THEY say distance makes the heart grow fonder. It did when I had the opportunity to further my studies abroad in Melbourne, Australia, exactly 20 years ago.

I was at the crossroads of young adulthood – I spent the whole of 2000 diving head first into the music subculture and taking a shot at being a live musician on the Klang Valley underground music circuit.

Contrary to what most of my acquaintances believe, I was not an active participant – at least not as much as I wished to be – in the local underground scene of the late 1990s. I was a participant looking in from abroad, sending my lo-fi cassette albums I made at my university bedsit in Perth (a backwater then by any measure) to my ex-bandmates at home who were in the thick of the action.

The tail end of that decade was also when the nation grew up up politically from adolescence and that, too, I observed from abroad.

I missed the zeitgeist in person for sure but regardless of where you were, you couldn’t escape the spirit of the times that emanated outwards to both temporary sojourners like myself and others who had migrated on a one-way ticket.

I was making up for lost time in 2000 and riding whatever minor buzz I had made in the small but closely knit Kuala Lumpur punk circuit – while also getting by with a job as a research assistant at a public university, which opened my eyes to the politics of higher education and research in the country.

Gigs weren’t common then for solo singer-songwriters unless you played covers and in pubs, so I accepted whatever came my way.

My noise-rock band The Maharajah Commission was in its seminal phase and we played our first gig (under another name) at an underground gig at a disco in Ampang Park just a few weeks into the new millennium upon my return home at the end of 1999.

The first gig I played solo was on an Amnesty International (AI) campaign to free a group of imprisoned comedians whose incisive humour had run afoul of the military junta.

To be honest, I had no idea about what was going on in Myanmar aside from Aung San Suu Kyi and the third United Nations secretary-general U Thant (an old Kuala Lumpur neighbourhood is named in his honour) so I did some quick research online. Wikipedia wasn’t founded yet then and it took quite a bit of roaming on search engines before I found what I was looking for.

I am big fan of stand-up comedians and look up to the likes of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, especially for they way they leverage humour and storytelling to communicate political thought – something sorely missing in local entertainment then but probably well and alive at private functions or corporate dinners that were the bread and butter of stand-up comedians but which were well out of my reach.

And as much as I was shocked at the persecution of the Myanmar comedians who were jailed, it also was revelatory to discover the power of dissent in the performing arts.

Punk rock was still new to me so I was more enamoured of its sheer sonic energy and F-U stance. It was at this point that I became curious about the relationship between political dissent and the performing arts in Malaysia.

It felt like a calling of sorts but the irony wasn’t lost on me – here I am, a fledgling largely unknown singer-songwriter, about to perform at an event to stand up against the persecution of a group of artists in a neighbouring country but whose own country was still mired in its own set of persecutions against vocal critics.

I didn’t even have the appropriate original “protest” songs yet – I was still finding my “critical” voice in many ways because like most young Mahathir-era Malaysians who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, we were groomed to not rock the boat.

The AI gig was to be held sometime in early half 2000 at The Black Box Theatre of the famed Actor’s Studio http://www.theactorsstudio.com.my/our-journey/ Dataran Merdeka (also known as the Plaza Putra theatre space) - THE hub for the performing arts in Kuala Lumpur at the time which was just loaded with so much symbolic significance to me considering the location and what had happened on the streets above during the Reformasi protests.

I would return several times to this hallowed ground of underground music gigs with my other bands and solo after my debut and also check out some left field theatre performances (I even have a scar above my knee from bumping into a broken seat hand rest while watching a theatre show at the Actor’s Studio Theatre to remind me of this era) right until its flooding in 2003

That one year was a steep learning curve for me albeit a fun one – one should always pursue new experiences and knowledge without compromising the enjoyable part of it, that’s what I say.

Some may fetishise the “struggle” and “hard work” but to me that is a given. Stop feeling guilty for the good times, for the good times may never return.

Big lessons are often in the smaller humbler steps. For me, as much I was reluctant to leave again just when I was getting a feel of the “scene” while also having two new job offers come my way at the same time (one as a reporter for a major newspaper, another as a camera assistant for a production company), I had to leave to learn more about Malaysia from a distance.

Homesickness is not a “sickness” – it’s a fond farewell that inoculates a patriot’s calloused broken heart. – February 19, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.