Pan Ron and Korn Phnao’s Pnhaeu Samnieng, a Cambodian psych-pop cover of A Hard Day’s Night.

Khmer vocals. Male-female call-and-response. Surf guitar. Mekong beat.

An open-sided dancehall in Phnom Penh sometime around 1968. Midnight. The heat still rising from the pavement. Hot amplifiers. Cigarette smoke swirled by a lazy ceiling fan. A waiter threads through the crowd carrying plates of grilled snakehead fish, green mango and chilli salt.

Silk sampots and sharkskin trousers. A line of Mobylettes and Vespas standing beneath tamarind trees.

I’d love a bit part in this movie.

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Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea – three of the great voices of Cambodia’s golden age – survive on tape but not in life. They were swallowed by the Killing Fields, murdered by the Khmer Rouge genocide along with so much of the country’s music, cinema, wit and beauty.