14: Is Singapore cool?
No, except sometimes.
Singapore is not known as Asia’s capital of cool. If anything, it’s the nexus of nerd. The depository of dork. The peak of geek. Ask people about London and the first thing they say isn’t that it has an impressively clean airport. Ask people about Singapore and the first thing they say isn’t that it has an impressively vibrant music, arts and theatre scene despite the fact that its parliament looks more and more like a reject clown school.
But there is cool stuff in Singapore if you know where to look. Then again, I can only say that it’s cool by the standards of a mid-40s British expat who wanted to go to an actual clown school as a teenager and secretly still does (it’s called Circomedia in Bristol).
So let’s get ready to party like only cool clowns can.
Singapore’s cool music scene (sometimes)
There’s more live music in Singapore than you might think. The National Stadium attracts names ranging from Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Blackpink to U2, Maroon 5 and Westlife, all of whom are cool enough for at least 55,000 people per night, believe it or not.
Yet as we know, size of audience is inversely proportional to true coolness, which requires a decent dollop of obscurity and explains why this is the coolest Substack about Singapore expat life.
To see less mainstream acts in Singapore, there are mid-sized venues such as the Capitol and the Star, who recently hosted Morrissey, Manic Street Preachers (as pictured above), Alvvays, Rex Orange County, Bloc Party and Suede, whose lead singer is so cool that he jumped into the crowd to stop them filming him on their phones.
The moment was captured for posterity on someone’s phone, naturally - proving that rock’n’roll is alive and well in Singapore, as is irony. Click the image below for the video.
In some even more niche venues, gigs included everything from death metallers Sepultura to Brighton indie-rockers Fur to YouTube jazzer Emmet Cohen to original junglist LTJ Bukem. But just when you thought music in Singapore was getting pretty cool, there’s Jazz For Dogs.
What else is (sometimes) cool in Singapore?
But if you’re not a dog, or even a clown, what else is cool in Singapore? As ever, drinking is the answer.
Singapore has the 14th, 32nd and 48th best bars in the world plus hundreds of lesser known dens of inebriation. There are boho wine bars, indie brewpubs, cocktail laboratories, underground speakeasies, postmodern groggleboxes (might have made that one up, probably not though) - in other words, something to suit every potable perversion.
Among the coolest of them all is craft beer kitchen In Bad Company (I just hope that isn’t the kiss of death coming from me). They serve gourmet bar food alongside supercool booze and make chilli sauce hot enough to raise the dead.
Beyond boozing, Singapore has a cool cinema called The Projector which occupies a formerly abandoned 1970s cinema with a suitably seedy feel. They play suitably seedy arthouse movies as well as new releases. It’s quirky, grungey and plays its own homemade pre-movie clips starring Turkish Luke Skywalker. Very cool.
Theatre is more hit-and-miss. There are big touring companies putting on musicals such as Hamilton and Matilda (which would only fit the most uncool definition of the word cool, and I say that as someone that likes musicals), as well as local troupes offering a more homegrown aesthetic, which I should go and see before passing judgement, but from what I’ve heard can - again - sometimes be cool, as far as homegrown theatre ever can be.
Art is similarly polarised, from Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, which is more of a glorified souvenir shop than an art gallery, to plenty of artisanal local efforts which have a coolness frequency that is probably much the same as for homegrown theatre.
There’s lots of stuff that I’m omitting - Formula One, clubs, hawkers - but the gist is the same: Singapore is cool sometimes. Hardly the most satisfying answer, but it’s better than never, which is what most people assume of Singapore’s cool quotient. Put it this way: Singapore is cooler than you might think.
And it’s got an impressively clean airport.