Flying High, My Story Page 6

  Soon after we landed in Malaysia, the reality of my new job and situation hit me. After living and working in London, Kuala Lumpur felt small, provincial and isolated – certainly not the connected city it is now. I was an accountant by training, not a music industry person, and knew absolutely nothing about the Malaysian or South East Asian music scenes. The final straw as far as my new colleagues were concerned was that I had never even been a manager in my professional career. My appointment must have looked strange from the outside. I learned early on that the staff were planning to boycott me because they thought I was some young punk who knew nothing. They weren’t completely wrong – I was only twenty-eight, after all.

  I managed to turn their attitudes around when I started working because I was friendly and got on with people on a personal level. I also changed the way we ran things, making everyone more accountable and giving them more autonomy to get on with their jobs. That’s been my leadership style ever since – broadly trusting people to get on with the job they’re employed to do. It has sometimes caused me grief but I prefer to work on the basis that good people know what they’re doing. I used the ‘walkaround’ management style and really listened to what people had to say; I made sure that I understood what everyone did and I think I brought a passion and a belief into what we were doing. Getting the books in order and making sure the processes of distribution were smooth helped with the bottom line, but energy was the most important change I made.

  Operationally, I felt comfortable, but as far as the local music was concerned, I had a lot to learn. So I started listening; I’d get the A&R man, Nasser Abdul Kassim, to bring me Malaysian music, he’d put on a tape and we’d decide whether to sign the artist or not. I felt that the scene at the time was actually quite boring and safe, and that there had to be better new music out there than what we were producing and distributing. Our catalogue was selling but it didn’t feel exciting to me, despite what I told the staff.

  I was thinking that the whole music scene in Malaysia was due a shake-up. Then one day a man called Roslan Aziz walked into my office. Roslan is a legend – as a producer, musician and recording artist, he’s been behind so much of Malaysia’s greatest music. Nasser had already signed him but Roslan had come in to give us a cassette of his new stuff to listen to. I think he thought I was fresh meat and that he might be able to get a load of cash out of me. But from the moment the music started, I was blown away. The quality was unique – a kind of Graceland meets Malay pop. It was smart music and it was Malaysian, which made a huge difference. I wanted to discover local talent and here it was, outstanding and staring me in the face. I genuinely thought that what I heard could break the world market. (Sadly, it never quite did – for it to work globally that kind of music needed a Western face or to be included on a film soundtrack. We never got those breaks but it was still exciting music.)

  Though he had a reputation as being a bit difficult, slow and meticulous in the studio, Roslan also owned a record label called RAP (Roslan Aziz Productions) with his wife, Sheila Majid, Zainal Abidin and a few others. I thought I’d unearthed a treasure trove of great Malaysian music in his label and decided to buy it for Warner Music. On the other side of the negotiating table as we fleshed out the deal was RAP’s finance man, Kamarudin Meranun Din, who drove a hard bargain.

  In the end, we paid a lot and Roslan’s reputation for being slow and a perfectionist was well justified. The purchase turned out to be one of my biggest mistakes during my time at Warner. We only made three albums with them and none of them was commercial enough. The music was great but way too complex for the market and consequently they never sold, despite the marketing money we threw at them. Albums took for ever to produce so we never really captured the essence of what RAP was. It wasn’t all Roslan’s fault, though. I didn’t manage the talent closely enough, leaving them to their own devices. It’s a flaw of mine that when I see talented people I trust them to get on. Sometimes I trust too much. It was the same at QPR for the first few seasons. These days I can recognize when things are going off the rails earlier – it’s taken me two attempts but I’m more alert to it now.

  One great thing that came out of the deal was meeting Din. I said to him, ‘Next time we do a deal I want you on my side of the table.’ And that was the start of one of the most important relationships of my life.

  The pace of change at Warner Malaysia was so fast that I don’t think I had a moment to take a breath; after six months Stephen Shrimpton and some of the other bosses came over to visit and see our progress. We were sitting in a conference room doing our presentations about the business and reviewing which albums and artists we’d be taking on in the next season. After one particularly long discussion during which I’d argued for an artist and got reluctant approval from everyone, Stephen turned to me and said, ‘You’re running everything, you might as well be CEO.’

  Günther Zeiter, the then-CEO of Warner Malaysia, was in the room at the time – Americans can be blunt that way. But a week later they fired Günther after Ella ‘The Queen of Rock’ (Ratu Rock), one of Malaysia’s biggest artists, walked free to EMI. Whoever had drawn up the contract had forgotten to put in what’s called the Option Clause which allowed us first refusal on her next album. It was one of the biggest disasters to hit the company and the final straw for Günther. So at the age of twenty-eight I took over as CEO of Warner Malaysia.

  Since moving back to Kuala Lumpur, we’d spent much more time together as a family. My daughter, Steph, had just been born, so most weekends we’d go to Dad’s for lunch or just hang out with him and my sister. It was a wonderful time and I’m grateful to have had it – particularly after Mum had been taken away so cruelly.

  But just as I was starting to really enjoy life back in Malaysia, with my career taking off and personally feeling at home again, Dad grew ill and died of emphysema. Despite the fact that he smoked incessantly – as did virtually all his generation – it still came as a shock. Like Mum, he was taken too early, but at least I think he died a happy man. Although he didn’t give me any credit for my achievements, I think he was pleased I was finally making a success of my family and career. Of course, he never told me that directly, but I did hear it through his friends.

  When Mum died, I had turned to sport to channel my grief; this time I focused on signing artists. I went on a band acquisition spree and ran the whole company really aggressively, battling hard for musicians we wanted and negotiating tough contracts to make sure we got the best deals.

  In 1993, Nasser, my A&R man, brought a religious band to me. They were called Raihan – five guys who sang together with minimal backing. As soon as I heard them, I wanted them on our books. So much Malaysian music at the time was minor chords, sickly sweet love songs and sad ballads, but Raihan had a purity about their voices and an energy in their harmonies that sang to me. The five men wore green shirts and make-up. I was hooked.

  They lived in an Al-Arqam commune in Kuala Lumpur. Al-Arqam was a controversial, Islamic movement which was led by a charismatic leader called Ashaari Mohammad. The commune itself was advanced and self-sustaining as far as food, water, education and social structures were concerned, but there were strong rumours that it was being watched closely by the government. When we arrived I got a bit freaked out by the whole scene and decided reluctantly that signing them wasn’t worth the risk. Sure enough, in October 1994 the sect was banned by the Malaysian government.

  A year later, after the ban, Raihan came back with their producer, Farihin Abdul Fattah. Still with their make-up on but this time in white. And I told Nasser to sign them straight away despite the fact that no one else in the company believed in them. Religious music wasn’t touched by any of the major labels or distributors so it was a punt into the unknown. But we got behind the album, called Puji-Pujian, spent money on videos, and it exploded. The first shipment, when it was released in 1996, was 500 units and it has gone on to sell 3.5 million worldwide. It was huge.

  A bonus was the wa
y the music crossed racial, religious and cultural boundaries. In Malaysia at the time the Chinese bought Chinese music, Malays bought Malay, and so on. This was the first time that the same music was being listened to by the whole country and it was the first time that you saw Malay, Chinese and Indians at the same concerts. Raihan broke that mould.

  For the second Raihan album, I got Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) in to collaborate and they recorded a couple of songs together in London. He’d seen Raihan when he was in Malaysia and had loved the fact they promoted Islam through their music. We broke Raihan internationally and they’ve been touring ever since. And they’re great – even though they became superstars of the Islamic world, they remained humble, always staying behind to sign autographs and help us clean up after gigs or stack chairs after events. Fame and success didn’t change them. They were all-round good guys.

  On the back of Raihan, we created a market for the religious music that was so popular in the region by packaging it in a commercial way. It was highly profitable for us and funded lots of the riskier punts I took.

  Once we brought religious music into the mainstream with Raihan, other local music styles followed. There was a genre called ‘Dangdut’, which is a strange mix of Hindustani, Arabic and Malay musical traditions. It had been seen as ‘low-class’ music and hadn’t had backing by a major label. But I wasn’t interested in what class it was; the only thing that mattered to me was if there was a market for it and whether it could be profitable. It turns out that the answer to both questions was a very big ‘yes’. We packaged Dangdut music up in a way that appealed to its core audience and knocked out compilation albums and CDs as quickly as we could. We put all our efforts into pushing the music and shifted good numbers in Indonesia and Malaysia. This was not an affluent market so we put on a free concert at the Johor Bahru stadium in southern Malaysia. I compared this kind of music to the ‘Macarena’ and the ‘Lambada’, and hoped that it would be picked up globally.

  Although I was implementing such initiatives for Warner, the music industry as a whole in the South East Asian region was still quite backward. Having seen the way the European and US record labels worked, I set about creating superstructures for the industry: charts, an academy and the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia (RIM). I figured that it’s not just about marketing your own products, it’s about creating a market if one doesn’t already exist. Professionalizing the industry as well as your own company always yields dividends – the better the standards in the industry as a whole, the more growth you can generate.

  Part of that industry-wide approach was taking on piracy, which was killing the business in Asia. There was a report by the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers published in 1989 which said that 95 per cent of all the tapes and cassettes sold in Bangkok were pirated. Apparently the only non-pirated cassettes available were collections of jazz songs written or performed by the King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, mainly because it was a criminal offence to use the king’s name in any context other than a respectful one. In Malaysia, piracy was running at 50 per cent. Millions of dollars were being lost each year to pirates.

  The only way of tackling it was to pay a visit to the gangsters who were running these operations. So I did. We worked with the police to try to shut the operations down. Often late at night, Datuk Pahamin Ab Rajab, the secretary-general of the Malaysian Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry, and I would find ourselves sitting in the back of a police truck with forty armed officers waiting for the command to go and raid a warehouse. These ramshackle buildings in industrial parks in Kuala Lumpur were the place where CDs were copied and then shipped out to be sold on the streets. Of course, we usually caught the little guys, the minnows of the operation, but I felt it was important to do something rather than just let it happen and see our profits and our artists suffer. As a leader I thought it was important to be on the front line fighting for the causes I believed in, no matter how dangerous it might be.

  As well as finding, nurturing and releasing great local talent, we were also always on the lookout for international stars. We were fed a diet of Western bands that we had to take in and distribute as part of being in the Warner Group but that never felt as satisfying as finding something that Warner hadn’t picked up already. The Corrs were one of those bands whose success gave me real pleasure. Two good friends, the legendary producer David Foster and Brian Avnet, artist manager, gave me their CD Talk on Corners in 1997. I loved it and played it to the Warner Asia team. At the time, two guys from EMI had just arrived in the company, Calvin Wong, who was head of regional marketing and Lachie Rutherford, who was president of the Asia region. Calvin was talented but liked to disagree with everything I said; he said he couldn’t see how it would work in Asia and refused to get behind it.

  I went ahead and did the deal anyway. I loved their story – four talented siblings (including three beautiful sisters) from Ireland who sang melodies and harmonies and had learned to play together at their aunt’s pub in Dundalk, County Louth. They’d appeared in the film The Commitments but their break had really come when the US ambassador had them play at the 1994 World Cup in Boston.

  They were still unknown in Asia but we were getting creative with marketing and publicity so we invited them over to Kuala Lumpur to play the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in September 1998. That was a good incentive but I added a white lie to convince them: I said they’d be introduced to the Queen. Although that nearly happened, I couldn’t quite pull it off so they were fed up with me for a while. But on the back of the Commonwealth Games they had one of the biggest-selling albums of the year. I’d gone out on a limb and it had paid off.

  The pace at which we were signing new artists and releasing new albums was breathtaking, and in the end it caught up with us. We had a few bad years in the late nineties where we pushed out huge quantities of too many artists – old and new – but they just wouldn’t move, so we had to bring the stock back.

  At that point, Stephen Shrimpton came to see me and said, ‘Slow down! You’re too much like a man in a hurry. There’s time; use it.’

  I took his advice. I slashed our lists and made the company refocus on its core artists rather than trying to do too much. The business was picking up again and I was getting my reputation back as a bit of a star. Since then the accusation of being ‘a man in a hurry’ is one that has been applied to me a few times and I know I can be guilty of it. There’s a temptation when things are going well to overstretch and let your attention drift from doing your main job and executing the most important duties well.

  I was also distracted by the desire to keep moving up the ladder. I’d shot through the upper ranks of Warner and had my eyes on being made head of the South East Asian region. Ambition drove that but I could also see the value of creating a coordinated South East Asian market even then. Stephen Shrimpton had been fielding my increasingly urgent messages saying that I wanted the promotion but he had kept putting a decision off until the top echelons of management in Asia had remained stable for a while. There had been a lot of movement in and out of the boardroom which had caused problems and he wanted a period of calm before acting on my behalf.

  Calvin Wong and Lachie Rutherford had been brought in from EMI to provide that stability but they didn’t seem to like me for whatever reason, and I felt they were trying to ease me out. Often when a new top-tier team come in they want to put their own people in place. That said, I did technically get my promotion in 1999 but it felt like more of a holding tactic than anything else. Neither Calvin nor Lachie thought I fitted the bill but gave me the job while they decided what to do with me.

  My new job didn’t really give me any new scope to develop my ideas: I wanted to create a structure that properly engaged with the South East Asian region but my new bosses weren’t supportive, and I was too senior to do a lot of the work I’d loved doing before. The writing was on the wall, but there was one final album to make.

  On
e of our biggest singing stars was S. M. Salim – think Frank Sinatra levels of fame in Malaysia. He’d been with Warner for many years but his sales had been slumping until I had arrived; I got him to record a song with Zainal Abidin in 1992 which became a lasting hit. He then told us he’d like to make a farewell album. Nasser and I thought it was a great idea; we teamed him up with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, which was Prime Minister Mahathir’s pet project, and persuaded Siti Nurhaliza to join him (if Salim is the Frank Sinatra of Malaysia, Siti is the Celine Dion or Mariah Carey). A live album that crossed genres so ambitiously had never before been attempted; the costs were high but it was a runaway success and ultimately earned Warner, the orchestra and the artists a lot of money. The Prime Minister went to the concert and on the back of it granted S. M. Salim a Tan Sri-ship, a high honour. He was so proud – and I was too, as it was a high point of my music career. This album was recorded in January 2001, and it was the last one I worked on before leaving Warner in May.

  It had been a long time coming. My frustrations with a stalled career, my South East Asian ambitions thwarted and the slow pace of change in a big corporation all contributed to my departure but what pushed me over the edge was the industry’s reaction to digital downloading. The attitude was either to bury their collective head in the sand or to belittle it. My view was that the technology was here to stay, so you couldn’t try to stop it – instead you had to work with it and try to reap the benefits. It was like when the car came along and everyone in the delivery business said that they’d keep using horses. I felt we should be taking on this new way of listening to music, exploring its potential and making the most out of it instead of leaving it to the Napsters of this world. The complacent industry reaction frustrated me enormously.