Chain-smoking troubadour Pete Teo meets self-proclaimed arrogant bastard, Funkshoppe maestro BadBoyBen. Two distinct characters come together at KLue’s behest and talk shop.
By Brian Yap, KLue
On the surface, DJ Bad Boy Ben and singer-songwriter Pete Teo have nothing in common. Sure, they both do music – but one fills the dancefloor in Penang’s premiere club, Lush, with his funky and groovy tracks, while the other sings dark pop songs at his own Songwriters’ Round. And while Ben only started DJing three years ago, Pete is what some might call an old fogey, writing and performing since his college days. He has tasted international success before, as one half of Hong Kong pop duo ‘Mid Century’, while Ben has started to gain a name for himself internationally – his record label, Funkshoppe, has a residency at ‘The Retreat’ in London, and Ben himself played at ‘Gatecrasher’ last April.
But often, with success, comes criticism. Rightly or wrongly, Ben and Pete do have something in common. Ben, for example, hardly plays in the Klang Valley – word has it that some DJs and promoters here aren’t exactly good buddies with him. As for Pete, he has a reputation for being arrogant and suffering from delusions of grandeur. Postings on message boards on the Web, including KLue’s, have put that in not so polite terms.
Both Pete and Ben, however, say they don’t see what the fuss is all about. What they do see is the necessity to push and market themselves as hard as they can. ‘You can’t please everyone,’ Pete says. With his recently released solo debut, ‘Rustic Living For Urbanites’, he will surely please some – it’s a gorgeous piece of work, filled with melancholic melodies and lyrics that deal with longing and loss through well-crafted stories.
Putting the two together surely causes a bit of apprehension, but surprisingly the two hit it off almost immediately, and began discussing their work, why they don’t pay too much attention to their critics, and what it’s like being an independent musician in this digital age.
KLue: Why don’t you guys talk about the ‘criticism’ from others?
Pete: I’m surprised at the reaction to what you’re (Ben) doing because it seems that in your scene, it’s easier to cross the line between artist and entrepreneur. That’s the culture that’s been developed when the music started in the club scene overseas anyway – the artist tends to be the entrepreneur who’s marketing his own stuff in a very strong and aggressive way, whereas in the tradition that I come from, there tends to be a clearer delineation between the artist and the person who is selling.
Ben: Absolutely. When I started out, if someone told me three years ago that yeah, you’ll be playing at Gatecrasher in London, I’d say you must be mad. Three-and-a-half years ago, I wasn’t even planning on DJing. It’s just that I’d been a big fan of electronic music since I was ten. So one of my classmates, some mad kid from the States introduced me to things like Depeche Mode and Talking Heads…
Pete: Talking Heads is brilliant.
Ben: Yeah…
Pete: You a Talking Heads fan? I’m gonna interrupt. Shit, I should’ve brought my black book. I got his (David Byrne’s) autograph.
Ben: Oh, you bastard.
Pete: I’ve got his fucking autograph! I saw him in New York. He was sitting next to me at the Knitting Factory. I played a gig in New York, and some friends brought me there.
Ben: David Byrne is like a genius. But if I had a kid now and he was 10 years old, I would never let him listen to Talking Heads. Imagine a 10-year-old kid running around singing ‘Psycho Killer’. That’s wrong, you know.
KLue: How did you start your career, Ben?
Ben: I was into this music from a very, very early age. I happen to have a lot of music, so I bought equipment I wanted to mess around with at home. It wasn’t a public thing, it was more like a private thing. After two weeks of messing around, I said ‘I’m never going to be any good at this, so I’ve got to find a place where I can actually start practising properly. I was basically thrown in at the deep end. When I started playing, people would just stand there and say, ‘What’s he doing?’.
KLue: Some say that you guys seek publicity too much.
Pete: I’m by nature fairly shy of publicity.
Ben: I’m even worse, I actually don’t like publicity.
KLue: Is that really true, though?
Pete: You have to do it. I think there’s a difference between selling yourself and selling your product. I think there’s a key difference. There are certain bits about my life which I will never allow to be published.
Ben: It’s not so much that I’ve gone out and actively seeked masses of publicity. Maybe it just so happens that for what I do, some people are actually interested, some people actually take notice. I agree with what you said about selling. Being an artist, you do want people to know about what you do, because say, if I had a gig and nobody came, and I was playing to the waiters, then that wouldn’t be very cool.
Pete: I think a lot of it is a question of attitude. We’re all driven by the same thing – you want to find a bigger audience. But there’s an entrenched culture that the artist is not supposed to sell. And that’s very well if you’re signed to a major label and you’ve got a whole marketing department doing your PR work. Then the artist is then removed from the dirty end of it. You know, I’ve been around. I’m an old dog.
Ben: And I’m getting there.
KLue: So detractors are just misconstruing your success?
Ben: When I started out, it was basically just to play music. It still is. I met a couple of like-minded people, so I said, let’s have a little like, group of friends, a collective, whatever you want to call it, a DJ mafia…
Pete: Support group.
Ben: Yeah, that’s actually better. I would say support group. For us small-time guys…
Pete: For counselling.
Ben: Exactly. That’s perfect. So we have this little ‘support group’. We bake each other cakes.
Pete: Pat each other on the shoulder, ‘it’s fine’.
Ben: And we’d have our Kleenex out, ‘Nobody came to my gig last night’.
Pete: ‘I played to three people last night.’
Ben: ‘And two of them were the waiters.’ We’ve all worked very, very hard. And I’m sure Pete has worked very, very hard. I’ve put in a lot of hours. I’ve pulled my hair out.
Pete: That’s why I used the word ‘driven’ earlier. That’s what I picked up when I went to your Web site. I personally have not heard your music, and I can’t wait to go home and listen to this CD. But just judging from the web site, I went, ‘Wait a minute, you got a crew that knows exactly what they’re doing’. And without trying to sound like a sycophantic prick, admiration goes out to that. I mean that sincerely. It’s the first time I’m meeting you, there’s no reason why I should be flattering you, but…
KLue: Why is he flattering you?
Ben: Well, I just gave him a free CD.
Pete: Well, it’s not worth me flattering you. It doesn’t even have artwork on it!
KLue: What’s it like trying to make it as a musician or DJ these days?
Pete: I think the music scene is changing. I’m talking across genre here. All the majors are in trouble, and the whole structure of the music scene will change over the next 15 years, and the power will go to the people who do it for themselves. But using you (Ben) as an example – let’s say 100 people hit your web site. You might have 50 who say, ‘What a load of rubbish,’ or say ‘arrogant bastard’ or ‘self-promoting bastard’. The other 50 will say, ‘God, I love what he’s doing.’ And it’s the price of what you do. I mean, you can’t please everyone.
Ben: I feel for that, because when you’re DJing, you’re playing to the crowd, and there will always be someone who says ‘Have you got the ‘Ketchup Song’?’. So do I play that? Just to please one person? No I can’t. Because we’ve always got to think of the bigger picture. So in that sense it’s really hard. But I also agree that recording companies, they’ve lost touch with the real world. There’s new technology every day. For example Apple has taken a very good initiative. Now they have online music.
Pete: That’s right.
Ben It’s something we all saw coming. Maybe some of them (recording labels) didn’t want to accept the fact, they try to force people to do things the old way.
Pete: It’s a Pandora’s Box. Once it’s open, you can’t stop it. The problem with the majors (music labels) is, as Ben says, they’re trying to force the old distribution model, and it’s not working out.
KLue: So technology has made it more possible for people like you two – who despite differences in genre, are essentially independent musicians – to get your stuff heard?
Pete: What you find increasingly is that the cost of making records is falling. It’s become more accessible to more musicians. When I was growing up, it’s not even possible for someone like Ben to make music, because it has to be a musician; you’ve got to know your instrument.
Ben: Oh. Gee, thanks a lot, buddy!
Pete: Music should go out to more people. It shouldn’t be about whether or not you can afford music lessons. And the technology affords a person the ability to make music although he may not come from a ‘traditional’ sense of being a musician. A digital eight-track recorder that you can make really good quality music on – probably better than what The Beatles had – can be bought for a couple of thousand dollars today. So the production cost of making albums are falling. The question is whether people are taking the initiative to make the music. Well, people are.
Ben: Yeah.
Pete: You get a flood of people doing demos. The next step is, well, everybody is making music, so the question becomes how do you get out of that ‘noise factor’. As an indie, you gotta get out there, by whatever means you know how. And you (Ben), for example, do it very successfully through the Net. The Net is the saviour in the sense that you can reach more people and it’s not limited to the geographical area you’re in. It’s global by definition.
Ben: Throughout the ages, people have heard music and said, ‘Well, I can do better than that.’ Well, now you can. So now you can put your money where your mouth is. But at the same time, it doesn’t matter how you sell it. You can have marketing people behind it, you don’t have to do it yourself. But at the end of the day, if it’s crap, it’s still crap.
Pete: Absolutely.