The many winners at the 25th Golden Melody Awards in Taipei on Saturday did not bag multiple awards on a night when the honors were evenly distributed across artists and countries.
Malaysian-Chinese singer and songwriter Penny Tai (戴佩妮) and Taiwanese singer-songwriter and record producer Jonathan Lee (李宗盛) walked away with the biggest hauls from the ceremony, Taiwan’s largest music event.
Tai won the Best Mandarin Female Singer category for her album Unexpected and took Best Album Producer for her work on Chinese singer Koala Liu’s album Embrace.
Photo: AFP
Lee’s song Hills — also the title of his album — picked up Best Song of the Year, Best Lyricist and Best Album Packaging.
Meanwhile, the night’s most important award — Best Mandarin Album — went to Taiwanese rock musician Chang Chen-yue’s (張震嶽) I Am Ayal Komod.
Chang said the album reflected a return to his roots.
Singaporean singer and songwriter J.J. Lin (林俊傑) took home the award for Best Mandarin Male Singer for his album Stories Untold.
“Yes!! So this is how it feels to win the Best Male Singer award,” an excited Lin said, after receiving the prize from Taiwanese singer Jam Hsiao (蕭敬騰).
Lin had been nominated three times for the award, but had never won, though in 2004, he scooped the Golden Melody Best New Artist award.
Best New Artist went to Chinese singer-songwriter Li Ronghao (李榮浩) for his debut album Model. He has won praise for his soulful singing style, with his style compared to that of US artist John Mayer.
Taiwanese band Mixer won Best Band.
The Lifetime Contribution Award was given to late music producer Peng Kuo-hua (彭國華) in recognition of his contribution to Taiwan’s music scene.
Peng, who died of liver cancer in 2001 at 46, discovered aspiring singers during the 1980s and 1990s when he was president of UFO Records, the Golden Melody committee said.
Peng’s wife, TV show host Chang Hsiao-yen (張小燕), accepted the award in his honor.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the