Then & Now | How Cantopop really began: Ren da Silva’s Diamond Records helped birth Hong Kong’s most-loved music genre

The origins of Cantopop lie not in 80s megastars like Anita Mui or Jacky Cheung, but within Ren da Silva’s humble studios in post-war Hong Kong

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Popular 60s soul band The Mystics are among the formatitive Hong Kong artists that cut their demo discs with Diamond Records, an incubator for what would become Cantopop. Photos: SCMP Archive

Jason Wordie

Published: 2:45pm, 13 Aug 2024Updated: 10:44am, 16 Aug 2024

Where and how did Cantopop begin? Not – as many would think – with Anita Mui Yim-fong, Jacky Cheung Hok-yau and Aaron Kwok Fu-shing, and all the other familiar Hong Kong Chinese superstars who burst onto the international entertainment scene in the early 1980s with a quintessentially Hong Kong music genre that combined catchy tunes with mixed-language, code-switching vocabularies and performance styles.

The initial stirrings of this most characteristic local musical phenomenon happened much earlier. And it at least partially began with local Portuguese performing talents, and a farsighted entrepreneur from that community, who astutely recognised an emergent popular cultural trend, and profitably used the latest recording technology to encourage new talent.

A CD collection by The Mystics, Anders Nelson & The Inspirations, The Menace and Joe Chen from Diamond Records

In post-war Hong Kong, a beguiling hybrid mélange of musical talent evolved; lilting, local Portuguese-meets-Southeast Asian keronchong sounds were paired with Shanghainese diaspora singers who sang Mandarin or Cantonese lyrics, which could suddenly change gear into English-language “versions” that catered to overseas Chinese in Malaya, Singapore and beyond. All these stylistic variations came to epitomise this emergent, Chinese-style modernity that Hong Kong, then, represented to the wider world.

By the early 50s, following the Communist takeover on the mainland, all that the interwar Shanghai lifestyle represented, by way of glamour and modernity, had effectively ceased to exist there. For the large numbers of émigré Chinese who had decamped from the old treaty port world, Hong Kong became the next best thing to what they had so unwillingly left behind. As memories of pre-liberation Shanghai receded, musical forms popularised there morphed again.

Hong Kong-based Portuguese businessman Renaldo Alberto da Silva, known to a generation of aspiring local artistes as “Ren” Silva, was the owner of Diamond Records. Photo: SCMP Archive

By the early 60s, the emergent Hong Kong music industry had transformed into something recognisably distinct, and closely related to the British colony’s burgeoning, pivotal role in the post-war overseas Chinese world; these new “sounds” were not merely rehashed cover versions of annually more dated Shanghai popular songs.

Hong Kong Portuguese businessman Renaldo Alberto da Silva – known to a generation of aspiring local artistes as “Ren” da Silva – was among Hong Kong popular music’s founding fathers. Now largely forgotten, da Silva’s Diamond Records was one of those unusual Hong Kong businesses that evolved in these years and combined local entrepreneurial spirit with new innovations – in this case, industrial plastics.