Ray Cordeiro, who had interviewed the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra as a radio host in Hong Kong, died Friday at the age of 98 after more than seven decades of career.
Guinness World Records hailed him as the world’s longest-serving DJ in 2000.
Reinaldo Maria Cordeiro was “a prominent figure in Hong Kong’s popular culture” who made “a considerable contribution to the music scene” in Hong Kong, the city’s culture minister, Kevin Yeung, said on Saturday.
Known to fans as ‘Uncle Ray’, Cordeiro had launched the careers of many local musicians and introduced pop music trends to generations of Hong Kong fans during his radio shows.
Cordeiro died Friday in Hong Kong, surrounded by his family and friends, who sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ as a farewell, a committee planning his funeral said. He had been hospitalized last year after a heart attack.
Born in Hong Kong in 1924, Cordeiro was the fifth of six children in a family of Portuguese immigrants. After working as a prison guard and bank clerk, he turned to music, hosting his first show ‘Progressive Jazz’ on Radio Rediffusion in 1949.
Cordeiro had come to prominence in the 1960s hosting shows for Hong Kong’s public network, RTHK, which were popular with teenagers. His late-night show ‘All The Way With Ray’, launched in 1970, became the station’s longest-running radio show.
When he retired in 2021, he told RTHK: ‘I had the best in life and I had everything I wanted to be, everything I wanted to do’. In his autobiography he wrote: ‘Sharing good music with my fans, I’m in my element’. ‘I refuse to imagine a world without music’.
/ATS