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He sings songs about mundane day-to-day life, mahjong and even illness and by most accounts has at best an average singing voice.
But to Chinese music fans in Hong Kong Sam Hui is bigger than Elvis; he is the man who invented Canto-pop, the phenomenally successful Chinese-language hybrid of ballads and Western pop that has become the staple of local charts.
Now, almost 40 years after his career began, the ageing crooner is hitting the high notes again with a series of sold-out mega-comeback concerts showing that when it comes to local pop, nobody does it like Hui - dubbed the "God of Song".
"He is a phenomenon," says veteran Hong Kong radio DJ Ray "Uncle Ray" Cordeiro, who was spinning discs when Hui's career began in the 1960s. "He was Hong Kong's first real pop star."
The shy and retiring 55-year-old Hui began a six-night residency at the 12,500-seater Coliseum, Hong Kong's premier music venue, on Wednesday.
The gigs are his third string of performances in a summer of mammoth shows to mark his return from retirement 12 years ago.
Such was the demand - all seats for his other gigs sold out within a day - that tickets are changing hands on the black market for at least 10 times their face value.
"He has something that the modern singers who follow him just don't have," said Anders Nelsson, one of Hui's 60s pop contemporaries and now a powerful promoter.
Hui's marathon four-hour long shows are a testament to a man against whom all other Cantonese singers are measured.
"He really has talent and he wrote great songs - songs that stand the test of time," Cordeiro, recognised as the world's longest-serving radio DJ, added.
"It was unusual then and is unusual now for artists to write their own songs - Sam did," adds Nelsson.
Although Hui is best remembered for his Chinese-language songs, he first came to prominence in the 1960s as the wild, shaggy-haired frontman of The Lotus, a band styled musically and sartorially on the British beat bands.
"They were an imitation band," said Uncle Ray. "It's how all the bands in Hong Kong were at the time. They imitated the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, all those British and American bands."
Early publicity shots of Hui show a pudgy-faced youngster in velvet mod coat, Cuban-heeled boots and sporting a mop top, pulling poses lifted straight from early Beatles record covers.
After The Lotus split, Hui turned to movies, becoming a student of kung fu hero Bruce Lee and starring in comedies alongside his brother Michael.
His big break came with the November 1974 release of "Games Gamblers Play". Asked to compose the film's soundtrack, the result was the biggest hit the city had ever known.
Selling 150,000 copies, the soundtrack smashed all records and became the first Chinese-language record aired on the BBC.
The movie it was drawn from was equally successful, smashing box-office records and grossing six million Hong Kong dollars.
"Before that Cantonese songs were considered naff," recalls Nelsson. "Mandarin was thought far more sophisticated and Cantonese songs were laughed at. Hui changed all that."
Even though, according to Cordeiro and Nelsson, Hui doesn't have the best of voices, he has star attraction.
His good looks and his humour-punctuated songs about ordinary Hong Kong life were a recipe for success in a British colony that at the time was forging its own identity and emerging as an economic powerhouse.
To Western ears, Canto-pop can sound like the slushiest of middle-of-the-road country pop.
But in Hong Kong it sells like no other. Before CD sales worldwide took a dive in the late 1990's, Canto-pop artists sold 9.2 million albums in Hong Kong alone and stars like Hui would sell, at his peak, 200,000 copies of his albums in the city of 6.8 million.
Cordeiro describes Hui as a Chinese cross between Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Barry Manilow - social commentator, pop star and crooner.
"He sang these slice of life songs that really captured the imagination of people at the time," he said.
His success opened the floodgates for a slew of Cantonese pop stars like contemporaries Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung, and more recently, Jackie Cheung, Andy Lau, Kelly Chen and Sammi Cheng, in whose syrupy ballads Hui's influence can be heard.
A year before he "retired" in 1993 he set one last record, playing 42 consecutive sold-out nights at the Coliseum as a goodbye to fans.
However, concern for his hometown in the wake of the social and economic trauma of last year's SARS outbreak - which killed almost 300 people there - brought him out of retirement.
He released an album, "Keep On Smiling (04)", as a call to arms and booked the comeback gigs.
"I went to that very first comeback show," said Cordeiro. "It was incredible. He has lost none of his moves. He's incredible."
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