52 Memorable 8 Days Covers And The Secrets Behind Them You Never Knew – Until Now

Our photographers risk life and limb to bring you, dear reader, exciting covers. Back in 1991, veteran celeb lensman Russel Wong shot Zoe Tay for our first anniversary cover. Twenty-seven years on, the man (you may recall seeing him in a recent cameo in Crazy Rich Asians), still remembers how he dodged moving cars on a busy main road opposite Rex Cinema to land the perfect shot of a smouldering Zoe at a mama shop. “I had just returned from LA and here I was shooting with the biggest star in Singapore,” Russel muses. “I knew the magazine man on the cover as his shop was just outside my first studio in Singapore. All of us helped to cover the magazine stand with copies of 8 DAYS. It was pretty fun! There were many people looking at us, and since the magazine stand was next to an Old Chang Kee shop, there were also people and cars driving up and ordering curry puffs while I was trying to shoot Zoe. I was always excited to see who was going to be on 8 DAYS’ cover, and what the concept was — it’s our pop culture magazine that had a pulse on the entertainment scene.”

The original Ch 8 heartthrob: Besides Li Nanxing, the only actor who could add serious smoulder to our TV screens in the ’90s was Desmond Shen. He with the killer cheekbones, bedroom eyes, and smooth smile. This cover was shot the year he appeared in Ch 8’s super popular Pretty Faces in 1991. Who could forget that scene where his roguish, drunken character raped Zoe Tay’s materialistic Bobo? That episode boasted over a record million viewers back then.

She just had one request. That she wanted to art direct this shoot. So Rui En showed up with a series of tear sheets from various fashion mags and her cool girl attitude. That photograph of her clad all in red — even her face was covered in a red cloth — is probably the weirdest photo ever to make it into these pages. But the shot that made it onto the cover? Well, that was a stroke of pure genius. Not totally sold that we had a cover photo, our photog Joel Low and Rui En decided to head to a kopitiam near the studio. We ordered a cup of kopi-o, Rui En propped her leg up on a chair and the most classic 8 DAYS cover for the millennial generation was born.

What happens when you stick Felicia in a -4°C ice box like a popsicle? “Her smile belies her discomfort, because her bare shoulder gets momentarily stuck to the ice. Ouch. But she’s a real trooper. Everyone’s impressed that she doesn’t utter a single word of complaint,” we observed back then.

Feli again? This time, we put her on the cover of our magazine sans make-up. In a close-up. And Felicia was totally fine with it. It’s a wonder that she still talks to us.

Till today we have no idea how we convinced Wong Li-Lin to breakdance for our Oscar-themed issue. We wanted to recreate the wall-crawling dream sequence in Inception where Joseph Gordon-Levitt fights a bunch of thugs. We had no special sets, no VFX, no nothing — but we still managed to pull it off. It was thrilling and surreal to see Li-Lin, a former dancer, going through the wringer, putting those core muscles of hers to good use. “I am recalling this memory with some relief,” Li-Lin says in an e-mail. “I mean, good thing I don’t have to do this now! The shoot required adroitness and stamina. It was pretty fun — we were laughing a lot, mostly at serious attempts that turned out comedic. Everyone was game about trying to capture key elements of the scene. I might have been sore a few days after the shoot. Come to think of it, why did we even try to do that? No wires or special effects. Just plain enthusiasm. And a good dose of daft.”

For the first time ever, we made a cover star cry. And it only took one minute and Christina Aguilera’s soul-empowering ‘Beautiful’ for Yvonne Lim to unleash the waterworks. No one in the photo studio dared to even breathe for fear of disrupting her process, but at least it was worth it — we got the perfect cover shot, and even had heaps of other options to choose from.

While some plebs refuse to upload selfies without first Meitu Xiuxiu-ing their pics, Rosalyn Lee went on a magazine cover with none of her pix Photoshopped. Not only was #NoFilter Rozz very cool about it, she was relaxed being in her natural state. Turns out, even the photographer was thrilled at not having to digitally enhance the photos after. Everybody wins!

(Mis)Adventures with Tay Ping Hui: Remember the time we made Jeanette Aw tie him up...

We got TPH to do a TPL during the 2011 General Elections fever. Cheeky, we know, but we hear a senior politician had a little chuckle over this Tin Pei Ling spoof.

And we almost set him on fire. TBH, TPH probably enjoyed it. The dude held on to the newspaper long enough to make the crew sweat (from nervousness, not the heat), and even made wisecracks about how he’s so hawt. In other words, just being Ping Hui.

These two covers have more in common than you think. Fashion photographer Chuando Tan had shot some 8 DAYS covers over the years. But last year, he turned the lens on himself as the cover star, after going viral online for looking hotter than the celebs he shoots. “The cover shoots were always fun and easy, ’cos most of the artistes were already my friends,” he laughs. Like his close pal and former national swimmer Leslie Kwok, who naughtily cavorted with Wong Li-Lin for this particularly racy issue in 2001. Says Chuando: “It was a rather hot afternoon at the shoot in my living room, and we were all perspiring a bit as there wasn’t any air-conditioning. But it was perfect as we needed that healthy, sporty glow on Leslie and Li-Lin!” CD’s living room gets more action than a Fortnite gameplay video; it was also where, 16 years later in 2017, he stripped down and oiled up his rock-solid bod for his own cover (shot by Frey Ow, one-half of CD’s photography team chuandoandfrey). We’re sure this time, air-con is very much needed.

We’d declared that the hot AF Fiona Xie cover was our first Swimsuit Issue, but really, it wasn’t. (Man, is that large boulder next to her the luckiest thing in the world or what?) Three years prior, Celest Chong had donned an itsy bitsy bikini for this cover. Former 8 DAYS stylist Fong Fan recalls: “We spent a day shooting at the villa at [now-defunct] Beaufort Hotel. There were too many factors involved with an underwater shoot, so we had to combine two pictures together for this shot. I spoke to Celest, who’s in Toronto now, and she remembers it too. (Laughs) Her face looked beautiful in one shot, and her body looked hot in another, so we combined two. But kudos to Celest who was so adventurous and professional, and didn’t mind going underwater many, many times — over 100 times!”

Flaunting a different part of the anatomy for very different reasons were Wong Li-Lin, Zoe and Jacelyn Tay, who were six months, six months, and eight months preggers respectively when they fronted our bump-er issues. It’s no secret that for regular non-pregnant stars, our modus operandi is to make these already-svelte folks look even more slim and fab (thank you, technology!). For these baby bumps, though, we had to digitally enhance the petite bumps that these yummy mummies were rocking. Otherwise, they could look like they just had a big meal at Haidilao hor.

What do you do when you’ve got 75 minutes with Katy Perry in a swish hotel suite? Feed her durians, wanton mee and kueh lapis, like we did, of course. If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about breaking rules, it’s the Katy cat herself. We’re talking sneaking thorny fruit into the hotel (oops), offering her snacks on the fly (double oops), and asking off-limits questions about her impending wedding with her now-ex-husband Russell Brand (triple oops). You’d think that by now the star would’ve found any excuse to slink off but when her minder tried to cut us off at exactly the 15-min mark of our interview, it was Katy herself who swooped in. “It’s okay, we can have a couple more [questions] since we ran late. You can have four more,” she declared, er, generously. We continued with 15 more questions (yeah, we kept count). She waxed lyrical about drinking games (“I’ve never won [a guy] at arm-wrestling matches ’cos I’m weak, but drinking games, I could beat them.”), pie-eating contests (“I’ve won one before in high school!”), and edible clothes (“Cotton candy [is more comfy to wear] because I can have a snack while hanging out”). It’s no surprise, then, that when we casually offer her some M&Ms before she leaves, she didn’t only take one. She nicked the entire packet. She did leave the durians behind, though.

They say the bigger the star, the easier going he is. And if we go by that, Eddie Peng should be the biggest star of them all. This shoot was done at his hotel room at the Fullerton Hotel late into the night. Eddie had a mad busy day, he was here for an event and had spent most of the day doing interviews. We had expected him to be tired and testy. He was anything but, and even came up to thank us for interviewing him. We had only two hours with him, but because Eddie Peng has no bad angles, the shoot was nailed in half that time. He would ham it up for the cam too, stuffing his face with pandan cake before and during the shoot, and drinking teh-o peng from a packet. But what struck us most about Eddie was how determined he was to lead a normal life. Right after the shoot, he went with his team to watch a midnight movie at Suntec City. He did ask us if we wanted to come along and years later, we’re still kicking ourselves for saying no.

This winning shot at Champs Élysées was the photo that almost didn’t happen. Zoe and Fann were in Paris filming Ah-Jie-of-all-Ch-8-blockbusters Golden Pillow, and our photo shoot could only happen during their precious breaks, if any. So all we could do was wait. Two days into the trip, we still had no photos. “But Zoe and Fann are amazing,” former 8 DAYS stylist Fong Fan opines. “They knew we were exhausted and stressed about not getting any pictures, so they told us not to worry and that they’ll sacrifice their meal time so that we could get some shots. The cover shot happened very, very quickly. It’s amazing how they can switch in and out of scenes [emotionally] very easily because they had a crying scene immediately after we took this shot. [It helped that] the girls are very professional and that’s why they’re still the Ah Jies in 2018.”

Before boy bands like BTS became Korea’s heart-throb ambassadors, it was TV and movie hunk (now hunkle lah) Bae Yong Joon who fired up the loins of ladies in Asia. His pretty boy face coupled with a stud’s body and courtly manner made him especially popular with aunties. For this cover story, we went on a whirlwind press junket for his movie April Snow, co-starring actress Son Ye Jin. The international press there was scarily aggressive; we were constantly shoved by sprinting photographers hoping to get clearer shots of the idol. Unfortunately, we didn’t enjoy the show’s plodding love story and said as much in our feature. We also called his fans “taugeh-plucking aunties”. Well, turned out Bae had a massive fan club of indignant aunties in Singapore who claimed they were not taugeh-plucking aunties. Everyone in the 8 DAYS editorial team, including the writer, received a lengthy complaint letter from the club, which came compete with a single rotting bean sprout taped to it. It was no ordinary taugeh too, but the extra-large Korean variety. Despite our annoyance, we couldn’t help but be grudgingly impressed by his rabid fans’ attention to detail.

A most unusual shoot involving a bunch of sumo wrestlers and Desmond Tan in Nagoya, at their training grounds (they call it a ‘stable’). While it was a colourful and eye-opening experience, the shoot, which spanned across a few days, was fraught with tension and drama. It involved initially hostile sumo wrestlers led by ex-wrestler Akebono Taro. The Hawaiian-born 45-year-old giant became Japan’s first foreign yokozuna in 1993. A yokozuna is the grand champion in the sumo world, and Akebono had the terrible diva attitude to match. This cover photo had the misfortune of being set outdoors (the indoor areas of the stable were off-limits), with overcast skies, rain and a malfunctioning camera flash. That’s not all — Desmond was made to down copious amounts of alcohol to win over the gruff, modern-day warriors. But Desmond, being a good sport, all-round charming guy and impressive drinker, eventually won them over and we got the pictures we needed.

You must be wondering why this cover of Andrea De Cruz and Pierre Png looks it was taken in their living room? Well, ’cos it was. The Slim 10 Saga had turned Pierre and Andrea’s very private romance into a very public one and we got all the exclusive deets while sitting in Andrea’s living room, just a week after her liver transplant. We didn’t get to go to Pan Lingling’s house when she opened up to us about her battle with breast cancer. Instead, we were with the actress in a meeting room at Caldecott Hill though we ended up crying buckets (no, seriously) as she spoke to us about the sickness and losing her dad to lung cancer during the same period.

How does a weekly magazine cover breaking news stories? With blood, sweat and tears, of course. When Michael Jackson passed away on Jun 25, 2009, we knew we had to pay tribute to the King of Pop. It was also Thursday night, which was when we would send that week’s work off to the printers. But things felt strange when we got into the office that Friday morning. The world, as we knew it, would never be the same again without MJ. So we postponed that week’s cover story (Ann Kok in a supermarket talking about her rumoured romance with Dai Yang Tian) and scrambled to piece together a 13-page lookback at the life of the music icon. Sure, it was a lot of hard work but it was the least we could do for the Man in the Mirror.

Why was Jeanette Aw sprawled all over a table set up to look like a modern Peranakan tok panjang feast? ’Cos Ch 8’s The Little Nyonya was huge, so it was fitting that she, as the lead actress, was featured in our Big Issue covering all things Peranakan. In this issue, we also visited a few Peranakan stalwart restaurants undercover with two hyper critical Bibik cooks (the writer’s mother and aunt) in tow. The results were both embarrassing and hilarious — “Fail!” declared one of the Bibiks to the proprietor of Guan Hoe Soon in Joo Chiat when she was served a rather bland soup.

Singaporeans have an insatiable appetite for durians, so we paid tribute to that lust with this blowout thorny issue. This was Yvonne Lim’s first solo cover and we happened to shoot at some stall in Geylang where the vendor was, shall we say, less than honest. After we cracked open a durian for her to pose with, the dude tried charging us an exorbitant sum for it. Yvonne, bless her heart, turned on her charm and helped us haggle the price down.

We crashed Yuwu’s bachelor pad in Thomson before QiPeh became a thang. We’d heard he was a foodie who loved cooking, so we made him prepare lunch for us. It was during this shoot that all our preconceived notions of Yuwu being a sexy, brooding, silent heartthrob flew out the window. He was OCD and kancheong in the kitchen, insisting his assistant go back to the provision shop downstairs to buy a certain brand of orange juice for his dessert because the one she got “isn’t nice”. And breaking into a panicky sweat when his blender broke down halfway through a crucial step. But we found it both amusing and sweet; it made him seem like a mere mortal instead of standoffish hunk. Incidentally, the guy’s cooking wasn’t bad at all — especially his yummy retro French dessert of cherries jubilee.

We’ve draped stars in Gucci, wrapped them up in Chanel, so why on earth did poor Beatrice Chia get a giant fan? This tongue-in-chic concept started with former 8 DAYS stylist Fong Fan’s idea of dressing theatre’s It girl in a risqué get-up, one that’s reminiscent of a burlesque performer. And so the fan of feathers, a prop loaned from a local theatre group, happened. “If we’d tried this with someone else, it could’ve come across tacky and cheesy. But Beatrice has a larger-than-life personality and is game for anything, and she’s leggy, so she’s the right girl for this look,” says Fong Fan.

It took a village — and a machine — to transform Jesseca Liu into her full monogrammed Louis Vuitton glory. Nope, none of this was Photoshopped in. “We had to use a machine to airbrush her whole body bronze, a shade darker than her skin tone. After waiting for it to dry, we stenciled in the logos,” explains Fong Fan. Despite the hustle and bustle going on around her, Jesseca was stoically silent throughout the four-hour-long make-up process. “At that time, she was still quite coy and shy about exposing herself, so we had to convince her that we would protect her modesty. So the poor girl just sat there for hours silent, and probably had 10,000 things going through her mind. It was the quietest shoot ever,” Fong Fan reveals.

What do you do when you’ve churned out 1,000 issues of 8 DAYS? You turn them all into dresses and make the stars, past, present and (somewhat) present, don them. “We scanned all the covers and I took them to a shop to get them printed on yards and yards of fabric,” says Fong Fan. “After we finalised the designs with [designer] Keith [Png], he customised the four dresses, including the one that ‘Angelina Jolie’, who was a stand-in, was wearing.”

Lady Gaga had just raised the steaks with a jaw-dropping meat dress. And that whet our appetites for a more…balanced diet. Leaf it to Jade Seah to be game enough to don this veggie dress that we’d gotten local designer Frederick Lee to create in about a week. “I’d asked for a dress but on the day of the shoot, he turned up at the studio with the dress… and a cabbage hat that he’d made just the night before,” Fong Fan recalls.

It’s been 21 years since this local sitcom showdown and we now know who won. But back then, not content with a ratings tug-of-war, we brought the battle between Three Rooms and Phua Chu Kang to print with this twin cover. P/S: Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you — next to Tan Kheng Hua is not Pierre Png but newbie Edwin Chong who played Phua Chu Beng in Season One of PCK, before Pierre took over in Season Two.

When James Lye, then-leading hunk of Caldecott Hill, was contemplating leaving showbiz, he had Angel James and Devil James to help weigh the pros and cons. The next time we’re faced with tough life-changing decisions, can we call on Angel and Devil James too?

Left: A nubile 22-year-old Fann Wong, on the cusp of her big break with her first acting role in Dreams Come True, hanging out with Navy officers.

Right: A nubile 22-year-old Carrie Wong, on the cusp of her Best Actress Nomination for My Friends From Afar, hanging out with Navy officers.

They say it’s hard to work with animals and babies. So what about seven babies? Photographer Aik Chen recalls the mother of all photoshoots: “The babies were very hard to control, especially Ivy Lee’s twin boys Nik and Dash. May Phua’s baby was the easiest to shoot and the cutest of the lot! We waited for hours for them to settle down, and in the end, they set off the other babies in a crying fit too! At first, we wanted to shoot them all together. We tried for a while but failed ’cos it’s simply too difficult to coordinate babies. Once one baby is ready, another one will need to eat or sleep or soil their diapers or just cry for no reason (laughs).”

The 800th issue cover wasn’t shot at an actual mama stall, but was actually a mock-up magazine stand at the back of our office that was painstakingly set up by stylist Fong Fan and crew. “None of the magazines are DI-ed in — we took very long to set up all the magazines ourselves,” she quips. “But we did have to superimpose the artistes in the picture together. We didn’t have the luxury of shooting all of them on the same day due to their work commitments. So we left the set there for about a week and shot everyone on different days. I love this cover a lot, for the Singapore flavour. This is what 8 DAYS is about.”

We have had the pleasure of interviewing Adrian Pang three times for a cover story. Each time, we’d always grill him about his role as Brad Pitt’s sidekick in Spy Games; or hanging out with Thor in Blackhat. We’ve spoken to Adrian in a gym, on a F1 race circuit, but him stripped down to his undies, wearing stockings a la The Rocky Horror Show’s Dr Frank-N-Furter? That was a first. Adrian wanted to pay homage to his Maggie & Me co-star Fiona Xie who had then recently announced her plans to take a break from showbiz. Adrian himself was entering a new phase in his career, going back to his first love, theatre. “I suggested [the cover] as a joke and someone took it seriously and before I knew it I was in sheer stockings,” says Adrian. No problem, man. You’re welcome.

What’s better than one Jeanette Aw on the cover? Two Jeanettes? Nah, it’s two Emoji-Nettes.

Michelle Chong, Lulu, and Leticia turned up for this shoot, but only two of them made it on to the cover (sorry, Mich). We kid, of course. This cover would not have been possible without Michelle, who got into character as soon as Lulu’s wig touched her head. “This one my old customer!” Lulu trilled as she pointed to random folks in the photo studio.

What’s the difference between Bachelor Fandi and Family Man Fandi? Not much, it seems. Singapore’s OG sporting hero still holds on to the same values, even after 23 years.

What Fandi said in his first cover interview: “Me a millionaire? I’m not a million-dollar player. This is all rubbish lah! Maybe once in a while I buy a branded watch or clothes. I’m just a simple person. I wear T-shirts and shorts like everyone else.”

What Fandi said in his final cover interview: “I tell [the kids] that they have to stay humble, despite all the good or bad things that people say. You must be humble, if not, you will stumble. That’s my mantra.”

This photo was one of probably four or five shots we managed to take of the Olympic gold medalist that day. In fact, we were lucky to even get a photo of Joseph Schooling. He had just returned home from Rio triumphant and everyone wanted a piece of him. But our request for time with the newly-minted champ was declined — and we had even brought him chye tow kway! Luckily, one of his minders took pity on us and allowed us and our photog to meet him and snap a few pics. He wasn’t even supposed to be on our cover – if memory serves us right, it was Julie Tan who was slated to front the mag that week. But with patriotic pride surging through our veins, we quickly turned what was a feature into an 11-page cover story. But back to the photo. It makes for such a great cover pic not just because it was so spontaneous but also because when a man is on top of the world, it shows... And no one was more on top of the world than Joseph Schooling.

It’s a sign of the times when our cover subjects morphed from just TV and movie stars to include social media stars. And there’s no bigger social media star in Singapore than Wendy Cheng aka Xiaxue who, of course, caused controversy among our readers when she made the cover with her son Dash. Not just because we called her ‘The Zoe Tay of Blogging’ but ’cos some felt an online personality had no place fronting the mag. But we knew better. In the years since, social media stars have reached a level of pop culture ubiquity equivalent to mainstream celebrities. And Singapore’s biggest online names Arissa Cheo, Yoyo Cao, Andrea Chong, Kim Lim (and Wendy again) have all made our covers. And without controversy this time. After all, it’s a digital world we live in now.