I haven’t hit the ground yet. What follows is the story of my journey down so far.
In January 1995, at the age of 31, I had recently moved to Singapore and was earning my keep with a pen. (Well, a Mac laptop, but that’s product placement!) I wrote brochure copy for an adventure travel company, and music reviews and features for a number of magazines. A welcome perk of my job was that I got into all the live music clubs free, so of course I was having fun (especially as the bars wouldn’t take money from me for drinks). I shared a flat with an Australian bass player, Belinda, and a Japanese teacher, Tetsu, and was dating my fair share of men without having anyone serious on the scene.
One night Belinda came home from work raving about a band she had seen playing in a club called Fabrice’s. ‘There are seven gorgeous men,’ she said, ‘and they’re explosive on stage. You have to see them.’
‘What are they called?’
‘The Cuban Boys.’
I rang Music Monthly to ask if they’d be interested in a review and they said, ‘Sure.’
I was interested in exploring why foreign musicians were frequently paid so little. I had dreams of doing some investigative journalism to rival All the President’s Men. It was a genuine problem, but I have to admit I was looking for a problem I could bury myself in solving.
I turned up at Fabrice’s on the afternoon of 25 January, toting my notebook and camera, to sit in on the band’s rehearsals. My first thought was that ‘the Cuban Boys’ was a strange name for a group that had seven blokes and three girls in it. My second thought was that Belinda had been exaggerating. Only two of the band members, Emilio and Juan Carlos, were particularly good-looking, while the rest could be described as having ‘good personalities’.
It was the band leader, Omar Puente, who came over to talk to me for the interview, and I thought he seemed a bit Mafioso with his little moustache. He sat opposite me looking very serious and frowning in concentration as we struggled to overcome the language barrier. I spoke English, some Norwegian and a little French, while Omar spoke Spanish, Russian and a little French, so French it was. It took me about twenty minutes to get a single quotable sentence. (I wasn’t 100 per cent sure of how much I understood, but he didn’t read English, so I was unlikely to be sued.)
I picked up the camera and motioned that I wanted to take a picture of them playing. Omar indicated in sign language that they should get changed into their performance outfits, instead of the casual clothes they were wearing.
‘No, don’t bother,’ I said. ‘If you could just play a number for me as you are, that would be fine.’ I motioned towards the stage.
When they started playing, I was instantly impressed. They had a really good sound, and Omar’s violin-playing was fantastic. The repertoire comprised modern and traditional Cuban dance music, but Omar also did a little Bach as a solo and I could hear humour as well as hard work and technique in his playing. On the violin he obviously felt in control; he was a complete master of it.
In the middle of the set, the band launched into a version of ‘La Cucaracha’. The percussionist, Juan Carlos, stood on his chair and put one leg on his conga drum. Then they all stopped playing and did pelvic thrusts in time to the ‘Da-da-da-da dah-dah’ bit in the chorus. It was crude and obscene, but mesmerising.
I came back to Fabrice’s later that night to watch the proper show. The band was not dressed up in their performance shirts, so I figured Omar had been trying to be interesting for the press. (Now I realise it was me he was trying to impress.) He had a very charismatic presence, interacting with the audience and chatting to them between numbers, and moving around the stage with ease. He wasn’t the best-looking band member, but you couldn’t take your eyes off him, mainly because you wanted to see what he would do next. All the band members moved with an easy, natural rhythm, the music was note-perfect, and their set was a huge hit with the regulars at Fabrice’s.
After they finished playing, Omar walked off stage and came over to sit beside me, bringing his friend Rolando, who spoke a bit of English and tried to translate for us.
‘Will you be nice about us in your magazine?’ Omar and Rolando asked. Well, that’s what they were trying to ask.
‘Of course,’ I said. They were so earnest and incredibly entertaining to watch that being anything less than glowing about them would have been like kicking a puppy.
The two of them would feverishly converse in Spanish, words tripping over one another, for several minutes before Omar would try to say something in English.
‘Do you live in Singapore?’ he asked next, and I told him that I did.
Our scintillating conversation floundered a bit when one of Rolando’s girlfriends arrived, but Omar didn’t leave my side for the rest of the evening except to get back on stage and play the second set.
At two or three in the morning, when Singapore was winding down, I was in the habit of stopping at a market for an early breakfast on the way home. I invited Omar to join me so we could continue trying to talk. We borrowed an English–Spanish dictionary, as Rolando didn’t consider his role much fun and the girlfriend clearly was. We walked down to the market and bought bowls of congee (a kind of rice porridge) and some other snacks, and sat at a roadside table to eat.
Now we were away from his job and the band, Omar dropped his earlier, more fatherly persona and started to be flirtatious, touching my arm and offering me bites of his food to sample. It dawned on me that he thought I had asked him on a date. I was just being professional and finishing the interview (I think). He was all smiles and charm until he accidentally bit on a piece of chilli, which ruined his composure. His eyes started watering and he was coughing and spluttering. I handed him a bottle of water to cool his mouth down. Not the most romantic start, and nothing to indicate that this would be the love of my life.
I still hadn’t asked about how much the band was being paid, so I opened the dictionary at the word ‘fee’. Omar signalled, ‘Twenty,’ with his fingers.
‘A day?’ I was horrified.
He nodded.
I thought we were talking about Singapore dollars, which
are worth a lot less than US dollars. Believing that the band was being paid a tiny fraction of what their Singaporean counterparts would earn, my trade-unionist instincts kicked in and my hackles rose. After some frantic investigation, though, I realised that he was telling me how much their daily allowance was, rather than their total fee, and he was talking in US dollars.
I later learned that their income had also been affected by a bad business decision. Most musicians pay an agent fee to whoever got them the job. For this type of long-term contract, it’s usually no more than 15 per cent, and if two or more agents are involved they share the fee. Omar had been a band leader for a short time and his business skills were only marginally better than his language ones. Consequently, his limited (to put it politely) English meant that the Cuban Boys were paying two agents 15 per cent each, which resulted in the ten Cubans receiving just 70 per cent of the fee. It didn’t seem right, but no one person was to blame. The band saved most of their pay to buy instruments, as they would need better equipment to be the next ‘super group’. I could see they would also need better business sense.
We had been speaking at cross-purposes and not even in the same language. It’s hard to make sense when you have to flick through a whole dictionary to locate every word, and even when you find the right one, cultural references mean you still speak at cross-purposes.
After I’d finished eating, I stood up to leave, laying my hands against my cheek to indicate that I needed to sleep. Dawn was breaking and