Scale the heights

MC Gold Mountain has the gift of the gab. The moment we sit down at Frenzi Music, the North Point studio where he works as a producer, he immediately starts. His voice has a lovely tone - you expect him to be a good singer just from hearing him speak - so perhaps he was always destined to become one of Hong Kong's top rappers.

'I was a terrible student. I was that stupid kid playing Gameboy in the background,' says the man born Kevin Chau Kei-chien in Michigan and raised in New York and Vancouver. Even so, he wound up at the University of British Columbia, initially to study economics.

He turned to English literature,

a subject he had enjoyed in high school. 'I remember in high school having a teacher who really influenced me a lot. She was really open-minded. She had a passion to teach. She was just fair to everybody, like one of those classic Hollywood movie teachers.' He laughs.

'I still talk to her when I have lyrics. I'll send them to her and ask her what she thinks.'

That teacher exposed him to poetry, which remains influential in his rhyming. One of his favourite poems is John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, which he thinks about when he's on tour and away from his girlfriend. He also speaks of a book called Songs of Gold Mountain, a collection of Cantonese lyrics from San Francisco's Chinatown.