New song sees BJX Rob celebrate his hometown of Chichester
China-based BJX Rob celebrates his hometown of Chichester with a new song simply called Chichester, now available on YouTube.
You can enjoy the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gke8wmnWYI – complete with a video showcasing the city with clips from around the area.
“I was born in Chichester and spent my earliest years there,” he says. “Then I moved to Hampshire when I was just about to start school. I used to come back to Chichester every year to see people and to stay connected with the place because it was my hometown.
“Now my parents live nearby so whenever I come back from China I get the chance to stay near Chichester. I live in China most of the time. I've been in China going on 20 years now. I started off in media in the countryside and now I work on textbooks and voiceovers for textbooks.
“When I first went to the countryside in China, I got together with some students there. At the local university there were some music students. I had always been into music and had been in bands before. It seemed like a great idea to have an international band. We performed some Chinese songs together and some western ones and we also wrote some songs together. The novelty made us quite popular. I was living in a quite isolated city of six million people and I was the only foreigner there. It must have been like it was for Pocahontas when she first came to this country!
“We were quite active as a band. We had various gigs that we are asked to do simply because of our novelty, being an international band in a place where there were no international people!”
Inevitably through his work, Rob gets asked about his hometown: “Chichester would come up in the conversation and it just seemed that people were interested in the place based on what I was saying about its history and its culture and the cathedral and all the things there that are quintessentially English.”
In the song he wanted to capture the city’s “elegant atmosphere” – hence the video showing the city off in all its glory. It can now be viewed on YouTube.
“I am very active on Chinese social media where I have 350,000 followers on Douyin (the original Chinese version of TikTok). I've also uploaded the music video – with English/Chinese subtitles – to my Douyin channel, to introduce Chinese netizens (lots of them, hopefully) to Chichester.”