Kevin Mathews is a strange (but wonderful) hybrid of left and right sides of the brain!
Kevin Mathews – born in Singapore in the 1960s – is a lawyer as well as a musician. He obtained a LLB (Honours) from the National University of Singapore in 1986 and worked as an in-house legal counsel for the bulk of his 23-year professional career. His last appointment was as Senior Legal Advisor at a law firm in Singapore handling commercial and corporate law matters.
Kevin Mathews is also a singer-songwriter, perhaps best known for his #1 hit song, “My One & Only” with Watchmen in 1993 and has released several albums and EPs with Watchmen, The Crowd, Popland and as a solo artist respectively. In 2017, he contributed his song “Telok Blangah” to Stories We Sing, a joint initiative between MOE-STAR and the NAC. Listen to Kevin’s music at Bandcamp and to his new album Time Flies.
In addition, Kevin is an accomplished film score writer, and has composed music for acclaimed Singapore director Eric Khoo’s feature films – including Ramen Teh (2018) – and has also contributed music to other Singaporean films like Stories About Love, One Leg Kicking, Invisible Children, Lucky 7, Anita’s Complaint, The Carrot Cake Conversations, That Girl in Pinafore, Piece of Meat as well as TV series such as Food Lore, Folklore, Food Affair with Mark Wiens, Drive and Seventh Month. Kevin’s latest film score was composed Koh Chong Wu’s Late Night Ride (2021), his first horror film. Kevin is currently working on the music for an upcoming TV series viz. Hungry Souls.
Kevin is also a well-respected music writer and has written for Singapore newspapers like the New Paper & TODAY, print magazines like BigO (Singapore), Amplifier, Pop Culture Press (USA) & Bucketfull of Brains (UK) and online zines like Pop Matters. He is the founder of Power of Pop, a pop culture webzine that he started in 1998. Together with Chris Toh, Kevin also hosts Lion City Rock, a podcast about the Singapore music scene.
Last but not least, Kevin Mathews is a part-time lecturer at Temasek Polytechnic, Republic Polytechnic and LASALLE College of the Arts. He has also given talks about various arts topics like songwriting, film music & music journalism.
… still there’s more …