UPDATE: VIP ticket heavyweight Tony Hadley crushes Singapore media giant

UPDATE: Perhaps it is too much to think that it was The DAIMANI Journal that made the difference, but following yesterday’s coverage of the controversial ruling from Singapore’s Gold 905 FM about how to pronounce the surname of former Spandau Ballet lead singer Tony Hadley, the MediaCorp-owned station has relented.

A second prize of SG$ 10,000 will be given to hard-done-by train driver Muhammad Shalehan, as Gold 905 FM confirmed in this statement on Facebook.

Originally published May 21 2021:

VIP ticket heavyweight Tony Hadley wrestles with Singapore media giant

One of the most popular 1980s bands, Spandau Ballet, is a permanent touring fixture with many of their young fans now in comfortable middle age and in a position to afford official VIP Hospitality tickets.

Perhaps Tony Hadley and Spandau Ballet’s best-known song True has more than 134 million YouTube views.

In fact Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet until 2017, was due to perform in Singapore in February this year where official VIP packages were priced at SG$ 328 per ticket [plus booking fees] or approximately US$ 230. The purchase consisted of a premium seat and a solo photo with Hadley before the concert.

That concert has been pushed back to October due to the coronavirus.

But Hadley is still very much in the Singapore news thanks to a local radio station that offered a SG$ 10,000 prize (US$ 7,060) to anyone who could name 14 celebrities, each saying one of the 14 words of the station competition’s phrase: ‘Gold 9-0-5, the station that sounds good, and makes you feel good.’

‘10k is a lot to a normal person like me,’ Muhammad Shalehan told the BBC. ‘That is why I put in enormous effort.’

As the BBC report made clear, the Celebrity Name Drop on Gold 905 is hard, and it's supposed to be.

‘To identify all 14, first time round, is impossible. You would need a terrifying knowledge of celebrity voices to get even three or four. But if you're an avid Gold 905 listener - and clearly, the station wants you to be - it's possible, over many weeks, to piece the puzzle together. By listening to other people's answers, and noting their score, you can work out the sequence. Essentially, it is a game of trial and error, crowd-sourced.’

That was why Shalehan was often listening from early morning until 6pm. He would even tune in on the Singapore metroline where he worked, when possible.

By 21 April, Shalehan was confident he knew every answer, except number 11 which was going to be guesswork.

‘My wife was so adamant it was Stevie Wonder, we decided to give it a try,’ he told the BBC. ‘It was a leap of faith, but I was confident. As the saying goes, the wife is always correct.’

Muhammad Shalehan and his all-knowing wife Siti Masuri Ayu

These were Shalehan’s answers:

Tony Hadley. Madonna. Maggie Wheeler. Ellen DeGeneres. Jim Carrey. George Clooney. David Bowie. Belinda Carlisle. Julie Andrews. Lionel Richie. Stevie Wonder. Meryl Streep. Michael Buble. Rebecca Lim.

The presenter DJ Chris said: ‘Hey Shalehan, you got 13 correct names. Not bad. Keep working on it.’

So Shalehan put the phone down assuming that his wife must have been wrong and that number 11 was not Stevie Wonder.

Then on May 6, as the competition neared its second month, a man called Jerome Tan gave his answer.

‘Congratulations!’ said the DJ. Wait a second, there! On Facebook, many listeners pointed out that Shalehan gave the exact same answer on 21 April.

‘The rules of the game requires callers to pronounce the celebrities' name accurately,’ the station replied. ‘In the case of Shalehan, he mispronounced Tony Hadley. We hope this clarifies!’

Shalehan was astonished. Mispronounced? Was his ‘Hadley’ really a different surname to Jerome Tan’s ‘Hadley’?

The radio station posted the two different answers on Facebook – imagining that that would clear things up. Which it didn’t at all.

After trying to engage with the radio station, who said they had conducted another review and were standing by their decision, Shalehan decided to contact the only man who really knew the answer.

He emailed the great Tony Hadley.

At this point you begin to understand why Hadley is still one of the most beloved figures in pop culture [he came fifth in the 2015 edition of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!]

‘I wasn't expecting at all for him to reply,’ said Shalehan. ‘I would have thought Tony Hadley had better things to do than reply to me.'

But then, on the evening of 10 May, he checked his email. To Shalehan's amazement, Hadley had not only replied, he had sent a video.

‘Hi Muhammad,’ said Hadley. ‘I've listened back to the tape, and as far as I'm concerned, you pronounced my name absolutely correctly.

‘You might have had a slight accent, but as far as I'm concerned, you said my name correctly, so you should be entitled to whatever the prize was.’

Tony Hadley, chipping in on a radio controversy in Singapore, the other side of the world from where he has spent the lockdown at his home in Buckinghamshire, England.

Even this intervention has not changed the opinion of station management of Gold 905. There’s been some social media speculation that the station might offer half of the SG$ 10,000 prize money as a goodwill gesture but nothing is confirmed.

And it’s not as if Gold 905 is under-resourced either, being part of the island republic’s MediaCorp which runs six television channels and 11 radio stations, and is in turn owned by Temasek Holdings which has more than SG$ 313/US$ 220 billion assets under management on behalf of the Singapore government..

As Shalehan himself might have sung, and Hadley definitely did:

‘Why do I find it hard to write the next line?

Oh I want the truth to be said

Huh huh huh hu-uh huh

I know this much is true’

Stay tuned …