His Life

Wong Ka Kui · 黃家駒
Born 10 June 1962 in Hong Kong.
Died 30 June 1993 in Tokyo. He was thirty-one.

Before the band

1962

Born in Hong Kong. He grew up in So Uk Estate in Sham Shui Po, seven people in one small flat. I have looked at photographs of those estates and I think about that a lot.

1977–78

A neighbour gave him a beaten-up acoustic guitar when he was fifteen, and he taught himself to play it. That is the whole origin story. Nobody sent him to lessons. Nobody's parents knew somebody.

Beyond

1983

He formed Beyond.

1986

They paid for their first album themselves, because nobody else was going to. It was called 再見理想 (Goodbye Ideal). I would like you to notice that they had to pay for it themselves.

1987

Their first Cantonese album, 阿拉伯跳舞女郎 (Arabian Dancing Girl).

1990

He wrote 光輝歲月 about Nelson Mandela. A Cantonese pop song, on the radio in Hong Kong, about apartheid. It won him a best lyrics award. Ask yourself how many songs on the radio where you live are about something that is actually happening to somebody.

1991

Beyond went to Kenya. He saw what poverty looks like when it is standing in front of you, and he came home and wrote Amani. Afterwards the band started the Beyond Third World Foundation. He did not have to do any of that, and this is the part nobody at my school believes when I tell them.

1992

In January they signed with a Japanese management company and began moving their career to Japan. Hong Kong would not let them make the music they wanted to make. They were expected to be personalities first and musicians second, and to appear on television programmes that had nothing to do with playing.

Tokyo

24 June 1993

In Tokyo, rehearsing a game show for Fuji Television, he fell three metres from a platform, head first.

30 June 1993

He died of his head injuries at a quarter past four in the afternoon, at Tokyo Women's Medical University Hospital. He was thirty-one years old.

I am going to say the thing I always say, and then I will stop. He left Hong Kong because he was tired of being turned into television. He died rehearsing television. I have never worked out what to do with that, and I have had four years.

His funeral brought Hong Kong to a standstill. He is buried at Tseung Kwan O, under white marble with a guitar carved into it.

Now go and read about the songs. That is the part that is actually about him.