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Kuala Lumpur’s nightlife is no longer just about KTV
lounges, dangdut clubs or tea dances. The last 10 years have seen clubs and bars
mushroom all over the city, turning KL into a crucial node on the international
dance music circuit. This explosive growth was fuelled partly by corporate
dollars and partly by the efforts of a tightly-knit cadre of DJs, promoters and
punters. Callen Tham is an integral ingredient in that mix of capitalism and
clubbing, having been in the game since its earliest days, and he isn’t showing
any sign of slowing down.
Callen is probably best known to KL’s nocturnal public for
performing as a DJ under the Excessive banner, which was formed with partner
Bryan after they split with pioneering promoters Tempo. The fledgling outfit
quickly gained a reputation when it began throwing parties at an abandoned
cinema that many clubbers still recall with deep nostalgia: Movement.
Although Movement wasn’t the first club in the city to play
house or techno (its predecessor, the Backroom, was already a magnet for dance
music enthusiasts, but it catered to a small group of career party-animals), it
was the first to break electronic dance music to KL’s masses. But Movement
wasn’t a commercial superclub either, retaining an underground atmosphere thanks
to a dark, cavernous interior and a flexible closing time.
As Movement’s promoters, Excessive and Tempo started
booking British and European DJs for parties at the club, first Jon Carter and
then heavyweights like Sasha, Digweed and Sander Kleinenberg. The massive
structure in the heart of Bukit Bintang, once Cathay cinema, began attracting
hundreds of newly converted clubbers to its doors every weekend with the promise
of superstar guest DJs, a mammoth soundsystem and a newly united clubbing
community. But nothing prepared the promoters for the biggest gig of all,
according to Callen.
“We actually fetch about four thousand people in
Movement. We had to turn down about a thousand five,” he says of Paul van Dyk’s
Malaysian date. “We closed door like three, four times just to control the
crowd.”
With Movement’s huge capacity and clubbers fighting their
way in to the club, the influx of foreign DJs to Malaysian clubs soon began in
earnest. In demand DJs like Deep Dish, Armand Van Helden and Dave Seaman made
stops at the club and were greeted by mobs of adoring fans. Callen maintains
that these foreign talents were originally booked to lure clubbers out so that
local DJs could reach a bigger audience.
“All the international DJs were just supposed to be a bonus
to help the scene, to make people come out and then listen to the local jocks as
well… using that mat salleh guy to actually pull the crowd,” he says.
But the plan backfired. A common grouse among local jocks
these days is that clubbers will only pay to see big-name foreign DJs; locals be
damned. Nevertheless, Callen sticks to his story, even though he was
instrumental in opening the Pandora’s Box of imported talent in the first place.
“That was all a marketing tactic at first… but then come to
the next set of clubbers, where the cigarette boys came in, corporate
sponsorship and stuff like that, more and more internationals, that now all the
clubbers are being pampered,” he says. “They want to see mat salleh only,
no mat salleh no going, you know?”
A few days after a packed New Year’s Eve party with Danny
Rampling in 2001 the news spread that Movement was no longer; an electrical fire
had razed the building to the ground. Disbelieving acolytes who turned up the
next weekend were faced with what remained of the club: two of its walls had
caved in, the interior was gutted, and the ceiling was barely intact. Conspiracy
theories abounded; it was an insurance scam, or the work of local crime
syndicates.
“I was one of the first few eyes that actually saw it
(burning),” Callen says. “It’s an old building… I got a lot of theories (about
the fire’s cause), but frankly, I don’t want to talk about it.”
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