A new FLAME burns after three decades

Founded in 1989 by just three young men performing folk and country music, and having grown to be favourites in the Sri Lankan entertainment industry in the three decades since, FLAME has come a long way since its beginnings. Chris De Alwis, current leader of the band, speaks about the secret behind their success in sustaining a 30-year career in the music industry. Following are excerpts:

By Ruwandi Gamage

Q: FLAME is 30 years old. What has changed, from then to now?

A: The founding members of the band were all Marianne singers, and that’s where the inspiration to start the band materialised. The founders started it off purely for folk music, which was only a niche market at the time. If you go back to the roots, the origins were with Naushard, who is still a member of the band. Today, after 30 years, the band performs only Western music, catering mainly to the Colombo circuit. We are a Western cover band, performing only cover versions of Western songs. If we ever perform a segment of baila, it is purely for entertainment purposes. 

Within the band, we have individual musicians who have pursued their own careers with their original songs. One thing that has been constant over the past 30 years has been everyone’s passion about what they want to do in the band. Though we perform commercial music, our passion has not been hindered, and we’ve been lucky enough to maintain that over the years. 

We started off with three guys – today we are a seven-piece band, and we’ve been through 35 members over 30 years. So the unique thing about the band is having sustained it through all these changes. There are many other bands who have done these kind of gigs, but we are probably the first band to hit 30 years. For us, these 30 years have been colourful, with many musicians of many different backgrounds, bringing in their tastes and their colour of music and leaving their influence. Today, the band is an enriched set-up with 7 members who carry forward the influences from the past.

Today, FLAME has branched out into other areas such as dances, weddings, and concerts, and changed our portfolio from a single genre (folk) to a multi-genre portfolio. We were never a dance band, and we believe we deserve a good pat on the back for our efforts so far in these 30 years in the industry.

Q: What is FLAME’s secret to sustaining itself in the industry for this long?

A: Naushad is the glue that holds the band together. He believes in a certain set of principles and values, which we all abide by, resulting in us creating a very strong culture within the band. Therefore, anybody who walks in and out of the band has to fit in to our culture. This culture is mainly built to fight the social stigma about bands and their members, such as the assumptions that band members abuse substances and are covered in tattoos. We always fought to maintain discipline in the band. Nobody consumes substances during performances. There’s so much discipline in the Flame bandstand: everybody values humility, there’s acceptance, there’s diversity with multicultural and multi-religious representation, and diversity among members with academic and non-academic music backgrounds. 

We have embraced the fact that the industry is evolving, and collaboration is part of the evolution. This has resulted in our style of member recruitment changing. In the past, the number one factor we considered was whether a particular person fits in well with the culture of our band. Skill came second because skill can be enhanced while on the job as a member of the band. However at present, once we recruit someone to the band, we give them a two-year grace period to fit into the culture. Skill is the first thing we look for now, because the culture is strong and set in the band. This is another change that has happened in the 30 year history of our band. 

If we take the members in the band now, everyone has been in the band for an average of at least 18 years. So our leader has managed to retain the members. Replacing of skill and talent works just like in the corporate world - it can be done, but in a band it impacts the sound, the genre of music we play, and the discipline on stage. So, retaining the members is a very important part in the survival of a successful band. There’s a lot of science, organisation, and business strategy that has helped us survive for 30 years in this industry, it was never an accident. We as a band are well aware of our past, and our future is sculpted to match the future environment. 

Q: What does it mean to run a band as a business entity?

A: In the beginning, we had day jobs, and the band was only a means of added revenue for our members. One day, we sat down and discussed the many ways we could bring in revenue as a band, and also ways in which we could forego our comfort zones as a folk band and build on the business, by recruiting new talent and growing from a three-piece band to what it is today. 

We perform folk segments at selected venues, such as pubs, cocktail events, corporate events, and also at weddings. We perform at weddings in abundance, and it has helped us create a position for the brand, and also our main source of income. During the months of February and November, we have planned tours to Australia, and concerts around the country. 

We have also discussed and decided on the pros and the cons of each portfolio, be it cashflow or stars, and have embraced the fact that all segments will not bring about complete success and satisfaction. There’s segments that bring in volume, and there’s others that bring in value. Therefore, our band has very strategically segmented our revenue streams, and today we can confidently sustain the band and the livelihood of our members successfully. 

There is seasonal business and there is constant business, so there are peak and off-peak seasons within a year, according to which we plan the portfolio. In the month of February, we plan a tour to Australia, because we don’t have much cashflow coming in from major revenue segments. In November, because of the lack of weddings, we plan our concerts. We also get invites for annual dinner dances of organisations and schools in November, and this helps add to our income for the month. December is a special month, since we have more gigs than days in that month. We get at least 33 gigs, and also a 31st night gig. The income that comes in on December alone is enough to sustain us for three months. 

As a band, today we are financially stable, and it took us 30 years to get to this point. Starting off with dual-career members who invested to achieve this position, now it is not a struggle to retain our members, because of the income and revenue the band makes.

Q: FLAME does tours - tell me more about that?

A: We started touring very late in our careers, because performing English cover songs restricted the opportunities to go out. We started touring around the late 2000s, and up to now we have done about 30 tours abroad, and we’ve covered about 30 countries in total. What we mean when we say we tour, it is that we’re performing for Sri Lankan communities living in other countries. It is never that we are going to play for international audiences. The only time we did that was in India, where we played for a German audience in a concert sponsored by Lufthansa Airlines. They loved the type of music we did, and we were really lucky to have been selected by Lufthansa Airlines for that show. The one yearly tour that we do is in Australia, where we entertain a bunch of colourful people, the Dutch Burger community now resident in that country. They bring us and other bands down to have a taste of the life they had in the past, and the audience in Australia really appreciates us for the music we do.

Q: You recently wrapped up the concert ‘Beatles and Eagles’. How was the reception for that?

A: Concerts are our new segment, and the one we did recently was a tribute to the Beatles and the Eagles, which was the sixth in the series of concerts we’ve done, and the most successful up to date. In the concerts we staged in the past, we used to say, “This is FLAME: A JOURNEY”, we had a sub-brand called Journey because we were taking them through the journey of music. 

At the Beatles and Eagles concert, we received really good feedback, and for the first time in our 30 year history we got a standing ovation, which made us believe we’ve done something right. 

We all picked songs each of us loved doing. There was 13 people on the stage, so we collaborated with other musicians at this concert, delivering a theme and a concept of music, as the brand FLAME has become renowned for doing over the years. We had a full house. The audience knew what they had come for, and we were allowed to express ourselves the way we wanted to, because they all loved it, from the start until the end.

Q: What is your opinion as an entertainer about the past, present and the future of the cover band industry in Sri Lanka? 

A: We have to hold on to our past, live in the present, and plan for the future, which is something every business does. But unlike in a corporate, we cannot take a picture of our past and paste it on a wall, because the past enriches the quality of the present output. That manifested in the concept we executed last week, because that was a blast from the past. The Eagles and the Beatles are something from the past, and if you look at what the band is doing today, it has nothing to do with the Eagles and the Beatles. But because we have that in our DNA, we embrace the past. We can always get together and do a concert like that and see it through. If you look at the cover band industry in the past, you have before and after 1983, and before and after 2010. Before 1983, this industry was booming, and there were great bands that were well appreciated at the time. We lost that era with the Burgher community moving out. After that was the war period, which was bad for the industry because nobody used to go out. It is only now, after the liberation, that there is a change in the industry, because there is a change in the lifestyle of the people. We feel as entertainers, that there is a difference in the way Sri Lankans behave post-war. Their habits have changed: nobody stays in on a weekend anymore, and they’re looking for entertainment. Also, with tourism being a focal point for development, we see a lot of hotel chains coming in, and with these landscape changes that are coming up in Colombo and its suburbs, we see a demand for good quality music. 

Q:How do you compete with the changing industry? Do you have competition?

A: The modern generation of musicians, there are more technically sound than the old generation of musicians, in the sense that they’re educated, they have more opportunity, and more access to technology to do their research. However, I believe we don’t have competition anymore, and our advantage is we have been here for a while, and our brand equity is high, so today we are not pressured to bring down our prices. We have the capability to change up our mix between folk and contemporary. In our HR policy, we always look at the talent pipeline for the next 5 years, and we see that our competition is not going to be the guys performing 80s folk music, but the guys that are coming in with the change in the economy. If we all don’t adapt now and change, I think we are all going to die a natural death. Now we are discussing ideas like including rappers in our band, and a folk band considering rapping is a vast change, but it’s relevant. I hope you won’t be surprised to hear FLAME performing a rap song one day. 

So to answer your question, we are adapting in tackling our competition, and we update our music vocabulary and library to keep up-to-date with the industry, and that happens constantly. You know, there’s no need to compete - there’s actually enough business. We’re not trying to compete with another band, our journey is to make sure we are okay. Not that we don’t have competition, but even if we do, it doesn’t matter. This is our journey, we have had to work hard to achieve what we are and what we are going to do in the future. Lots of people, and lots of bands, lose it by trying to compete. The industry has received a fresh, new lifecycle, which has just started, so we have enough and more things to worry about other than what other bands are doing now. Because copying them is only going to result in us doing 80s again, and that’s not where the industry is going to go. 

Q: What have you planned for the future?

A: Concerts. The next one that we’re thinking of staging is ‘BEE GEES: A One Night Stand with FLAME’. We haven’t yet conceptualised how we’re going to market it, but it will be a tribute to the Bee Gees. We’re also thinking about a Captain Knopfler and Santana tribute on another angle. Also, we want to reposition the band away from the 80s, and we are hoping to bring in a Coldplay or a Maroon 5 tribute as well. And since we got a standing ovation at the last concert - which means a lot to us being a local band, because it’s not a regular thing that happens – we want to learn from that and have our future series of concerts always revolve around a theme. We will tell our audience exactly what’s on the menu, so they know what they’re coming in for.

Pix by Daminda Harsha Perera