Hoang

20 million hits on youtube 16 million hits on myspace over 100 thousand albums sold independantly Stevie Hoang – Essex-based 24-year-old R&B producer-artist extraordinaire – has achieved all of the above. Working out of his bedroom, and his own song-spinning imagination, he has already crafted upwards of 50 songs. Via Myspace, YouTube and an entrepreneurial flair that saw him strike international record deals before any UK label had a clue who he was, Hoang has already topped the Myspace chart in the US and released two albums in Japan – where, after repeated trips to Tokyo, he’s a major star on the Japanese charts and club scene. Courtesy of his heritage (he was born in the UK to Chinese parents from Vietnam) and his way with a sublime ballad and instant groove, he’s been hailed as ‘the Chinese Ne-Yo’. We can just call him the hottest, most ambitious underground R&B star the UK has ever produced. ‘I was more into video games and kung-fu movies,’ recalls Stevie Hoang of his early passions. Born in Birmingham and growing up in east London, ‘music was more something on the side’. But when he was 11 his auntie bought his sister a keyboard. ‘I just started fiddling about with it. My parents saw that I was picking stuff up naturally, playing songs I heard on the TV and radio. So that’s when they bought me a bigger keyboard and made me take piano lessons. I kinda developed from there.’ He took an A-level in music technology at sixth form college and, in a year out prior to going to university, worked in the Funland arcade in the Trocadero centre in London’s West End. But in his spare time, he was busy crafting beats on a keyboard and computer set-up in his bedroom at his mum and dad’s house. It was a productive time, but a frustrating one: none of the artists he was producing had a hit. He wasn’t making enough money to support himself, he was still living at home, and he was having to fend off the suggestions from his parents that Stevie should get a Proper Job. ‘I’d be like, “Mum, this next one, this is the big one, this is the one where I’m gonna get paid…”’ A low point came in Sainsbury’s, where he’d gone in search of a part-time job. They told him to come back in a few weeks. ‘That’s when I decided to change it up. My friends told me about Myspace, and I put a couple of my songs up there, with me singing, and a cover of Mario’s You Should Let Me Love You. And it just went nuts.’ Hoang’s Myspace plays ticked up and up. He was recording secretly at home: his little sister would alert him when his parents were approaching his room so ‘I could quickly shut down – they got mad when they saw me on the mic ‘cause they thought I was just pissing about’. But he knew how to write a tune and, he cheerfully admits, he knew how to work the angles. ‘I was adding loads and loads of girls. I was targeting Oriental girls - I put a couple of nice pictures up there. I had the vest on - I wasn’t taking my top off! And word was getting round – there was a new R&B singer and he was Chinese. Then I put up Addicted, and things blew up.’ In early 2008, still an unsigned artist and newly relocated to Braintree in Essex (his big sister lives there and ‘there were less distractions than in London – I could concentrate on my music’) he was contacted by a small, independent Japanese label. Would he like to put out an album in Japan? In summer 2008 he released his debut album, This Is Me. his second Japanese album, All Night Long, followed quicksmart in September 2009. His first visit, one month after the release of This Is Me, ‘was crazy. At that time I’d only performed once or twice in the UK, at Chinese events, and I went to doing crazy instore events in Tokyo’s HMV, big clubs events and VIP parties. It was just mental. That was the first time I’d ever felt like a real artist and a star.’ Now April 2011 marks his return with his highly anticipated second album for the world untiltled 'Unsigned'