Away from Beloved Lover by Dee Peyok (Granta Books) ~Janet Brown

In this century, fourteen years is a lifetime ago, and in that other lifetime back in 2012, Dee Peyok was ensnared by Cambodian music. In the atmospheric ruins of the once elegant Bokor Palace Hotel, she heard the familiar strains of Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale coming from a "ghetto blaster" carried by a young Cambodian man. But this 1967 rock and roll classic was sung by a voice she'd never heard and the words were in a language she didn't know. Sinn Sisamouth, a Cambodian icon, was singing this in Khmer, giving it the title of Away from Beloved Lover, and he captured the imagination of a young British singer and her American husband. Within fourteen months they were living in Phnom Penh where Dee Peyok began her ten-year quest into the rock and roll history of Cambodia.

Before the Khmer Rouge took control of the country and shattered all cultural norms, Phnom Penh was a vibrant center for the arts, encouraged by King Norodum Sihanouk. He was a man who produced and directed fifty films, taking a central acting role in some of them, and as a musician and songwriter, he welcomed advances in dance and music, the more modern and Western the better. Under his reign, young Cambodians embraced jazz clubs, the Twist, the art of surf guitars, and under royal auspices, rock and roll.

This all was brutally cut short by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Within less than four years, this regime took Cambodia back into the Middle Ages, doing their best to erase all vestiges of education, art, and social norms. 

When Peyok began her musical odyssey in 2014, she was lucky.  Filmmaker and writer Rithy Pan, who recently released The Elimination (Asia by the Book, November 2025), had established the Bophana Center, which had an archive of Khmer film, photography, TV, and music from the period known as the Golden Years, from the 60s up to 1975. A foundation called Cambodian Living Arts was begun by Arn Chorn-Pond, whose early talent for music had put him at the age of eleven in a Khmer Rouge musical propaganda troupe, Youk Chang survived starvation and torture when he was fourteen to create the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which collected oral histories and mapped mass grave sites, where perhaps as many as 90% of Cambodia's musicians are interred.

With these resources and with the help of interpreters and fixers, Peyok tracks down as many surviving musicians as she can, from royal princes to agrarian peasants, from musicians who learned to play in temples and Catholic churches to girls whose stunning voices took them from rice fields to stardom. One man made it his mission during the Pol Pot years to find and save vinyl records. Even though possessing them meant a death sentence, he stashed them away in boxes buried in fertilizer warehouses. Another, blinded by smallpox when he was a toddler, became a pop star known as the Cambodian Ray Charles, and against all odds, survived the Khmer Rouge regime under which many disabled people perished. Other survivors came away with fingers ruined by the years of hard labor and found their musical gift had been diminished.

Peyok has written a musical history that is painfully intertwined with the modern history of Cambodia. Her passion for her subject is diluted by her reliance on interpreters, who couldn't give her the nuances of the testimony provided by the musicians whose stories she tries to tell. This is a diligent, dogged primer, offering an introduction to a rich and tragic narrative that may someday be told in the way it deserves.