The sepia tone photo shows a young child, wearing nothing but a nappy and a slight scowl, sitting on a small wooden seat. Her father stands beside her, wearing an army uniform with flared trousers, a pistol in a holster hung on his right hip. Parked in the background, behind a rabble of dust and vegetation, is a Soviet T-54 tank. The child's hand rests on a transistor radio, its aerial pointing straight up.
The girl in the photo would grow up to be Srey Thy, one-time karaoke singer and now the frontwoman for the Cambodian Space Project, a band that is leading a psychedelic rock revival in Phnom Penh. As the radio in the photo proves, rock 'n' roll prevailed even in Srey Thy's embattled village in Cambodia's southern Prey Veng province.
Srey Thy was born into conflict. As the daughter of a tank driver, she would move around the battlefields with her family as Cambodia's civil war dragged on even after dictator Pol Pot had fled Phnom Penh. For her, war was a normal part of life.
She has never owned a CD player. When Cambodian Space Project founder Julien Poulson discovered her in a karaoke bar and asked her to join the group, she would listen to music on her cellphone. She was enjoying a tradition from before Pol Pot and his genocidal regime, the Khmer Rouge, came to power in 1975.
'There was a childlike innocence to the Cambodia of the 1960s,' says Poulson, an Australian guitarist who first visited Cambodia on a fellowship to study the country's music in 2007 and since decided to stay on and form the band, which will play in Hong Kong on Saturday, March 5. 'It was a very sweet, innocent place, which adopted this explosion of music from the West.'
Wealthy Cambodian teenagers were embracing music from the 'British Invasion' - led by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones - that swept the world. Less well-to-do music lovers heard popular Western tunes over the airwaves courtesy of American troops stationed in neighbouring Vietnam.