Homespun hero

Wu Bai has come full circle in many ways. He is still Taiwan's one and only rock star, a hard-edged, working-class, guitar-toting hero who plays to stadiums.

But on his current tour, which started last autumn in Taipei and comes to Hong Kong this weekend, he is playing new songs that sound like the old Wu Bai, the Taiwanese Johnny B. Goode who came from a southern Taiwan backwater to big-city Taipei and helped write the score for what has since become known as Taiwanese rock 'n' roll.

Often slower than many would consider proper for rock, this music came together into swaying nasal ballads that combined old Taiwanese songs, Japanese enka and bouncy power chords.

In the past three or four years in Taiwan, that local sound has become part of a larger fashion trend that sits between nostalgia for and the outright celebration of the lost art of being a Taiwanese redneck. The trend is known as taike - the 'tai' comes from 'Taiwan' - and has grown to include everything from city kids wearing cheap plastic slippers as a fashion statement to the huge T.K. Rock Festival that Wu Bai has headlined two years running.

'Before everyone was scared to be a taike, now everyone feels compelled to be a taike,' says Wu Bai, wearing shades, incognito celebrity style, in an Italian restaurant in east Taipei. 'I think this means we've done what we were supposed to do. We made it!'

Wu Bai, who started out under his given name Wu Chun-lin, came to music playing tuba in a high school marching band, and eventually switched to guitar and moved to Taipei in the early 1990s, where he landed gigs playing cover songs in western-themed bars. In 1992, he came together with his current band, China Blue, whose members still include Zhu Jian-hui on bass, Dean Zavolta on drums and Xu Da-hao on keyboards.

A few bars allowed them to perform their originals, and along with two other notable singers, Bobby Chen and Lim Giong, a scene began to form. Through it, Taiwan's notion of rock was gradually redefined from soft rock covers to original homegrown hits, including Taiwan's first rock tunes in Hoklo, or Taiwanese.

'When it came to singing Taiwanese songs, I wasn't as conscious of it as they were,' remembers Wu. 'They might have been thinking that they really wanted to sing [Taiwanese], but I didn't really think about singing [Taiwanese] that much. I didn't have that kind of yearning - to sing Taiwanese songs and develop Taiwanese culture. But my Taiwanese is better, so people like it better when I sing Taiwanese songs.

'At first I didn't really feel like writing Taiwanese songs, because schools didn't teach Taiwanese,' he continues. 'When you think about things, you didn't think in Taiwanese. Taiwanese was just for thinking about your hometown. But I don't really like to mention my hometown, so I don't really use Taiwanese to write songs. But people encouraged me.'

Though Wu Bai has produced two albums in Taiwanese, most of his music is in Mandarin. Through the 90s, as his sound grew progressively heavier and riff-orientated, his fame grew from Taipei to Beijing. On a couple of recent albums, electronic beats were incorporated, and songs began to take on a heavily produced sound. (His earliest electronic rock appeared in songs he wrote for Hong Kong pop singer Karen Mok.)

However, for his newest album, last year's You Are My Flower, Wu Bai has ditched the loops and gone back to a catchy, down-in-the-rice-fields style with the perfect nostalgic edge for teary-eyed karaoke crooning. The title track is the shining example, a perfect fusion of old Taiwan melody with American electric guitars and 1950s whoa-whoa-whoa-ing.

Bizarrely, he explains his inspiration: 'I was listening to Madonna's Hung Up and thought, with this kind of song, you could do it unplugged and it would be really simple and come out really well.'

But whatever the winding, postmodern path he's taken, Wu Bai has somehow returned to his roots. Expect other anthems like Norwegian Wood and Lone Bird on a Tree Branch, and get ready to rock and sway, taike-style.

Wu Bai and China Blue, tomorrow, Sat, 8.15pm, Hitec, 1 Trademart Drive, Kowloon Bay, HK$150-HK$400, HK Ticketing. Inquiries: 3154 9873