April 13, 2009
the monday interview with Lincoln Cheng
Hip night owl
Lincoln Cheng's eagle eye and business smarts led to Zouk becoming a renowned nightspot
By john lui
The nightclub Zouk is celebrating its 18th birthday this Saturday, and like a rambunctious teenager that has just hit legal drinking age, it has had its ups and downs.
It has weathered a drugs raid, upheavals in ownership and a few failed side ventures.
But along the way, it has also seen itself grow from just another disco into a landmark on both the physical and cultural landscapes of Singapore.
The office walls are covered in awards from the Singapore Tourism Board, and in the eyes of younger travellers, Zouk is as much an attraction as Boat Quay or Little India.
Its last ZoukOut party in December drew more than 26,000 people, its highest attendance ever. On Fridays and Saturdays, over 8,000 throng the 20,000 sq ft complex in Jiak Kim Street. There is also a Zouk club in Kuala Lumpur, which opened five years ago.
Credit for much of the club's success goes to the smarts and passion of its owner, Mr Lincoln Cheng, 61, the Hong Kong emigre who, with his former business partners, put $10 million into turning a conserved Singapore River warehouse into Singapore's longest-lived and most internationally renowned nightspot.
He remembers how in the early days, taxi-drivers used to take his patrons up to Mandai, thinking they had asked to go to the zoo.
'Now it's the other way around,' he says, smiling. He is the majority owner of the venture, with a small percentage held by a partner who prefers to remain anonymous.
The recent grandfather - his elder son from a previous marriage has a 10- month-old boy - looks rested and characteristically dapper at the interview with Life!.
He is dressed in a chocolate brown Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt and his black trousers and slip-on shoes are by Louis Vuitton.
This celebrated member of the Singapore establishment says his proudest moment came when he was named Tourism Entrepreneur of the Year 2004 by the Singapore Tourism Board.
That award was sweet because it was a sign that nightclubs were no longer just officially tolerated, but embraced.
'In most countries, clubbing is a sin, a vice,' he says, his gentle, relaxed speech sounding mostly British with a slight trace of a Cantonese accent. 'The award was a sign that clubbing is accepted by the Government.'
Of course, a lot of the acceptance from officialdom has as much to do with his commercial success as it does with the recent official push to shed Singapore of its stuffy image, say industry insiders.
Many attribute the success of Zouk to Mr Cheng's unerring good taste. They say he blended house music and brand- name DJs with frequent building renovations, modern art on the walls and a hip conservation site to create a temple of chic.
His secret weapons are an unyielding personal attention to detail and a small group of long-serving, fanatically loyal and scarily competent managers.
He has passed edicts on the direction toilet paper should hang down from the roll. Over the top, not from underneath, so it does not touch the wall and possibly pick up germs. Wobbly tables must be fixed at once. Typos in advertising materials are a no-no.
Very little escapes his notice, he admits.
Zouk general manager Esther Soh, 54, vouches for her boss' eagle eye and recalls the time he noticed that one plasma screen in a bank of 10 bolted to the club's video wall was slightly dimmer than the rest.
'He sees the fine details,' she says. She has worked for Mr Cheng for more than 20 years, first in his business furniture enterprise and then Zouk, and is a member of a crack team that is the envy of the industry.
Many talk about fostering loyalty but Mr Cheng puts his money where his mouth is.
In March 1995, officers from the Central Narcotics Bureau arrested 32 people, including senior managers, staff and patrons, after a bust.
Its licence was restricted and the club had to close at 10pm. Mr Cheng was arrested and subsequently fined $20,000 for possession of sleeping pills.
During that time, no one was laid off and no one had to take a pay cut.
Mr Andrew Ing, 41, former marketing manager with Zouk and now chief operating officer with club operator St James Holdings, says his former boss used the time to refine operations in readiness for the re-opening.
'He was happy that everyone was loyal and no one jumped ship,' he says of the low point in the company's history.
Mr Cheng says: 'I treasure all my managers, supervisors and staff so much that I kept all of them on full pay during this period. In return, they really appreciated it and most of them stayed on to work, up till today.'
His business smarts was honed on several ventures in Singapore where he has been a citizen since 1986 and in his birthplace, Hong Kong.
He was born in 1947, shortly after the end of the World War II, to a family whose history was closely tied to that of China's.
T.T. Cheng, his grandfather, was a friend and supporter of China nationalist Sun Yat Sen. He later became finance minister in the short-lived Nationalist government that held power on mainland China following the defeat of the Japanese in 1945. His signature was, for that short time, on the banknotes, notes his grandson.
While running for the post of governor of Guangdong, however, the patriarch was assassinated by a political rival.
His son Cheng Yum Yue, the clubowner's father, was the head of the Bank Of China in Hong Kong at the time. Following the withdrawal of the Nationalist forces to Taiwan, the bank split into Nationalist and Communist operations. He was forced to choose sides and was asked to choose between Taiwan or Shanghai.
But he decided to keep his family in the British colony. So he left banking altogether and started a property and construction business, which flourished.
Mr Cheng says he and his elder sister Amelia had 'sheltered' childhoods.
In 1962, when he was 14, his father sent him to Concord, New Hampshire to study at St. Paul's, a preparatory institution that has schooled sons from America's oldest and most illustrious families. Among its alumni are banker J.P. Morgan Jr., Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, author Rick Moody and Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, known for his Doonesbury comic strip.
The teenage Cheng was the only Asian in the prestigious school and got into a few racially motivated fist-fights, but these trailed off quickly once he showed he could stand up for himself, he says.
It was there that he discovered his talent for painting, with his style influenced by the likes of abstract icons such as Frank Stella and Jackson Pollock.
He would go on to win several art prizes, sometimes going head-to-head with the other bright young artist on campus, Trudeau. He was offered a place at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design just before he graduated from St. Paul's.
'My father said 'no' because artists starve,' he says.
Instead, he went on to study architecture at Cornell University. Architecture was close enough to art and his skills would be of use in the family business.
At that time, the counter-cultural movement was in full flower in the United States and Mr Cheng was at the famous concert in Woodstock in 1969. That, and the whole Summer of Love idea, 'opened my mind to other possibilities, and how strong the youth movement could be'.
He went on to pursue a master's degree in Business Administration from the Chicago School of Business after his undergraduate degree in architecture, returning to Hong Kong in 1972.
But he was restless and knew working in the shadow of his father would not keep him happy for long. Between 1972 and 1982, he launched a string of enterprises related to the family business of property and construction, but for products that were new to the region.
For example, he started a company that specialised in then-cutting edge construction of buildings with structural steel. He also branched into lifestyle products such as luxury yachts. He had a company supplying high-end cutlery and glassware to major hotels in Hong Kong.
It was to set a pattern that would lead to Zouk.
He would first get into a line only if it interested him personally. The consumers for the product would not yet exist, but he believed it would only be a matter of time. And once too many low-end copycats entered the picture, he got out.
For example, since the 1970s, he has been collecting Chinese paintings and believes he has amassed one of the largest collections in Singapore. He also has works by the late Keith Haring and Haruki Murakami and some of these hang in Zouk. But he stopped collecting when the entry of new buyers pushed prices skywards.
It was former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, or rather, her actions, that brought Mr Cheng to Singapore.
In 1982, the handover of the colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was confirmed and he felt it was time to think about living elsewhere.
By 1984, he had settled here, on the back of his steel-based construction company and then, correctly sensing that the building boom would end, caught another wave: system furniture, which are the modular tables, partitions and other standardised fittings common in offices today.
The company, BusinessWorld, became the largest company of its kind in Singapore. The carpet tiles in Changi Airport Terminal 1 and 2, for example, once came from Mr Cheng's warehouses.
Sensing that Singaporeans were ready for collectible furniture from modern designers, he launched Abraxas Designs in 1986 to sell high-end brands such as Alessi and Artemide.
He later sold both businesses, in line with his philosophy of getting out when the playing field got crowded.
The world traveller had by then amassed a large collection of records, but it was the dance tracks that aroused the interest of friends at house parties. It was the music of the club scene of Ibiza in particular that got the attention.
The Spanish beach resort city had by the 1980s become a focal point for new, experimental kinds of electronic dance music such as house, techno and trance.
Mr Cheng would host parties at nightclubs and play his music with the help of local DJs and he sensed from the crowd reaction he was on to something. In 1991, Zouk, named after a kind of Caribbean music, opened.
From the outset, he knew that size was crucial in order to offer a variety of rooms playing different music, similar to the large clubs he had seen in Ibiza.
The first three years were loss-making, he says, but he stayed the course. He bought out the business partners who had lost faith in his vision, putting in karaoke rooms in a bid to boost takings. He tore down the karaoke rooms the day after he won ownership, he says.
Since then, it has become Singapore's most successful dance club.
Now married to former employee and current Zouk director Adeline Cheng, 38, he is the happy father of Isabel, five. They live at The Boulevard Residences at Cuscaden Walk.
He has two sons, Julian, 36, and Simon, 31, from a previous marriage.
His father died in 1983 but his mother, Mrs Amy Cheng, is a hale and hearty nonagenarian who lives in Singapore. Sister Amelia, 64, a housewife, lives in Singapore with her own family.
Being a dad again at his age is not a problem, he says.
'I was overjoyed at being a father. I have always wanted a daughter.'
Those in the nightclub business keep odd hours, but Mr Cheng's hours must be odder than most. After spending much of the night at Zouk, he goes to bed in the morning, rises in the mid-afternoon to check his e-mail and spend time with his daughter. He then naps well into the night until it is time to head to the club.
For now, he has no plans to stop working, though he says he has over the years left more of the day-to-day tasks to the management team.
He says: 'I hope my younger son and my wife will be able to take over the reins, but I will not force them. My wife is already very involved and with the rest of the highly competent team there, Zouk can run by itself, even today.
'When I retire, and I have no intention to do so yet, I guess I'll stay in the background as a mentor to make major decisions with the team together.'
For now, there are no plans to move the club out of Jiak Kim Street or to open a Zouk hotel on the premises, as has been rumoured.
'We have been here 18 years. The fengshui must be good. Something must be working right,' he says with a chuckle.
my life so far
'The feeling - to be at the birth of the music - was elating and satisfying. I could never have thought that American and European dance music could merge so seamlessly'
On being in the clubbing capital of Ibiza in the 1980s, when a new type of dance music and dance culture was being born
'My energy level is lower. So it's good to have a daughter. Girls are more sedate'
On being a father again. He is pictured above with his wife, Adeline, and daughter Isabel, in Venice last year
'Zouk was a strange creature from outer space. It took a lot of people by surprise'
On the reactions to the club when it opened
'My theory in business is to look ahead all the time, not backwards. Find something new that the market will be excited about'
On why he can quickly sever ties with former enterprises and move on
'I am a vinyl junkie... and I knew with my records and music, I was building a customer base. After half a year of hosting parties, I knew it could work'
On why he plunged into opening a superclub in 1990
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