Going global is the watchword on everyone’s lips at the moment as we grapple with one of our worst national crises in history. Amidst such times, we look to those Sri Lankans who have successfully managed to make that shift from local to global.
One such Sri Lankan who has managed to make that shift and then some is Sri Lankan-Australian singer Alston Koch, who, a couple of years ago, passed the milestone of 50 years in international music. This week, The Sunday Morning Brunch sat down with this legend for a chat on how he made his name, what it takes for local musicians to make a mark internationally, and his passions beyond music.
Alston wears many hats – singer, songwriter, composer, entrepreneur, film producer, and actor are just a few. Many will remember his turn as the complex Father Matthew Peiris in the 2018 film ‘According to Matthew’ which painted a picture of the prolific murder case from the point of view of one of its main perpetrators.
A man of many talents
Alston’s formal career in music began when he moved to Australia in the 1970s, and in the intervening years, he has become an international platinum and gold award-winning singer and songwriter.
He has received many monikers in the media throughout his career, including Australasia’s King of Disco, the Grand Pa of Trance, Asia’s King of Pop, and Asia’s Elvis. He was also the recipient of the 2018 Ada Derana Sri Lankan of the Year Award for his work as a global entertainer and for bringing glory to Sri Lanka.
His first self-written major hit, ‘Disco Lady’ in 1979, earned him his first gold record. The song also won him and Dark Tan the Best New Talent at the 1979 International Disc Jockey Association Awards. This was the first of many awards and accolades over the years, including being inducted into the Hard Rock Hotel’s Hall of Fame in 2010.
As a film producer, Alston’s credits include being Executive Producer for ‘Impact Earth,’ a Hollywood movie released worldwide in 2015 for Alta Vista Entertainment and an Associate Producer on the film ‘The Road from Elephant Pass’.
Since 2007, he has been the Ambassador for Tourism for Sri Lanka and is also an avid campaigner on the impacts of climate change, having championed the cause since 1990. In 2008, he wrote a song about climate change for a United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) presentation in London.
Additionally, Alston has received many honours; he is an Ambassador for Climate Change (ICTP), the Family Film Awards (US) for Australia, and the Arts For Peace Foundation (US), as well as a member of many esteemed global collectives including the Grammy Academy (US), the Australian Performing Right Association (APRA), the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA), and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS).
He is also a recipient of the State of California Senate’s Certificate of Recognition and Certificate of Special US Congressional Recognition for improving the lives of the communities in America.
The man behind the legend
Speaking to Brunch, Alston explained how he first got involved, sharing that music and entertainment “enthralled him from a young age”. He started singing during his school days, but looking back, Alston said that this was in no way singing in a professional capacity. His move to Australia in 1970 was what precipitated him to approach singing and entertaining professionally.
Musically, the shift to Australia was a big one, Alston explained: “My musical experience in Sri Lanka didn’t qualify me for what I was going to experience in Australia. Over here, their focus is very much on original music, whereas in Sri Lanka, I was asked to copy most of the Western musicians like Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and so on. If you’re going to succeed in Australia, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, those covers will not qualify you; your original music will.”
Even locally, within Sri Lanka, Alston noted that it was original music that allowed the big entertainers to connect with their audiences and form large followings – Sunil Perera of the Gypsies, H.R. Jothipala, and C.T. Fernando were clear examples of singers and composers that illustrated this.
Their popularity was because they were identified with the original music they created, something that cannot happen if you’re reproducing songs by other artists like Elvis or Tom Jones, because the songs you’re producing are already identified with that singer and not yourself. Alston stressed that was especially true if you were trying to make it in Western music.
“Original music is a very difficult genre to get into,” Alston shared. “I was compelled to write my own music, and interestingly, in the outside world (I’ve never sold a song in Sri Lanka, so I’m not sure how it works locally), the person that makes the most money is not the singer, but the songwriter – the writers get paid huge sums of money every time the song is played. You get paid by royalties, per play, and the singer doesn’t get paid anything except for a percentage of the sales of the song, which is when people buy CDs and vinyls, and now when they download and stream.”
Part of what defined Alston’s global success is that he never stopped with just making music in Australia. He focused on performing globally, from Singapore to Malaysia to Indonesia, and he found great success in these countries, which is what led to his moniker of Asia’s King of Pop.
“No one had ventured into recording English songs in Asia,” Alston explained. “Even in Sri Lanka at the time, original music was people singing Sinhala songs, and this was true in other countries as well; they were singing in their own languages. And so, me, an Asian, going there and singing English songs was a welcome change for them, and also gave me a much wider reach. A Malaysian singing in their local language can’t find success in India or vice versa, but English is a universal language and I was the first to come out of Asia with English songs other than the Western musicians from markets like the UK and the US who were globally popular.”
To date, Alston’s favourite music to compose and perform is the music he started out with in the 1970s – disco. His first big hit ‘Disco Lady’ is still popular to this day. Of course, his musical style has evolved over the years; he moved into soul, pop, and then edged along with funk, but to Alston, his lyrics and songwriting have always been his greatest strength.
With over 50 years of music under his belt, Brunch also asked Alston what one of his most memorable career moments was, to which he replied that he was once asked to perform with ABBA on their TV special during their first tour of Australia in 1977, when they were newly famous and on their way to becoming the unassailable pop phenomenon they are today.
Making a difference beyond music
One of Alston’s biggest journeys outside of music (which has, of course, overlapped with the power of music), is his campaign for global action against climate change, with him taking up the cause in 1990, long before it became recognised as a valid issue that needed resolving. So what sparked Alston in being so ahead of the curve to actively call for sustainable change?
Funnily enough, it was his Sri Lankan upbringing. “Having been born and growing up in Sri Lanka, we never had radio or TV as much as we would have wanted to. It was hard times, and as kids we only had the basics in life. A big thing as a little child was the amount of time we spent outdoors, climbing trees and being familiar with the many different trees like the num-num tree, eating the many varieties of mangoes, and playing with our friends,” Alston said.
On visiting Sri Lanka in 1990, Alston noticed a clear lack of biodiversity – the num-num trees, for example, were all but gone, the diversity of birds had decreased, the rusty-spotted cat was almost extinct, and he realised that all this was the knock-on effect of the clearing our forests.
“We’d been getting rid of our heritage and part of our enduring past, and that was what got me thinking. I also noticed that it just wasn’t as cool as it used to be. Colombo was so intensely hot, and it’s never been this hot,” Alston shared.
“Climate change wasn’t used as a word in the 90s like we use it today. It was a different world, but in my mind, I knew our environment and the changing climate and that’s what I was arguing about. One thing led to another and we went into the jungle and met the veddas and learned so many things, and even though I had come to Sri Lanka to perform at The Supper Club and do some other shows, my mind was completely elsewhere.”
Alston took his concerns to the then President of The Conservation Foundation in Great Britain, Prof. David Bellamy. “He thought I was a bit crazy, coming up with these ideas, but it was the start of a huge association with him and The Conservation Foundation,” Alston recalled, “and today, we know climate change is a reality.”
“The clearing of the forests has to stop,” Alston said, speaking of the most pressing actions needed to fight climate change. “The trees bring rain, but then again, the question of too much rain diversifies the argument. But the way we are going through heatwaves all over the world has to do with climate change and scientists have to come in and help.”
On the prognosis of winning the war against climate change, he stressed that optimism was essential, but that the gravity of the situation needed to be understood.
“If we don’t do something, we’re doomed. There’s no other option. We have to work together as scientists tell us, to make this world a liveable planet or we will be shooting ourselves in the foot. Every country in the world needs to be jumping up and doing something about it. We cannot take this chance and we cannot think ‘oh there’s always someone else to do it’. We have to do it because if not, we will feel the repercussions even within my lifetime.”
Alston and the future
Now in his 70s, Alston is far from slowing down, and right now, his thoughts are on Sri Lanka. “Right now, I’m trying to help my country,” Alston said. “It’s like climbing a huge mountain and I am coming up with something that could very probably make Sri Lanka an attraction to the world.”
Still in the early stages of figuring out this project, Alston said he was at present securing the funding to be able to implement it before taking it to the world.
Pioneering game-changing concepts is something that comes easy to Alston – in the late 1990s, amid a global recession, he was behind introducing cable TV to Sri Lanka in its first iteration and he has every hope of being able to pioneer a new project that can help Sri Lanka regain its strength and recover from its struggles.
“In my lifetime, I have done a few things before that have changed the outlook of Sri Lanka which most people don’t know about. It’s always been at my core and there’ll be more change coming. At the moment, I’m working on this little project, and hopefully, it will see the light of day before I myself lose my light of day on this planet.”
