In the Thai music industry, one man reigns supreme - Paiboon Damrongchaitham. He's also a major player in the TV and movie industries and recently moved into newspapers too. But it all grew from pop.
His company is Grammy. Originally it was just Grammy Music but now it's Grammy everything, operating from its own skyscraper, towering above the craziness of modern Bangkok - main roads jammed with smoke-belching traffic, elephants ambling along the kerbside, pavements crowded with food stalls, old women crouched over piles of dried fish and blackened eggs.
Like so many people, when I first came to Thailand I fell in love with its excitement and colour - gilded palaces, floating markets, food cooking in the street, everyone with smiling eyes - and playing in the background an endless soundtrack of Thai pop music. I fell for that too, and in the early Nineties, thinking there must be something here that could be sold to the world, I went off to see Grammy Records, where I met Mr Paiboon, silver-haired and charming.
Paiboon was the businessman in a partnership that began 20 years ago with his best friend from university, Ter, who recently died of cancer. This left Paiboon as Thailand's indisputable media king - the owner of Grammy Records, a major TV channel, movie studios, sports shops, radio stations and a daily newspaper. And all this flowed from his and Ter's original idea for a record company.
'In those days the charts were full of Western songs translated into Thai,' Paiboon explained. 'We wanted to create original Thai pop music with sophistication - capture the essence of Western pop but make it into something uniquely Thai.'
The company signed songwriters, producers and performers. The records aped every Western style of pop, from mainstream to rock'n'roll, from hip hop to electro - but because of the way the language is sung, with glissandos and slurs, the end result always sounded Thai. Grammy producers borrowed indiscriminately from established fashions - pop from the Sixties, rock from the Seventies, electro from the Eighties - and the styles were caricatured until they lost their Western derivation. Grammy, single-handedly, created a modern style of Thai pop music.
They controlled their artists' output totally. Ten years ago I worked for a while with one of Grammy's artists, Mai Charoeunpura. 'Grammy's songwriters got hold of my private diaries without my permission and used them to write lyrics for me,' she complained. Although she had a legitimate grumble, she had to admit the lyrics were excellent, and she sung them wonderfully. Soon she was one of Thailand's biggest stars.
Often the company seems to sign artists more for their notoriety than their singing ability - soap stars, fashion models, children of the rich and famous - most of them promoted under names of one syllable, such as Ning, Nom, Jay, Jon, Am, Moss or May. But from these unpromising beginnings, each year's package of newcomers breeds one or two artists who become long-term mega-stars. Bird McIntyre, Asanee and Sek Loso are the Thai equivalents of Elton John, Robbie Williams and George Michael. All three have it in them to become international stars, except Grammy rarely looks towards the rest of the world.
In the late Seventies and early Eighties, Ben Findon wrote for and produced the British pop star Billy Ocean and secured him a string of Top 10 hits in the USA. In the early Nineties he came to live in Thailand. 'I hear pop music all the time that cries out to be promoted worldwide,' he told me. 'If any Far Eastern country could break an artist in the West, it should be Thailand.'
This is a country that has sold the world on its cuisine and beaches and while many South East Asian countries still feel awkwardly foreign - Indonesia, for instance, or Korea - Thailand feels accessible and friendly. All of which makes it the best-placed country in Asia to sell its singing stars to the West. So why hasn't it done so?
Grammy is supreme. And what it does, it does supremely well. Grammy's artists are promoted with concerts in Grammy's own open-air concert halls, ready-equipped like TV studios. The dancers and backing singers who back them are on the permanent pay-roll. The thousands of kids who come to cheer and scream have been to so many Grammy events they come as a ready-choreographed audience.
In Thailand, apart from record sales, Grammy earns money from every other aspect of its artists' careers too - concerts, advertising, endorsements and management. From overseas, the company would receive none of that. In Thailand, Grammy presses, manufactures and distributes its own product. From albums sold in other countries, the company would make just a quarter of what it can make from its own market. And then there's the cost of sending the artists overseas to do promotion and the unsettling effect it might have on them. Grammy likes to keep a firm grip on its artists. There's little incentive for the company to send them abroad.
For a while Grammy employed an English record executive, Steve Lewis, to look into the possibilities of selling their artists overseas. 'The artists won't really throw themselves into it,' he told me. 'They don't like being abroad. Life in Thailand is too comfortable.'
Outside of the capital, Thailand is still very much a Third World country. People in the countryside live in simple houses, mostly on stilts, with chickens underneath. Buffalo graze next to flooded rice paddies temples are surrounded by fields of sugar cane motorcycles transport entire families - mother, father and three children.
Here the music is different: slurred country laments accompanied by flutes and small drums, or raucous rhythms for impromptu dancing, with men as well as women sweeping their hands around in graceful circles, fingers bowed backwards.
Country music is very different from the pop that Grammy invented. The general Thai name for it is luuk thung . It varies from province to province, but in every style there is simplicity and sadness, excessive vibrato and the haunting sounds of the countryside. Until recently luuk thung records were mostly released by small regional record companies. The big money was not in records, but from playing live at local festivals and fairs.
Luuk thung music gets to the heart of country life - the problem of being poor and on the bottom rung. Although love is the central theme of all Thai pop music (usually combined with much heartache), Thailand has a much more casual attitude to death than Western countries and its pop music reflects it. Newspapers feature front-page pictures of car crashes and shootings with dead bodies shown in all their bloody detail and pop songs, too, frequently involve suicides or road accidents or suffering at the hands of hoodlums.
Until a few years ago, Grammy stayed well clear of all this but eventually came to see it as a necessary way to expand. They took on country music and turned it into a new brand of pop. Artists were given squeaky-clean Grammy grooming and recorded in the city with computers and other electronic techniques. But what Grammy did best was to incorporate the essence of country music into urban pop and rock music. The company's first mega success in country music was with its longest serving and most loved artist - Bird.
His real name is Tongchai McIntyre and his father was half-Scottish. In his early days with Grammy, Bird was recorded singing mainstream songs in an airy-fairy manner - sweet but seductive. During that first burst of popularity he recorded a song which became the ultimate Thai classic, a dreamy paean to the country's relaxed lifestyle, 'S'bye, S'bye' (which in English might translate as 'Take it Easy, Take it Easy'). In Thailand it is a second national anthem, like 'Land of Hope and Glory' in Britain.
That made Bird a national hero, and ever since he has made an album each year in much the same style. But a couple of years ago, with sales finally fading, Grammy tried him doing something new. He was teamed up with Jintara, a top female country singer. The result was a classic of pop and dance music, a mix of two styles and two voices. The album, Sanid Gun Laew Jah , became Grammy's biggest-selling CD ever. The lead track, 'Fan Ja', was a six-minute dance track that gripped the country for a full year with a whole slew of remixes. With the distinctive sound of country dance blended with four-to-the-floor disco, it could have broken the world - and still could - for it's one of those unique bits of pop which crosses all barriers. But for Grammy the rest of the world seems to offer less reward than having Bird record further albums in Thailand. Rather than looking towards international success, Grammy moved Bird on to new projects - more duets. He's also been rewarded with shares in the company and a directorship.
Smitthi Bhiraleus is a director of BNT, the firm that holds the Thai franchise for Rupert Murdoch's music outlet, Channel V. His father, Itthyvat, has the Thai franchise for MTV, its biggest rival. Itthyvat, a friend of mine for 30 years, used to be Thailand's top concert promoter. No one knows more about the peculiarities of the Thai music scene than these two.
'Thai music used to fall into four categories,' Smitthi explains, 'pop, rock, country and international. But nowadays pop and rock have become the same market and country is going that way too. Between the three of them they have 80 per cent of the Thai market. Local hip-hop, rap and underground make up another five per cent and the other 15 per cent goes to foreign artists. Until a few years ago, the majors tried to compete with Thai music and signed local artists. Nowadays they've given up. They leave Thai music to Thai companies and focus on selling overseas artists into the local market.'
He's right about Thai rock music having become pop. Thais love rock music, but it's the sound more than the attitude. Basically it's the same old pop songs sung to guitar riffs that ape Western rock styles, from heavy metal to punk. Sure, the groups play their instruments and are proper musical groups, but they're packaged with the same surface gloss as pop stars, and for some reason they're always given English names - Silly Fools, Big Ass, Ebola, Modern Dog, Blackhead. (No - they don't worship bad skin. The name arose because all Asians have black hair, and are therefore 'black heads'.)
Of the multinational companies, only one has made any real inroads into the Thai market. By buying into a local record company, Sony acquired Tata Young, the only artist ever to leave Grammy records yet continue with a successful career. A few years ago Tata Young was one of Grammy's big stars - a girl of 17 who already had three huge-selling albums behind her. But her father wanted more for her - he wanted international success.
Tim Young is not a sensitive man. He doesn't have a delicate manner or a subtle touch. He's an American, a resident of Thailand for the past 30 years. He used to work in shipping, got a job in the Far East, fell in love with Bangkok, and then with Tata's mother. Later he divorced her and Tata was brought up between the two of them.
Tim's addiction to Bangkok's seedy side is famous. When we first met he made a point of dragging me round girlie bars in Patpong, Bangkok's night-life area. I understand the allure. But whereas Tim likes go-go girls dancing to Seventies rock music, I prefer dance music. (And if there are going to be near-naked bodies onstage, I'd rather they were guys.)
Despite this discrepancy in taste, Tim and I got along pretty well. He wanted advice on Tata's chances of happening in the outside world. 'She needs to be allowed to mature,' he explained to me. 'To find her own image and her own music'.
He had proposed as much to Grammy, who pretty well told him to get stuffed, so Tim decided Tata would leave them. No artist, Grammy pointed out, had ever done this and continued to have a singing career. Tim knew nothing about the music business. So he bought books on the subject and read up on every aspect of it. He decided what he needed was a contract with an American record company - Warners, maybe - and a top record producer - Nile Rodgers, perhaps - who had produced Madonna's first album.
Because Tim didn't know how crazy his ambitions for Tata were, he pursued them blindly. First he got Nile Rodgers to agree to produce her, then he went to LA and bludgeoned his way into Warners and got her a deal - a big one. Shortly afterwards, the company had one of their all too frequent internal re-shuffles and Tata was dropped, paid off with a million dollars. 'Many a person in that position would have taken the million and run,' Tim says, 'but I felt the money was meant for Tata's career and decided that was the way it had to be used.'
Tim brought her back to Thailand, signed her to Bec Tero, a small emerging record company, then set about finding top non-Thai producers. His idea was to produce Tata totally in English and sell her worldwide, releasing her in Thailand only in English. 'It will never work,' everyone told him. 'The Thais want Tata to be Thai.'
From music publishers around the world Tim got together 500 English-language pop songs, made them into CDs and sent them out to students all over Thailand. He asked them to whittle the songs down to 100. Then to 50. Then to 12. And those were the 12 that went on the album.
When the album was finished it sounded tremendous, slick and catchy, but surely not suitable for Thailand because it was all in English. 'Not for the UK either,' said most UK record companies. 'Too "poppy" for us, I'm afraid.'
Tim bludgeoned on and Tata has now been released in 12 countries. 'She's had hits in eight, including Japan,' he says proudly. 'And against all the odds, her album has also done well in Thailand.'
When Tata plays stadiums she sells out. She's become something of an icon, particularly a gay one. She gets the biggest TV ads too - for Honda and Pepsi. And it was on the basis of her success that Sony got its niche in the Thai market by buying out her record company, Bec Tero.
Tata is now the biggest mainstream pop star in Thailand not with Grammy Records. Her next album is being made in America under the control of David Massey, Vice-President of A&R for Epic Records, and already songwriters such as Diane Warren are lining up to offer her songs. 'We're totally committed to her,' Massey assured me a few weeks ago in New York. Tata's success gave Grammy a new problem. Another of its artists started dreaming about worldwide success.
Sek Loso is Thailand's best-selling rock singer. In eight years with Grammy, he's achieved everything, becoming even bigger than Bird. A year ago he told the people at Grammy that if they wanted to keep him, they would have to agree to him recording and performing in the UK and America. Eventually they agreed and Tim Carr, an American A&R man from Capitol Records, was put in charge of the project.
'I'd fallen in love with Thailand and wanted to stay,' he explained to me. 'I was trying to find something to do which would keep me here. I went to Grammy and asked if they had a project for me. They gave me Sek.'
Tim organised for Sek to go to the UK - to learn English, to write songs in English and to record. And there Sek made his big mistake - he decided to start again right from the beginning. Sek didn't want to be a Thai singer making it in the West, he wanted to become a Western singer - he wanted to be mistaken for a Western rock star. It was the equivalent of a black American soul star trying to break the UK market by polishing up his English accent and asking to be produced by Simon Cowell.
The sound of Thai is as unique as the sound of American jive talk. The rise or fall of a word completely changes its meaning. The word for 'far' is spoken in a straight unflexing tone the same word spoken with a tone that slides downwards means 'near' - a pretty important difference for a song about missing your loved one. The result is that Thai pop music shimmers with strange glissandos. And so does Thai rock. Over conventional guitar-riffs, the sliding intonations of the Thai language change old-fashioned rock into something unique. Singing rock music in his own tongue, Sek Loso can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Singing in English on his new album he sounds contrived, almost laughable.
Sek Loso's mistake could give Tata Young a clear run at being the first Thai to make it abroad but in Bangkok, there's already a scene as exciting as anything in the West.
For many years I've thought, given the right
trigger, Thailand's capital could become another Munich. I'm referring to that extraordinary decade when 'the Munich sound' dominated the world of dance music. Bangkok is sunnier, sexier and, nowadays, not too Third-Worldy. It has great night-life and a hip club scene with a cosmopolitan clientele - Thai, Japanese, European, American, Australasian. It's the perfect place for a world-class recording studio to pump out dance songs the perfect place for a world-class dance group to emerge. And suddenly, a year ago, there it was: Futon.
At first it was just their photograph: a Thai boy with his hair dyed blond and a dynamite torso and a Japanese girl looking like a young Yoko Ono. The music was electro-techno-raunchy-rock. More contemporary than Scissor Sisters, more punk too, but with pop overtones. It had social intensity - the ring of the early Seventies, when all those over-amphetamised groups like the Banshees, the Slits andthe Sex Pistolswere coming out of London.
Futon grew out of Bangkok's famous club scene, particularly the notorious teenage area of Royal City Avenue, 300 yards of warehouse-like buildings converted into clubs, pubs and bars. All around is the real Bangkok - horrendous traffic jams, smelly markets, lolloping elephants and seven-year-old kids selling garlands of orchids. But until recently, in the midst of this everyday chaos was another type of chaos - the clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, mostly much more luxurious than their London counterparts, jammed with rich Thai teenagers drinking, drugging and dancing.
Q bar probably still remains the best with its three floors of different sounds. The clientele love sharp Western slogans: Massive Mondays, Pink Thursdays, Frisky Fridays. Alternatively there's Narcissus, which claims to have the best sound and lights in Asia or Mystique, which calls itself a temple to hedonism and has a jellyfish tank and serves lobster-burgers.
It was no secret - at Royal City Avenue there were drugs all over the place, yet for years the government showed a surprising tolerance to what went on there and the club scene boomed. Then a new, thin-lipped, enjoyment-free Minister of the Interior declared war on teenage fun and instigated a series of police raids. He took to attending the raids himself and had a particular dislike of dancing.
Pubs, however, still get licences relatively easily. As a result, inventive entrepreneurs began building their pubs like discos, except that, where the dancefloor should be they put high, well-spaced tables with bar stools, one table squeezing in as many as eight people. As soon as the music starts the occupants hop off their stools and dance around the tables. When the minister turns up with his police, the music stops and the teenagers hop back on their stools. Last one back's a loser - like a game of musical chairs. Losers are hauled outside for urine tests.
Last year the government had a big clamp-down on underage drinking. As a result, a few weeks ago I found myself at a gig by Futon at the surprising time of 5pm on a Sunday afternoon. 'It's meant for our younger fans,' the group explained. 'For under-16s who won't be able to get into the club later when alcohol is being served.' By 5pm the place is stuffed. Under 16 or not, I notice a good few kids who look more than naturally happy - 'E' perhaps, or amphetamine. But never mind - I've been assured the thin-lipped minister and his marauding police take Sundays off.
Amazingly the band start dead on time - a great rolling dance anthem which has the audience joining in the chorus. Momo, the Japanese girl half howls, half growls. Gene, the blond Thai boy who used to sing in temples, whips off his shirt and pumps his crotch. 'I don't wanna be straight,' he chants. 'Football makes me masturbate'.
A thousand kids in the audience sing along with gusto. I like this stuff - it's way better than the carefully choreographed teen screams of a Grammy concert.
The next song consists of an endless list of recreational drugs and again the fans know every word. Momo takes her clothes off. Bee, the skinny white guitarist, flogs the air with an iron chain. The blond singer is down to his underpants.
Anarchy may be old-hat these days, but for an old Sixties hand like me this stuff feels pleasantly familiar. Of all the styles of Thai pop, this is by far the most alluring.
