front of people, never shy.” 

Yip grew up bilingually and would later attend the English-language St Clare’s Girls’ School. Her father was a Hakka civil servant, her mother Cantonese and Yip was named Lily before she was Frances. “My Chinese name is Yip Lai-yee, so naturally my father gave me the name, Lily. And when I went to school I was Lily Yip.  But when I came out to work I felt that Lily was not very elegant. So Frances became my name.   And I also liked [American pop singer and actress] Connie Francis.   I used to sing a lot of her stuff.”

After the Sharp talent contest at TVB, when Yip was 23, she partnered up with composer Koo and his lyricist James Wong Jim.  Wong and Koo became a legendary duo creating hundreds of movie and TV series theme songs, including the hugely successful and evocative “Under the Lion Rock” “and Shanghai Bund,” which was specifically written for Yip. The two men are the subject of an exhibition at Tai Kwun, Soundtrack of Our Lives: Joseph Koo x James Wong x the Rise of Cantopop, until August 28. 

But before Yip sang the iconic theme songs, she sang the jingles. Rediffusion Television had been launched in Hong Kong in 1957, its competitor TVB in November 1967, and the advertising business was taking off. Koo was based in Kennedy Road at Crown Studios, Yip worked as a secretary at HSBC and just after 1pm would head in a taxi to Koo’s studio.  Jingles were usually around 45 seconds and in her lunch hour Yip could polish off four or five and while Koo listened back, she would eat a sandwich. It was a great way to augment her income while increasing her experience. On an average lunch hour she might sing “Up, up and away” for the airline business, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” or sing a song about a litter bug called Lap Sap Chung, which Koo also composed. 

Koo would work with lyricist Wong on incidental movie music where Yip trilled “la-la-la-laah” to a bossa nova beat or sighed into the mic during love scenes. Koo would gently tell her she was too loud, to step back from the microphone, and listen to the harmonies and all the while she learned from them. While Koo was introverted and shy, Yip describes Wong as a firecracker, quick to blow up and swear before apologising the following day.  

Twice a month or so, Yip would appear as a singer on “Enjoy Yourself Tonight” and was signed to Life Records. In November 1972, Koo was invited by Yamaha to enter the World Popular Song Festival. Koo and his wife, plus Yip and a friend from school headed to Tokyo to perform with the NHK 60-piece orchestra in the Budoka stadium. For Yip, it was a seminal moment. She was excited to be in Japan, awed to be performing in a 12,000-seat stadium and, she says, it “put the seed in my brain that it is very good to be a professional singer.”  

In 1973, after the exposure in Tokyo, Cathay Pacific approached Yip and asked her if she would be willing to become their goodwill ambassador and go overseas to promote Hong Kong as a destination. She would travel to 17 cities in the following year. “It was a time when travel took off and Cathay and Hong Kong really took off with it,” she says. Yip performed at travel conventions and headed to local radio stations to talk about Hong Kong. Then a marketing manager at Cathay Pacific asked her if she would create an album using songs from all the destinations she had been to. “So I very boldly said yes,” she says.

Her manager — later husband — was Briton David Lomax. He helped her write to radio stations and ask them to make suggestions. Some of them sent back folk songs, nursery rhymes or popular songs. Yip’s record label turned down the project but EMI took it on. The album took seven months to produce and was called Discovery. Air stewardesses from around Asia guided her on her pronunciation and Yip sang in multiple languages. The album opened the door for other destinations and over the decades she has often performed in Thailand and Malaysia among other countries.

Discovery was also heard by an agent in London, Richard Armitage, whose clients included British journalist and TV host David Frost. “He tracked me down through EMI and said, ‘I can work with you, I’m very excited about your voice.’ So I went to see him in 1973, and he said, ‘If you come to live in London I can deliver you a major contract within six weeks with at least a five thousand pounds advance.’”

Yip deliberated and decided to take a chance. “Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking ‘If only, you know.’” She would release four singles and an album while in the UK and would travel to Manchester, Glasgow and Swansea, taking song arrangements with her to sing live with BBC orchestras. 

Yip’s producer, Norman Newell, also produced for singer Shirley Bassey.  Newell provided her with good material but it was hugely challenging to break into the market in the UK. “You know how hard it is to break into the Western world, right, as a Chinese girl. And they wanted to put chopsticks in my hair and sing ‘Ping Pong Song’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m 26 years old. I want to be known for my voice.’”

It also rained and the skies were grey, so instead Yip came back this way.  She performed in the cabaret rooms of various Asian cities and in Hong Kong. “In the Mandarin [Oriental] in Hong Kong I would sing in the Harbour Room, in the Hilton in the Eagle’s Nest, in the Shangri La it was the Tiara Room.” 

Koo, meanwhile, continued to compose TV theme songs, often collaborating with Wong, but due to her itinerant performing schedule, Yip was often unavailable to sing for him. But in 1980, TVB asked her to return. They had a new gangster series set in Shanghai, starring Chow Yun-fat, called The Bund. The filming had finished and Koo was given three weeks to compose the theme song, “Shanghai Bund.”  Yip laughs as she explains it took Koo most of that three weeks leaving Wong with about 12 hours to write the lyrics. 

“Long6 ban1, long6 lau4 (浪奔, 浪流)” — ”Rushing waves, flowing waves” — sings Yip with power and emotion in a song specifically composed for her voice and range by Koo. “I can probably hit a high C,” she says. “In falsetto I can probably do better. A low B flat, dodgy sometimes you know.” Over the years, Yip has looked after her voice. “I never shout,” she says. “I live a very normal existence and exercise a lot,” including golf at weekends for the past 40 years. “I would say that my range has dropped half a tone. A few years ago I recorded six of my most popular theme songs with Michael Au, a local producer.  And in the studio I sang everything in the original key and I was very, very pleased about that because I didn’t expect to.”

Yip is a warm conversationalist happy to explain her collaboration with Wong and Koo and the close friendship that ensued.  The trio had concerts together at the Hong Kong Coliseum where Koo initially conducted the orchestra before relaxing in later concerts and passing his baton to his proteges. “So they would take over and then he would sit in an armchair, and then we would tease him, because he is very shy,” she says. “We would get up to the front and stick the microphone in his face and say, ‘Joseph, say hello to everybody.’”  

Yip would continue to work intermittently with Koo, who died last year at the age of 92. He emigrated to Vancouver in the early 1990s and Yip would join him there for concerts. Wong died at the age of 63 in 2004. “I used to be James Wong’s neighbour,” says Yip. “My study looked down on his study and sometimes he and his wife and my husband and I, we would go on walks together especially in the last couple of years when he already had lung cancer and he wanted to have a more active lifestyle.

Yip describes how devastated she felt when Wong died. “His work will live on. They’re very creative and professional, they taught me how to be professional for which I was very grateful.” She laughs at one memory involving Wong. “We worked closely together for more than 40 years. According to James, and I take it with a pinch of salt he used to say: ‘We like you because you’re cheap.’”

Yip has remained internationally popular, in the Chinese diaspora in Canada and elsewhere but also throughout Asia – a legacy of her Discovery album that finds her giving concerts in Thailand and Malaysia. Shanghai Bund is a staple of those concerts and will be at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium next month. And there is that other song, too.

When Koo and Wong created the theme song for “Below the Lion Rock,” a new RTHK television show in 1979, it was written for Roman Tam. While Yip has never recorded it, she has sung it many times. “Whenever we do a concert, we usually close with that and people really, really love that song,” she says, in a salute to Wong and Koo. “Because it is us, it’s everything about us. It’s phenomenal.”

Soundtrack of Our Lives: Joseph Koo x James Wong x the Rise of Cantopop runs until August 28, 2024 at Tai Kwun.

Gratitude: Frances Yip 55th Anniversary Concert Hong Kong 2024 takes place on August 3 and 4 at Queen Elizabeth Stadium.