Tickets for Cho Yong-pil's anniversary concert sold out
Singer Cho Yong-pil / Courtesy of YTC Production
By Park Jin-hai
Tickets for “king of Korean pop music” Cho Yong-pil's upcoming Seoul concert, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his singing debut, sold out in 10 minutes, showing the 67-year-old singer-songwriter is still influential.
Starting with 40,000-seat Jamsil Olympic Stadium on May 12, the veteran singer will perform concerts in Daegu on May 19 and Gwangju on June 2.
For his Seoul concert, 150,000 people simultaneously visited popular websites for ticketing and used goods to buy tickets priced at 200,000 won 300,000 won.
Cho, nicknamed the first “national singer” for his popularity among people of all ages, recently graced the headlines as he plans to perform in North Korea in early April, ahead of the South-North Korea summit. It will be his second performance in the North. In 2005, he held a rare solo concert in the reclusive country, singing for an audience of 70,000 in Pyongyang.
Cho, the sixth born of four sons and three daughters to an affluent but conservative family in 1950 in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, started his musical career as guitarist and singer with Atkins, a country and western group, at clubs around Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.
He rose to fame with his first single “Come Back to Busan Port” in 1975. His first official album, “The Woman Outside the Window,” which also included the hit song “Come Back to Busan Port,” hit a record-breaking 1 million sales in 1980, setting a milestone in the Korean music world.
As music critic Im Jin-mo said, “While the music of the West is divided before and after the Beatles, Korean pop music is divided before and after Cho Yong-pil.” The list of the singer's achievements over his half-century music career seems endless. In 1980, he had a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, becoming the first Korean singer to perform there. With 19 albums, he has received numerous awards such as the KBS and MBC Best Artist Award (1980―1986), Ampex Golden Reel Award (1982) and the CBS-Sony Golden Disc Award (1984).
His song “The Red Dragonfly” for a record 24 weeks topped local music charts in the 1980s.
Challenging various musical genres ranging from rock, pop-ballad, blues, traditional Korean music and opera, the singer topped local music charts from the 1970s until the 2010s. His song “Bounce,” from his 19th album “Hello” released in 2013, garnered rave reviews both domestically and abroad.
U.S. music magazine Billboard praised Cho as “the Michael Jackson of Korea” in an April 2013 article titled “Cho Yong-pil Knocks Psy from No. 1 on K-Pop Hot 100.”