RadA/Sms works in concert with RecA

Many stories have been told about how Positive Tone made its mark in the Malaysian music scene. How Positive Tone wasn’t just a record label but a symbol of independence, innovation and a music that was at once original, new and exciting. How Positive Tone produced music that not only introduced new musical styles to the overly mass-market-rock Malaysian public but also captured the imagination of a generation just waiting to erupt in musical and social freedom from the onslaught of manufactured music that pandered for mass market consumption.

All these sound extremely romantic. Maybe to many it was and always will be.

But to me, the start of Positive Tone’s journey in the underbelly of the Malaysian music industry and turning inside out for all to see was more than that. Our journey was filled with a lot of amazing talent, amazing people, amazing coincidences and mostly, very much mostly, amazing passion.

Yes Positive Tone did become this beacon of independent success, a fairytale story of a record label that did good and changed the rules of the game. But the real story never started out so straightforward.

Coming back from studying abroad, I was a majorly confused though optimistic young man. It was approaching the summer of 1994 and I just received my

MBA. I also had a Music degree from Berklee College Of Music majoring in Music Production & Engineering, whatever the hell that means (actually it means I learn formally how to produce and engineer albums but I like saying

“whatever the hell that means”).

I was also fresh from working for a record label in Boston called Taang!

Records which was an extremely well-known label in the punk culture. I did not know that going into the job. I just knew that I wanted to get some US work experience and I wanted to work in a record label and there was an opening in Taang! Which was placed in Harvard Square, not that far from where I was staying. It was only when I started work there that I found out the label was a global shrine to punk, ska and other sorts of indie derivatives.

Working at Taang! Records wasn’t glamorous at all. Yes, this was the original home of The Lemonheads and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones but no, I never met any of the artists. I was given menial tasks, appropriate for any budding young record executive. In fact, my first assignment was manning the shop floor including putting up lights, checking the stock, attending to customers and the like. I didn’t complain. The shop floor experience was invaluable, giving me insights on how customers think and how they decided on their purchases. I made my way up to handling international shipping, which basically meant putting CDs and posters in a box and sending them off to some country somewhere. My last task was to ‘analyse international revenues’ as the Head of Finance called it, which actually meant counting how much money the company was making overseas from the invoices they sent out.

To make things more surreal, when I started working in Taang! Records I just came off an intensive 4-year study of jazz music. So I wasn’t that well-versed in punk. In fact, I was schooled in music principles that was totally opposite to the punk-favoured no-rules principles. But I found the music in Taang! fresh and the punk ethic of NOT adhering to formal music principles and theories refreshing (I think most of my Berklee lecturers would have rather killed themselves then be subjected to the dissonant notes of The Lemonheads and Teenage Fanclub). To top it all off, I was an MBA student at the same time.

I decided not to tell the guys at work that I was a business student with jazz knowledge, as I don’t think they would understand what I was doing there.

Usually snot-faced kids with pimples and other types of white-trash persona would be the ones working in punk labels. Not a jazz-educated MBA-wannabe brownish Malaysian. That combination would have been suspicious to my then-employers. They all thought I was just some foreign student wanting to be an intern. That was fine by me.

It was with all these experiences in jazz, punk, business studies, studios, performing in Vietnamese weddings, that I came back to Malaysia, full of hope and energy, but not quite sure what I was going to do. I knew I wanted to be involved in producing music. I knew I wanted to be in the music business. But I didn’t know how.

And so it was then in that summer of 1994 that I met up with my mentor, Helen Yap.

Helen was responsible for me studying music. This may not seem an important fact. But the truth was that I was offered a JPA scholarship to study law, economics, or international relations. But Helen, dear Helen, in my very first jazz piano class with her in 1987 (I took jazz piano as a ‘thing to do’ after SPM) persuaded me that Berklee was the way. And in my youthful foolishness, I decided to take her advice and applied. That’s how I got to Berklee.

I remember the look of the JPA scholarship dude when I asked if there was a scholarship for music. He had a condescending snigger and such an oh-my-god-you-can’t-be-seriously-thinking-of-studying-music look on his face that it helped me carve a permanent disdain for the establishment until today.

It took my parents by surprise too as they didn’t expect me to turn down the JPA scholarships. I still remember the worried look they had: Would music give my son a proper career? How do we pay for all this? As the legend went, after my mother recovered from nearly fainting when I told her I turned down the scholarships, she said these immortal words, “Izham, if you want to be a tukang sapu sampah pun, be the best tukang sapu sampah in the world.” Those inspirational words drove me all the way from my Music degree and into my MBA. My parents worked extremely hard to give me the best education in the world as the powers-that-be then obviously never wanted to recognize music as a viable career option and weren’t any help. There is no way I can repay how hard my parents worked to give me the best. (Thanks Mak and Ayah).

In that fateful 1994 meeting with Helen I told her I saw a job opening in the classifieds a PR executive at BMG Music. I was thinking that maybe I should try that as a way into the music business. She quickly changed my mind when she said that it probably meant I had to go around sticking up Whitney Houston posters and coo to radio DJs how much I loved “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”

and how her new record will top that “amazing classic”.

She then said these immortal words (again). “Why don’t you go see Kenny?

You know, Kenny, the guy who used to be in Kenny, Remy & Martin. He’s got Positive Tone. He’s got that record label”.

I actually thought she said, “He’s got a positive tone.” I was wondering how strange it was that Helen would say that someone has a positive tone. Maybe she meant that he was a very optimistic person?

I went over to see Kenny at Kenny Music, a jingle house at the shoplots at PJ’s section 16 roundabout (Now no longer a roundabout but a traffic light 4-way stop).

He told me about this record label he had called Positive Tone and how it was a company that him and Jeff Siah, a friend from the construction industry, started to release a record by Leonard Tan in 1993 called “Bintang Bukannya Satu”. (The name Positive Tone wasn’t new, it was a dormant shelf company that they bought. I’m glad they didn’t chose “Six Happiness” or “Usaha Jaya Trading” or any of these typical shelf-company names. We would have a very different story, I’d think). Kenny told me that Positive Tone’s only employee at that time was some white guy called Paul who was then working in the studios upstairs on an album by an unknown group. He took me upstairs.

Kenny opened the door to one of the smallest studios I’ve ever seen (I’ve seen bigger toilets) and there was Paul. Paul Moss.

Paul was crouched over the computer, looking stern and annoyed. (I don’t think he has any other look. Someone once said that Paul has perfected the

“anguished” look when he saw him as a judge on Malaysian Idol. I thought it was a perfect description).

Paul took one look at me after Kenny’s introductions and said “Hi. I’m working on this group. Still a lot of work to do. I think this is the best song they have.”

Then he reluctantly played me what he was working on.

I still remember the moment when the music came out of the speakers. It was fresh, different than anything I’ve ever heard in Malaysia and extremely catchy and original. It was just three or four chords but it had a soul to it. It was brave.

It was clever. It was just….alive.

Most of all, it reminded me of Taang! Records.

I was listening to OAG’s ‘60’s TV’.

Paul still had this annoyed look on his face. I thought he was upset at something, maybe me coming in and barging on his musical workmanship. I knew all artists and creative types hate it when they have to show their work unfinished.

So I excused myself and went back downstairs excitedly. I took one look at Kenny and said “I’m in”. I didn’t even ask how much was the salary or what benefits there were. I didn’t care. I just wanted to do something that felt like a new beginning of something, whatever it was. I had a feeling this was going to be…fun.

The next Monday I reported to duty. Kenny put aside a big creaky and old wooden table and chair in his filing room at the back of Kenny Music and armed it with a 286-processor IBM-compatible computer and a dot-matrix printer. I sat at the table, not caring that I was in some old filing room in some old part of PJ looking at some really old piece of machinery. I was just excited at the possibilities of the road ahead.

I asked Kenny what I should do. He just said something along the lines of, “You decide”. Then he went off.

I stopped in my tracks. I decide? I decide? Wait a minute, I decide? It was like a blank sheet of paper. And I get to write on it. I didn’t stop to question his sanity.

From then on it was all systems go.

After much contemplating, and listening to OAG’s music, and hanging out at the underground gigs and talking to the kids there, I realized that Positive Tone could really have its own niche in the music business. The best thing was this niche was something Paul and I really loved. And so I worked out a business plan around a mission – to continually produce something new and exciting.

That was our niche. That was our mission. Heck, that was our calling.

Armed with that mission, we not only produced OAG’s landmark debut album, but also a single by Poetic Ammo. At the same time, I heard a demo in my car by a group called Innuendo. It was so stunning that I immediately forgot where I was going and made a few calls and headed straight to say hello to the group.

And so the basic foundation of Positive Tone laid upon the mission of doing something new and exciting for the urban audiences: and now we had three different musical styles from three amazing acts to show for it. With OAG,

Poetic Ammo and Innuendo, we launched Indie, Hip-Hop and R&B to the unsuspecting Malaysian public. None of these three styles ever made it across the mainstream in Malaysia before and it was nuts that we were planning to release all three within a space of a year of each other (For the purists, yes we also released a pop album by Liza Aziz around that time but I considered that a necessary piece of production needed to lay the groundwork to pull off an Innuendo and also a necessary piece of education in that we are totally SO not set-up to handle a mass-market artist, no matter how progressive we made the music).

It was the four of us, Paul, me, Kenny and Jeff, wide-eyed wanderers trying to create something new in the music industry. Kenny was a music veteran, having been a top Malaysian artist and then a top Malaysian jingle writer. Jeff Siah was from the Siah Brothers corporation, a huge construction company.

He had amazing passion in music and constantly threw ideas at us. The two of them, the original founders of Positive Tone, always gave me the freedom and support needed to make the dream a success. I bought into the company within a few months of working there, immediately showing my interest in the long-term. In hindsight, that was a good move. It meant I couldn’t just treat my Positive Tone job as just another job. It meant that this was going to be my life.

It meant I had no back door to escape, no back-up plan. There was only one plan and I had to make it work.

I knew if I started down this route, I would not only be going against the more established work options and corresponding salaries of more traditional careers, I would also be going against the more established way of charting success for a music label. And I knew I needed a few years to make it work, if it would work at all. If it all went to hell in a handbasket, I would be set back a few years.

It wasn’t a hard decision to make. OAG, Poetic Ammo and Innuendo gave me hope and belief that we were on to something. Whatever that something was.

And whatever it was, it felt exciting and sort of revolutionary-like.

In many ways, Paul and I was a great complement to each other. We had different musical production styles. He worked on OAG and Poetic Ammo and I really worked hard with Innuendo. But that didn’t mean we didn’t get involved in each other’s productions. What I liked most about working with Paul is that I learnt so much from the way he approached music, which was the totally opposite way of my schooled approach. Paul taught me so much more than school ever did, I once said in some awards show. And those words ring true all

the time. He taught me to respect the melody and not get too tied up with the

‘right chords’ as most Berklee grads would inevitably do. I repaid the favour by playing keyboards for his productions and getting involved in arrangements and co-writing a little with him but that was nothing compared to what I learnt from him.

We both knew we had to work really hard to make sure the music sounded fresh and different and unlike anything anyone has heard before. That would be our unique selling proposition, as business-types would like to say.

So Paul never questioned why I spent a year in Reymee’s basement working with Innuendo, carving a direction and sound with them. Normal music industry folk would have thought that was a waste of time. But I thought it was necessary if we wanted to hit Malaysia with a sound that was miles above what anybody else was doing. I, in turn, never questioned why he spent months perfecting the sound of Chi’s drums (Yes, before Chi made it big as a TV celebrity with the new moniker Qi, he was just Chi, short for Qushairi) and making sure OAG sounded perfect.

You see, we were not in it just as a business. We were in it because we wanted to bring something new from all of these great young talents that we were hearing in the scene. We just had to find a way to make it work and to balance it all, combining financial returns with spending what was considered excessive times on perfecting the product. But I knew this was the right way. We all knew. When you combine business discipline and marketing creativity with a passionate respect to music sincerity and production quality, you could have a real chance of not just making a real hit, but making a real difference.

And for us, that meant everything.

The early years were tough. No one really understood what we were trying to do. No one…….except the fans. The fans gave us strength and belief to try something new all the time. We knew the industry wouldn’t support us in the beginning but we knew we were on the right track as the fans were very supportive.

We couldn’t use the music industry infrastructure then to get our music out.

Radios wouldn’t support us. The press didn’t know what to write about us.

The TV stations only showcased huge mainstream acts. Even the music shops didn’t know where to put us on their Malay, Chinese and International racks.

It was frustrating that the industry just didn’t see, or maybe the industry didn’t

WANT to see, that there was something moving in the underground that was out of their safe little process and infrastructure. But we weren’t disheartened for long. We didn’t give up, though at times we nearly did, especially when time and time again, we came upon roadblocks when we tried to get support from the music industry and its infrastructure. In the end, we thought, screw the infrastructure, let’s go direct to these screaming fans we saw in gigs.

From sticking flyers on toilet walls to being chased by mall security guards for giving out flyers to shoppers to organizing gigs we did all we could to get the music out directly to the fans. I still remember the pained look on my dad’s office staff when I kinda borrowed his photocopy machine to make flyers without paying.

Even with all the hardship we kept on going. I remember the times when I didn’t know when the next salary was going to come from. I remember looking at the hopeful faces of the artists for their future and how we all just kept it all going even though we had no idea when the next batch of funds will come. For a while I even didn’t pay myself anything, as every cent was needed for us to keep on going. And boy did we keep on going.

We didn’t have much money to promote OAG. We just made a great video, directed by the genius Brad Hogarth, we took a single black and white bus advertisement and we just spent days and nights voting for OAG in the Metro Chart Show on the now-defunct Metrovision (It’s some kind of karma that

We didn’t have much money to promote OAG. We just made a great video, directed by the genius Brad Hogarth, we took a single black and white bus advertisement and we just spent days and nights voting for OAG in the Metro Chart Show on the now-defunct Metrovision (It’s some kind of karma that