To visit the world of music promoter Roks Lam is to enter a zone where time has a strangely elastic quality. It can run forwards: Lam's office clock is set 20 minutes fast deliberately. Or backwards: every day his office quivers with the quaint percussive force of the noonday gun stationed across the road. And it can run on the spot: all those people you thought had long since yodelled their last, including Patti Page, Herman's Hermits and Paul Anka, are alive, but trapped in a musical time warp, like one of those episodes of Star Trek when no one realises they're pickled in a cosmic wrinkle. Lam's enterprise is to beam such entertainers into present-day Hong Kong.
This week it's the turn of Peter, Paul and Mary, who are being zapped into the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on Friday, Saturday and next Sunday nights. For those short on memory (or years), Peter, Paul and Mary are renowned for such songs as ... 'Puff The Magic Dragon,' crooned Lam, 52, when I asked him to name his favourite. (He could also have opted for such classics as Lemon Tree, Blowing In The Wind and Where Have All The Flowers Gone. It soon became apparent Lam has a tendency to segue from one song to another at the slightest excuse.
The day I visited him, he was preparing for a visit by a singer called Brian Hyland, who was to be a special guest at an RTHK event, and when I furrowed my brow (Hyland? Hyland?), Lam leaned over and mournfully intoned, 'Though we gotta say goodbyeeeee for the summer.' Oh, that guy. Lam added, 'Sealed With A Kiss. And, what's that song? Dum, dum, dum, dum ...' I waited, mystified, while Lam did a hum-along ponder. After a while, it came to him: 'Itsy, bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini.'
Such exchanges might give the impression Lam is a merry soul, but that would be a gross simplification. He struck me as a pleasant but unusually serious individual, long on introspective philosophy and short on light-hearted quips. This could be a result of his Hong Kong childhood, which was so impoverished his family could barely afford two meals a day.
He named himself 'Roks' as a boy because it sounded like the Chinese for 'happy guy'. 'I was not happy, but I wanted to be happy.' And is he? 'Life isn't easy for everybody. I would describe myself as much happier than in the old days.' (Which makes it even odder that so much of what he does is about harking back to another era.)
In 1972, having been a cartoonist and a rhythm-guitarist in a band, he became an occasional DJ at Commercial Radio, eventually graduating to his own show. During this time, he met an American DJ called Wolfman Jack of whom, I must confess, I'd never heard but who was clearly an icon in the American music industry (and who played himself in the film American Graffiti). Lam produced Jack's autobiography, Have Mercy! Confessions Of The Original Rock 'n' Roll Animal, from a cupboard behind his desk with the remark, 'So wild. He was always screaming in his programme, that's why he called himself Wolfman.'
After Lam emigrated to Toronto in 1985, with his wife and five-year-old son, he approached Jack in New York and began to help him put on concerts featuring the likes of the Everly Brothers and Patti Page. These genteel acts didn't sound very wolfish to me, although Page is famous for her ferocious canine number, (How Much Is That) Doggie In The Window, but Lam said, simply, 'He belonged to that generation.'