By Dave Ang
The Straydogs in a reunion jam session in 1986.EDITOR Philip Cheah recalled how a meeting with Straydogs' lead guitarist Jimmy Appudurai in London last year made up his mind to undertake the daunting project -- daunting because the songs have been out of circulation for a long, long time.
Even Appudurai didn't have any copies.
"We were in Jimmy's old Merc in Portobello Road when he slipped this Straydogs' tape into his car player. A friend had mailed it from the US.
"We listened and started talking about the early days. Jimmy had many stories.
"I was so taken by them that I told him that we had to do something to put the music out."
He did. Cheah returned to Singapore and tracked down Straydogs' manager-guitarist Jeffrey Low, now a New Paper sportswriter, and persuaded him to temporarily part with his precious Straydogs vinyls.
"Jeffrey is probably the only guy who still has them," recalled Cheah. "They're very rare."
Three tracks were selected. Repent, which was restricted from radio airplay back then because, as Appudurai told BigO magazine, "someone thought it was a drug song"; Freedom, a feisty rocker which topped the Singapore and Malaysian charts in the '70s; and Mum's Not Pampering, the band's first single released in 1967.
The records were sent to a studio in Sydney to clean up the cracks and pops.
Then they were transferred to DAT sound and equalised. Finally the CD was pressed.
Cheah believes that all the work was worth it.
First published in The New Paper, Sept 27, 1994
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