Who are Beyond?

Hi, I'm back with another music/band related post. Today, I want to introduce you to one of my favourite bands that I recently discovered back in June/July. This band is fairly old and no longer perform together...  lets start!

Beyond are a Hong Kong rock band, they are made up of Wong Ka Kui, Yip Sai Wing, Wong Ka Keung (brothers with Wong Ka Kui) and Paul Wong. The band was formed by Wong Ka Kui (who is often described as the soul of the band, as he composed majority of the band's music and penned a few of the band's lyrics as well) and Yip Sai Wing who were both interested in Pink Floyd's Progressive rock. They decided to enter a music contest hosted by the guitar magazine, the band's guitarist at the time wanted the band to go "beyond" themselves, thus "Beyond" was chosen as the band's name. However, they had a diffcult path to go before reaching success. The band truly did go Beyond, their music certainly touched the hearts of many people and there songs are extremely popular and famous to this day. 

In 1984, Wong Ka Kui's brother Wong Ka Keung joined the band, however Chan See (who at that time was the guitarist for the band) soon had to leave the country thus leaving them without a guitarist, soon after the position was filled by Paul Wong. However, it wasn't commercial success straight away, the young band had to handle many aspects of the band such as selling tickets and buying their own equipment. 

In 1986, Lau Chi Yuen joined the band but then left in 1988.

Moreover, in 1987, the band released the album "The Arabian Dancing Girl" which become one of many commercial hits, the band would go on to produce. However, they would soon be hit by a tragic accident in 1993, the band appeared on a Tokyo Fuji television game show and Wong Ka Kui and Japanese actor Uchimura fell through a broken platform, the stage was 2.7 to 3m high. This resulted in  both of them sustained severe head injuries and immediately hospitalised, which led to Wong Ka Kui's passing a week later (he had fallen into a coma). He was 31 years old.

A lot of popular Cantopop singers paid tributes to Wong Ka Kui, at the time of his funeral, the song "Boundless Ocean Vast Skies" was released, which is perhaps the song that Beyond are most known for.  The song has a soft yet catchy melody, that I'm sure a lot of older generation of people that were listening to Hong Kong music, could hum along too. The lyrics are also not too difficult to sing too even if you can't read Chinese characters.

You can go onto the Internet and browse around to learn more about Beyond...

My favourite songs are "Boundless Ocean Vast Skies" and "Paradise", the second song, I believe was released after Wong Ka Kui had passed away as Paul Wong provides the vocals of this song. In my personal opinion, I like both voices, they sound very different but both very like able for me.

I'll shall end this post with some pictures of Beyond:

     





Credit: The pictures do not belong to me, also a lot of Beyond's information such as dates and information about Wong Ka Kui's death was found on the Internet, from various websites, so credits to the original owner. 

 
Thank you for reading...