The beat goes on

He befriended Nirvana, discovered Ben Lee, but music guru Steve Pavlovic reckons his best ideas are yet to come

He befriended Nirvana, discovered Ben Lee, put Wolfmother and The Presets on our iPods - but music guru Steve Pavlovic reckons his best ideas are yet to come

No one knows what happened in the swirling dreamworld of Stephen Pavlovic’s mind. But overnight something in his 19-year-old subconscious clicked. When he woke at his Canberra home, he was overwhelmed by an urge to change his life. “It was so sudden,” he recalls. “It was like an epiphany.” Pavlovic didn’t hang about. That very day he stunned his boss by quitting his job as a ­recreational officer at the YMCA. Returning home, he told his bewildered girlfriend their three-year relationship was over. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Pavlovic admits. “I just knew there was more to life than this.” Two weeks later, he caught a lift to Sydney with a local band called The Plunderers. Striking up a rapport with the members, he talked his way into becoming their manager. Squashed in the van’s back seat as it thundered along the highway, Pavlovic had inadvertently broken into the music business.

This dramatic escape from the Canberra suburbs reveals the characteristics that have propelled Pavlovic’s career – a startling willingness to trust his instincts, bold opportunism and oodles of quiet charisma. It’s a volatile package that’s thrust him to triumph and disaster, and back again. Twenty-three years on, Pavlovic (or Pav as he’s generally known) is one of the most influential players in Australian music. His label, Modular, balances underground credibility with commercial success, and has evolved into a global business with offices in Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London (Tokyo is next on his list).

Veteran promoter Michael Coppel knows all the machinations of the music business, having toured everyone from AC/DC to U2. “Pav has probably got the best set of ears of anyone in the Australian music industry,” he says. “In terms of the acts he’s signed and broken, his track record is pretty much unparalleled. I don’t think anyone has been able to replicate that degree of success.”

Today, Pavlovic is sipping green tea in the winter sun outside a Japanese restaurant in Sydney’s Surry Hills. Dressed in a leather jacket, white Nikes and a T-shirt bearing the words “Danger and Ecstasy”, the 42-year-old looks to have made it through two decades of rock’n’roll remarkably unscathed. Between mouthfuls of kingfish sashimi, he rattles off anecdotes in a soft but insistent voice. The moral of each story is invariably upbeat. Pavlovic is someone whose glass isn’t just half-full, it’s positively overflowing and the contents seem to consist of freshly squeezed sunshine.

This perkiness isn’t altogether unreasonable. While the record industry implodes in the face of downloads and nosediving sales, Pavlovic is walking around with a big grin on his face. Despite being wincingly hip, Modular has built a mass following, notching up six platinum and multi-platinum albums in the past 10 years. Its appeal isn’t ­confined to Australia either. Last year Wolfmother won a Grammy and London’s NME magazine voted Modular “the coolest label in the world”. The Guardian has already pronounced Cut Copy’s new CD one of the albums of 2008. Meanwhile, Modular continues to win dancefloor converts by hosting notoriously messy parties everywhere from Moscow to Milan. “People ring us from obscure countries saying, ‘Will you come and do a party?’ ” Pavlovic says. “And we’re like, ‘Okay, why not?’ ”

“Why not?” is Pavlovic’s unofficial credo – the words repeatedly escape his lips. They reflect the give-it-a-go mentality that’s created so many opportunities, including the pivotal episode he cites as the “total launch-pad” for his career. After settling in Sydney, Pavlovic was quickly sucked into the alternative music scene. He started managing bands and booking acts for indie venues the Palace and the Lansdowne. In 1990, a friend suggested he try to arrange an Australian tour with Mudhoney, the big guns of the nascent grunge scene. Pavlovic leapt at the prospect, unfazed by the fact he had no idea what touring an international band might actually entail. “I was pretty naive,” he admits. “I just kind of winged it.”

The tour sailed close to catastrophe. In Melbourne, Pavlovic had booked everyone into a cheap motel in St Kilda. Overnight the entire tour takings – some $12,000 – were stolen from Pavlovic’s room as he slept. “I just remember this wave of dread and fear,” he says. “I had to tell all these people I barely knew that their money was gone.” Luckily, the rookie promoter’s camaraderie with the band saved the day as Mudhoney agreed to play extra dates to recoup the cash. “It all worked out,” Pavlovic says. “Mudhoney had such a good time that they went back to Seattle and told their friends, ‘Hey, we just went to Australia, it was amazing. You should call this guy, Pav.’ Their friends at the time happened to be Nirvana.”

When Pavlovic booked Nirvana’s Australian tour, Kurt Cobain’s band was still largely off the radar. Then they released their second album, Nevermind. Spearheaded by the grunge anthem, Smells Like Teen Spirit, the album zoomed to number one on the US charts. Suddenly Pavlovic was touring the hottest band on the planet. He’d originally booked them to play 600-seat venues but plans were quickly upscaled. “I still remember standing on stage at the Hordern Pavilion with Nirvana playing in front of 10,000 kids when the room should only take 6000 and the roof almost being lifted off by the screaming,” Pavlovic says.

During the tour, Pavlovic kindled a close friendship with the band’s troubled singer, Cobain. Less than two years before he committed suicide, the Nirvana frontman wrote a list of the “really important things that I’ve been blessed with” on the liner notes to the album Incesticide. Cobain reflected on the wonders of fatherhood, meeting his idol Iggy Pop and acquiring a signed first edition of Naked Lunch. Included on the list was “making a friend like Stephen Pavlovic”.

The Nirvana tour established Pavlovic as a young promoter with an instinctive handle on the zeitgeist. But it also reflected a cultural shift in the music business. The alternative scene, previously consigned to specialist record shops and fanzines, was now encroaching on the mainstream. While other promoters were scrambling to get their heads around this new world order, Pavlovic was fully attuned. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he says. “I was bringing out bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day, who started having huge mainstream hits while the world of the Jimmy Barneses and Midnight Oils was going down the other side of the hill. It was just this real changing of the guard and Nirvana put a sledgehammer through the door and broke it way open.”

As his touring business gathered momentum, Pavlovic began to diversify. He set up Fellaheen, an independent record label, with business partner Steve Stavrakis. One of their earliest signings was a 15-year-old Ben Lee, who the pair saw playing his first gig at a sausage sizzle outside Waverley Library in Sydney. “Pav came straight up after and said, ‘You guys were great. Do you want to support Sonic Youth?’ ” Lee told JMag.

Randomly, Pavlovic also became involved in fashion retail. He picked up the Australian franchise for X-Large, the cult label that was the brainchild of Mike D from Beastie Boys. Pavlovic explains: “I did a tour with them, we had a great time, and suddenly they were like, ‘Dude, you should do our clothing label out here and open a shop.’ And I was like, ‘Good idea, why not?’ At no point did I think, ‘But I’ve never had a shop before – what’s involved with that?’ It just seemed like we were on this roll and it was natural to participate in the things that interested us – the music, the fashion, the parties. These were just different elements of the lifestyle that we were living.

“I was having the greatest time – in my mid-20s, essentially single, running around the world, going to great shows and hanging out with amazing people. There was nothing that wasn’t do-able. I didn’t feel bullet-proof or that I was better or smarter or anything else. It was more like I had this ravenous hunger – I wanted to do things. And now I suddenly had all these opportunities.”

Pavlovic’s enthusiasm may have fired these projects to life, but sustaining multiple ventures beyond the initial flush of excitement was another story. Projects didn’t always get the attention they required. The X-Large shop in Surry Hills only lasted three years. Pavlovic also walked away from Fellaheen Records, believing the label couldn’t muster the necessary infrastructure to match his goals. Instead, buoyed by his success in touring, he decided to take on the Big Day Out.

Ever since bringing Nirvana on to the bill of the first Big Day Out, Pavlovic had bolstered the festival’s line-up with international headliners such as Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. But despite attracting these crowd-pulling names, he didn’t feel he was getting the financial recognition he deserved. Pavlovic took his grievance to the festival’s promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees. “They were like, ‘But we’re the Big Day Out.’ So I said, ‘Okay, f..k you, I’ll do my own show.’ ”

In 1996, Pavlovic assembled a rival festival, Summersault, to tour several weeks before the Big Day Out. The competition between the two festivals turned ugly. “People’s egos were involved,” Pavlovic says. As the two went head-to-head over ticket sales, allegations of dirty tricks were rife and relationships deteriorated to the point that West threw a drink over Pavlovic in a Sydney bar.
Summersault had a stellar international line-up including the Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, Beck and Sonic Youth. But it failed to pull sufficient numbers as the public stuck with the Big Day Out. Forced into voluntary administration, Pavlovic was reduced to working out of his lounge room. “The reason we ended up in that situation probably was within our control,” he reflects. “And it probably came from being naive and not planning properly, and from having had a dream six years where everything just worked.”

Nor was this Pavlovic’s only big fall. Three years later, he again lost heavily on the Glenworth Valley Weekender that, according to some reports, pushed his touring company into receivership. (Pavlovic claims to be “foggy” on the precise details.) “The hardest thing is, once you’ve had a serious kicking there are suddenly question marks over your integrity,” he says quietly. “That hurts. Especially when your integrity is your currency. But it’s not until you’re actually down that you start to really appreciate what you’ve got.”

He appears undaunted though. A couple of months ago ASIC requested Modular’s financial reports, which show receipts from customers total more than $8 million while payments to suppliers and employees are nearly $8.7 million. “Swings and roundabouts,” declared Pavlovic at the time. “You’ll see (Modular) start to rise now, as the records we’ve got start to sell.”
The extent to which previous financial mishaps stemmed from bad luck or bad judgment is open to question. But Pavlovic has learnt to temper the more impulsive side of his character. He admits to going “totally off the rails” as a youth. At 14, he and a mate ran away from home, driving to Brisbane via Sydney before the law caught up with them. Glints of that larrikin streak still appear. Julian Hamilton from The Presets recalls meeting his label boss in 2004. “He was the wildest out of all of us and he could always be found pouring drinks over some poor band or punter,” Hamilton says. “But that was a long while ago. He has really chilled out these days.”

Fatherhood may have contributed to the process. Pavlovic’s partner, Croatian model Tanja G, gave birth to their daughter, Coco Valentine, last year. These days Pavlovic insists he lives a relatively wholesome life in Bondi, where he practises Buddhist meditation every day. “Then there are times when I’m a hedonistic, satan-worshipping mongrel,” he concedes. “And that’s okay too.”

If the first phase of Pavlovic’s career was powered by a mad lust for life, phase two was a lot more strategic. Effectively starting from scratch after financial maulings, he proceeded with considered restraint. He now had a plan. Having already run a record label, dabbled in the fashion industry and organised dozens of tours, Pavlovic set out to lasso those elements into a single lifestyle brand. “Hence the name Modular – like modular furniture that has different sections and can fit together in all sorts of ways,” he explains. “I started with the record label.”

This time, Pavlovic was keen to harness the financial muscle of a major label. In 1998, Modular was launched as an offshoot of EMI (it’s now half-owned by Universal, which has a role in the record label side of business only), with the aim of building a solid Australian roster and giving the parent label some much-needed credibility. Pavlovic had a dream start with early signings such as Ben Lee, Eskimo Joe and Jack Johnson. He also won a fierce bidding war to nab The Living End, despite arriving at the crunch meeting unaware he’d broken his shoulder while mountain biking. “I was in a lot of pain,” he says. “But whatever I said to them they must’ve gone for it.”

The Living End’s debut album shot straight to number one and went quintuple platinum. Since then, Modular’s more leftfield signings – The Avalanches, Wolfmother, Cut Copy, The Presets – have established the label internationally. But it’s Modular’s broader vision that has helped it stand out from the crowd. The record label is only one arm of a multi-headed entertainment company. Alongside the parties, last year Modular launched a festival, Nevereverland, run in tandem with a travelling film festival. Headlined by French dance pioneers Daft Punk, it sold 88,000 tickets with little advertising. “I’ve never seen anything like the level of demand,” says co-promoter Michael Coppel. Meanwhile Modular’s popular line of T-shirts is set to expand into a clothing label.

Probably the most lucrative component, however, is the in-house marketing company, Modular Ideas. This allows the label to take advantage of its most precious commodity – that rare mix of edge cache and mainstream reach. Modular Ideas generates revenue by enabling brands such as Heineken, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Wrangler to tap into this cool capital. Projects have included developing ads for BMW, overseeing launches for Hugo Boss and providing consultancy services for Puma and Virgin Mobile. Effectively, Modular is making money simply by marketing its artists and music through third-party channels.

These extra streams of income are vital at a time when downloads have eroded the value of recorded music. “Fundamentally it’s this,” Pavlovic says. “The record industry is dying.” His scattergun approach to business may not always have paid off but, as labels scrabble for fresh sources of revenue, his experience at juggling creative interests puts him ahead. “In the same way that it was exciting for me when Nirvana blew that old world apart, there’s a whole new model for the music business evolving. We’re in a great place to take advantage of that. Through chaos comes new potential.”

Pavlovic suggests this is just the first chapter of Modular’s evolution into a global entertainment company that will span music, fashion, art and film. It sounds insanely ambitious but fate may be on his side. In his 20s, Pavlovic visited an astrologer, who told him: “Whatever you’re doing in your professional life, it’s going to reach its pinnacle when you’re 54 and you’ll have a breakthrough moment that is the biggest highlight of your life.”

“At the time I was like, ‘You’re kidding me! I’ve got to wait 30 more years! This is bullshit!’ But here I am at 42 and suddenly it doesn’t seem that far away. If things continue to evolve like they are now, in 12 years Modular could be in a pretty exciting place.” To coax the prophecy along, Pavlovic is moving to London to oversee Modular’s development. The indie entrepreneur has set his sights on world domination. And even if you’re unconvinced by the wisdom of soothsayers, you might find yourself wondering, “Why not?”