Thanks to a Singapore Heritage Festival bloggers' workshop some of us acted as though we were MPs, if only for a day. But it was at the Art House - the former Parliament building - that we aired our views on 60s music. 
Three sessions for Past Forward: A Heritage Blogging and Social Media Workshop, held in the main chamber on 14th July were moderated by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (top left) who co-authored the book, Singapore: A Biography.
Panel speakers for Session 2, Not Just Nostalgia: Music of the 1960s, were yours truly and Georgiana Glass (top right), blogger at modcentric.blogspot.com Others who were either on panel workshops or guests included Lam Chun See, (author, blogger), Victor Koo, James Seah (bloggers) , Peter Chan (archivist, photographer), Yusnor Ef (cultural medallionist, author, lyricist ) and Audie Ng (Silver Strings band leader, bassist).
The main thrust of the panel discussion was to encourage all Singaporeans to post their memories on a blog or share online about heritage. The speakers related stories and provided tips from their online blogging and experiences to "demystify heritage blogging" and "help people to feel that they don't have to be experts in order to blog."
In this session, I raised a question as to why local Singapore 60s songs like Shanty, My Lonely Heart and other popular ones have not been orchestrated and performed by SSO while second panel speaker Glass advised her youthful audience that they do not, "need to live in the 60s to blog about music from that period."
Ivan Chew (Singapore Memory Project), Dan Koh, Rosenah Omar, Adrianna Tan, Char Lee and Zakaria Zainal were the other session panellists during the workshop. A wonderful gathering it was with reasonable audience participation. But the rain outside...
The above article is not an official report on the Workshop but a personal observation.
Images: Peter Chan and James Seah Collection, Copyrights Reserved.
