Don't try this at home

IndoChine Group, an established Singapore based restaurant and bar company, is renowned for making a splash with its parties.

At its relatively new, four storey high bar and restaurant building on Phuket’s Kalim Beach on Saturday, 12 March IndoChine turned up the heat with the opening of its new Saint Tropez Beach Club, a rooftop bar set around a small swimming pool with spectacular views across Patong Bay.

Leading the party was IndoChine’s charismatic founder and CEO, Michael Ma and his sister, Executive Director Sue Ma. Since 1999 Michael Ma and his family have built IndoChine Group into a 15 venue, four country [ Singapore,  Phuket, Thailand, Jakarta, Indonesia and Hamburg, Germany ] arbiter of so-called fusion cuisine set around food from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

They are also famous for running a good party. The Saint Tropez event was a kaleidoscope of funky DJ sound, searchlights, exotic dancing and flashing lights that attracted the local glitterati.

The iconic, round, glass walled building also houses the Waterfront fine dining restaurant, Bar Opiume, a ground floor Deli Cafe and the IndoChine Surin Beach Club:Stereolab at nearby Surin Beach.

IndoChine Saint Tropez Club Brings Party Attitude To Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

A little bit naughty: The LED wall behind the bar in the Famous nightclub.

Sound came. And Sound went. And now it’s Famous. For those who find this statement a little mysterious, Sound was the ritzy nightclub that opened in Jungceylon in July last year with huge fanfare and a bevy of stars and starlets including songbird Tata Young, but closed rather quietly earlier this year.

Now the interior of the club has been stripped out – apart from the flying saucer deejay booth – and it’s been reborn as Famous. Small tables with stools have replaced the plush, sweeping booths, and the curvy ceiling has gone, leaving a fairly stark and functional venue. The bar, however, is a marvel – a 30-metre stretch backed by a wall of LEDs flashing patterns and sexy pictures. Apart from that the lighting is simple but effective, red and blue spots sweeping the floor and occasional bursts of strobe.

Sound levels are high enough for partying, yet still low enough for conversation, which is unusual in Phuket.

Of course, there had to be a big party to mark the occasion. So last night the Lambos, Ferraris and Porsches lined up outside the entrance, stiletto heels and cleavage were de rigeur for the girls while the gents wore… Ah, who cares what they were wearing.

The biggest change, however, is the upper floor, the Famous Beach Club, with its own deejay station looming over all, its long inviting pool with, at the far end, a large raised sala and, along one side, comfortable tents for lounging in.

Connecting the two is a staircase and the glass bottom of the pool, so that swimmers and paddlers are visible from the disco below. The effect is unusual.

Opinions were very positive, so maybe Famous will be more successful than its predecessor. Just to be sure, management has hired 60 hostesses to keep punters drinking and, we are told, is offering bounties to a further 200 pretty faces to decorate the place every night. Definitely an attraction.

We’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

Upstairs, the deejay booth in the Famous Beach Club looks across the pool.

Looking the other direction, toward the elevated sala with the Beach Club bar underneath it.

Girls in the pool...

...and what they looked like from below.

Who cares what the men were wearing?

The music in the club is loud, but not too loud for conversation.

Ground zero: A burst of strobe hits the dance floor.

Becoming Famous in Patong’s newest nightclub is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

The guy the girls all want to get close to: Wan Vorasit Issara of Sri Panwa.

A tough choice this weekend: a cool party on Cape Panwa on Saturday (June 5), or a cool party in Kalim, also on Saturday. Which to go to? What to wear? If I miss either one people will notice. Can I get to both?

Technically, yes, you could, though you would probably end up completely exhausted by the dash from one side of the island to the other. It’s make-your-mind-up time.

Choice A: At Sri Panwa, the uber-classy village and resort at the end up Cape Panwa, the opening of the new Cool Spa and Saturday night sessions at the Baba 88 lounge. Be there at 6pm for registration and cocktails followed by a spa show and lucky draws, then pile into Baba 88 for DJ music from 9pm till late, fronted by the interestingly named DJ Zit.

Most of the girls will be there to try to get close to Sri Panwa boss Wan Vorasit Issara, one of Thailand’s most eligible bachelors. He’s been featured in GM (Gentlemen’s) and Priew magazines and he was interviewed recently by TV chat host Woody Militachinda (with both sitting on chairs in the pool).

Wan’s a delightful fellow and really, really, knows how to organise a fun evening. Dress code: “Anything cool”. The spa thing is free to those in the know (which you now are) Just email to confirm you’re going. The Baba 88 part of the evening costs nothing to get in, but you pay for drinks. Beers and house cocktails are B200 a shot.

Nine looks nothing like the background in the pic. So will the girls at the event look like these?

Choice B: Nine, next to glitterati haven Lim’s on the hill overlooking Kalim Beach, is the soi-disant “Phuket’s most fabulous lounge and bar”. It does have the seal of approval from Condé Nast Traveler magazine, which included Nine in its 2009 Hot List.

Traveler described it thus: “Mimi, the owner’s mutt, mingles with Phuket’s coolest expats and in-the-know visitors who’ve outgrown the seaside sleaze.”So if you’re used to hanging out with dogs, or cool expats, or both, this is the place for you, especially on June 5 when it’s Plastic Dreams night.

The plastic dreams (Bakelite? PVC? Polystyrene? Tesco shopping bags?) start at 8pm. B1,000 gets you in, gets you finger food and gets you all-you-can-guzzle drinks. Dress code: how about “anything cool”? No need to book. Just turn up.

So which will it be?

Decisions, decisions… A tough night out in Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Boy George, photographed three years ago by Ariadne Barroso, in Brazil.

Heads up all you 40-somethings: androgynous Culture Club icon Boy George will be deejaying in Phuket on May 26, at Seduction disco, just off Soi Bangla.

The Boy – real name George Alan O’Dowd – has recently been making up for lost time following his release from prison in the UK on 11 May last year, after doing  four months of  a 15-month sentence for assault and false imprisonment.

After his release he was tagged with an ankle monitor  and placed on curfew for the remained 11 months of his sentence. Last month, as soon as the tag was off, so was he, on an exhausting world tour, deejaying in 27 countries in just over four months.

On May 23, he’ll do a gig at Lima Lima club in Pattaya, followed by Phuket and then a night at Bed Supper Club in Bangkok on the 27th.

Down in Bangla, with its myriad persons of indeterminate gender, he should be a big hit – one of his main claims to fame is his own dubious orientation, though it took him quite a while to admit he was gay. In one interview, with chat show host Russell Harty, he famously ducked the question, saying that he preferred “a nice cup of tea” to sex.

His recent spell behind bars was not his first brush with the law. He was arrested a couple of times in the UK on suspicion of  drugs possession in the 1980s, and spent five days doing community service in New York five years ago for falsely reporting a burglary.

Despite what he once referred to as his “dark periods”, he has been, and remains, a prolific artist.  Since Culture Cub disbanded in 1986, he has released eight studio albums, six deejay albums, four EPs and 56 singles. His most recent single, Amazing Grace, was released in March and he has another, The Pentonville Blues, due out any time.  He also wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the music for a stage musical, Taboo, which was performed in London and New York in 2002.

Oh yes, and he still found time to write two autobiographical books, Take It Like a Man and Straight, both best-sellers. And he has his own fashion label, B-Rude.

Next month is his 49th birthday, but there’s no sign he’s slowing down at all. The one night in Phuket will be a must-go. To get on the guest list go to the Seduction Facebook page or call +66 (0) 8 1188 1230. Boy George’s MySpace page is here.

Boy George heads for Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Plenty of smiles in Opiume.

Phuket’s beautiful people were out in force last night (May 5) for the unofficial pre-pre-soft opening of two floors of the restaurant and club section of the Indochine Resort & Villas, above Kalim Beach.

Singaporean group Indochine, which runs resorts, restaurants and clubs in Singapore, Indonesia, Germany, India and Malaysia, recently bought the majority share in what had, up to then, been the occasionally troubled Villa Santi Resort.

In addition to the 24 hotel rooms owned by the resort, Indochine will be able to let out many of the privately-owned villas and condos on the hillside behind.

But last night was not about accommodation. It was about celebration, fuelled by some free booze, always guaranteed to make an opening work. In this case, two floors of the four-floor main building were opened – the Deli Café on the ground floor and Club Opiume on the floor above.

Both are works in progress – flooring and ceilings are not yet complete, giving both venues the glamour of a very chic parking garage.

Not that anyone seemed to notice, especially in Club Opiume, where minds and legs were fully occupied with the music pumping out from the decks of the two deejays, model and fist pumper Nicole Chen and American legend in his own lunchtime Steve Aoki.

Laddawan Somniyam. EAM of Sales and Marketing, says there’s plenty more excitement to come, with deejays from around the world doing guest spots every two weeks, and locally-based deejays keeping the volume high in between.

Look out, too, for the opening parties for the other two floors – the Waterfront Restaurant on the 3rd floor and the Beach Club (no beach, but a swimming pool) on the 4th. Be there or be square.

For more on Indochine in Phuket, go here.

Indochine gives party people a taste of things to come is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Minimalist architecture and maximalist views: The pool at B-Lay Tong.

Over the past couple of years, Patong has been shifting gradually away from its image as the centre of down-and-dirty vacationing into something rather more chic. That’s not to say you can’t get down and very dirty if you want to – but there’s no longer the sense that that’s the only thing to do there and that, basically, if you go to Patong that’s what you have to do.

Just the place for a summit meeting - the dining table in the B-Lay Tong Presidential Suite

Now there is a rising number of chic places to go to. Places where you might have to think a bit further than flipflops, Singha T-shirt and shorts with 17 pockets. Places where you might actually feel out of place if you don’t dress up a bit.

Names in Patong that come to mind include Club Lime, Climax, BYD Lofts or White Box. Now there’s another to put on your list and in the back of your mind: Beat Club at the new 123-room B-Lay Tong Resort, at the north end of Patong Beach. It’s  just opposite the Novotel, close to the junction of the beach road and Phra Barami Rd.

Beat Club is ready – it’s just not operating full-on yet. It can, however, be booked for private parties, taking advantage of the high-tech sound system and neon-lit bar; call K. Tik at +66 (0) 76 344 999.

The resort opened quietly in March, and will have its official opening in the next few months – it’s not yet certain just when, but before the next “high” season. In the meantime everything is ready – two restaurants serving Mediterranean and Thai food, an oyster and sushi bar, the lobby bar and the pool bar, along with a library and fitness room. In-room facilities include audio system, LCD TV with satellite reception, and WiFi or LAN connection for Internet. Free.

Following the trend away from Thai temple-style roofs and a great deal of ornate woodwork, the exterior design of B-Lay Tong is starkly rectangular, with dark grey dressed concrete surfaces. Indoors, things are slick, chic minimalist with dark shades contrasting with splashes of bright colour. In the rooms, the opposite prevails, with bright white being dominant.

Beat Club - not fully open yet, but bring your private dancers for a private party.

The resort is owned by B-Resort Group of Bangkok, and is managed by the InVision Group, headed by former Marriott exec Kevin Beauvais, whose portfolio now includes such chic inns as Zeavola in Phuket along with Villa Maroc on Pranburi Beach, and Glow and Swiss Park in Bangkok. The GM of B-Lay Tong will be Daniel Meury, formerly boss of The Chedi in Phuket.

Room rates until October 31 this year run from B4,900 a night for a Superior Garden View Room to 46,900 for the Presidential Suite with its two bedrooms and enormous living/dining area, sprawling over a total of 145 sqm.

Expect B-Lay Tong to be mentioned soon by the cognoscenti in the same breath as, say, Twin Palms on Surin Beach. For more info and current special rates visit the website here.

B-Lay Tong – new place to stay and party in Patong is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

But where Phuket currently excels is in attracting DJs with international reputations.

Joachim Garraud - don't let the boyish good looks fool you; this is a clever man.

On January 20, for example, French deejay, composer and producer Joachim Garraud appears at Sound (in Jungceylon, Patong) for one night. Despite his youthful looks, Garraud has a musical history going back 21 years, when he started work as a DJ at The Boy in Paris, a club synonymous in France with the beginnings of techno in that country.

Just two years later, he was one of the DJs at the first rave in Moscow, the Yuri Gagarin Party, which was attended by an estimated 300,000 Russian ravers, and this was followed up in succeeding years by appearances at huge events in Manchester, at the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt and at the Love Parade in Berlin in 2006, in front of a million people.

In the studio which he set up in Paris, he has produced, composed or remixed for the likes of Jean Michel Jarre, David Guetta, Kylie Minogue and David Bowie. He has, since 2005, had his own record label, F**k Me I’m Famous – a reflection, perhaps, of his astonishment at his own success. His website is here.

Meanwhile, on January 30 at Stereo Lab at the south end of Surin Beach, Hed Kandi make a welcome return – their third visit – with Sam Cannon on the turntables and disco diva Shena on the microphone.

Shena - her second album came out just a couple of months ago.

Trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Shena has since recorded dozens of singles, including The Weekend, which reached No 7 in the UK charts. She performed the song on the UK TV programmme Top of the Pops, following which it was nominated for a Grammy award. She has also released two albums, the most recent – One Man Woman – at the end of last year.

When she’s not doing her own thing, she’s in demand as a backup singer for the likes of Luther Vandross, Angie Stone, Chaka Khan, Mariah Carey and James Brown. Sample her voice ate her website, here.

Tickets to the Sound event cost B400 (which includes a free drink), while the Stereo Lab event is, as usual, free (but no free drink). The Sound website is here while Stereo Lab’s can be found here.

Top DJs coming to Sound Club and Stereo Lab is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Todd Terry - more than just house.

Stereo Lab, the disco on the sand at Surin Beach, which earlier brought Hed Kandi to the island for the first time, has scored another hit, booking Brooklyn-born deejay Todd Terry for a night on December 2.

Terry first drew international acclaim with his house mix of Missing by Everything But The Girl, but insists that his skill and style stretches much wider than house.

“I don’t know how to break this to you, but there’s more than a little bit more to me than four to the floor,” he writes on trustthedj.com.  “True – I did the house mix on Missing a few years back. The critical acclaim around that track meant that some people think I am representative of mainstream house music. Sorry to disappoint you; here’s the other side to the story:

“My first dance cut ever, Flight 16, came out on Cutting Records, which I co-owned at the time. When I made it, it didn’t really have any kind of genre. People tried to call it different things, but it was pretty much in the middle of everything. It had elements of hip-hop, elements of house and elements of jungle. Basically, it was breakbeat – but not in any form that you’d know now.

“DJs should be playing hip-hop, reggae – everything. We shouldn’t let people put us into pigeonholes or genres. That makes us too narrow-minded. After all, we should be playing for the people. They pay our wages.

“When you see my DJ sets, you’ll hear everything from Public Enemy to Armand Van Helden to Photek. And just when you think you’ve heard it all, I’ll drop something totally fresh and new and leaving the dance floor will be the last thing on your mind.”

People obviously like his style – or styles – because he’s been making a good living in the biz since the 1980s. That’s a long time in the world of deejaying.

Todd Terry appears at Stereo Lab on December 2, starting at 9pm (or, knowing Stereo Lab, more likely 10 or 11).  Entrance is free, and VIP tables (also free) can be booked by calling 08 9218 0162.

Top DJ Todd Terry heads for Stereo Lab Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Just three days from now – on July 17 – Phuket will be the battleground for two major events in the world of cool-and-sexy-see-and-be-seen, as two leading names in the world of deejay night clubs, Bangkok’s Bed Supper Club and Ibiza’s Hed Kandi, go, er, Bed-to-Hed.

Tata Young has apparently already checked out the new Sound nightclub in Jungceylon. Photo copyright © Alasdair Forbes.

Bed Supper Club, possibly the capital’s coolest nightclub, is the place to go to gawk at stars. In fact, if you haven’t been been photographed in Bed with someone sexy, then you’re probably not a star or even a starlet. Now Bed is about to officially open the very sexy Sound, at Jungceylon in Patong.

Meanwhile, down at Surin Beach, Stereo Lab – which is not as sexy but is right on the beach – will be the venue for the first appearance in Phuket of Hed Kandi (a subsidiary of Ministry of Sound) which has organised deejay parties all over the world as part of its World Series Tour, whichhas already included Tokyo, Seoul, Dhaka, Macau, Jakarta, KL and Phuket.

Now we don’t know whether there’s been a pledge of cooperation between the two, but consider this: on opening night, Sound will initially be open only to invited guests (ie, stars, starlets and other people with beautiful faces, bodies or wallets), who will mostly be flown down from Bangkok. They will have the place all to themselves from 9pm until midnight, when the doors will be opened to the hoi polloi – you and me – for another couple of hours.

But the Hed Kandi gig will be open to all, starting at 9pm. So it’s going to be a busy night, heading for Surin Beach first for the Hed Kandi gig featuring deejay Dean Rigg and percussionist Dean Oram until sometime before midnight, then hopping in the car – no, better make that a taxi after all those cocktails – for the dash to Jungceylon where the line-up will include now fewer that eight deejays from Bed – Fred Jungo, Octo, Duke O’Phive, Em, Ome, Josh and The Bangkok Invaders.

Sound soft-opened a few weeks ago and report that they’ve already received visits from from Thai glitterati Tata Young, Navinta, Dome (Pakorn Lum), Matthew Dean, Helen Pratumrat and Mark Kingpayom, presumably all down in Phuket for Fashion Week.

Manager Dave says that Sound will have different themes on different nights: Monday is Retroactiv – Old Skool dance hits from the 70′s onwards; Tuesday is Kinky Beats – sexy chilled out house; Wednesday is Jet-set – Hip-hop, R&B (also Ladies’ night); Thursday is Samba Loca – Latin Dance music; Friday is Ultra-sound – hardcore house for serious clubbers; Saturday is ‘this is SOUND’ – with international guest DJs; and Sunday is Bootlegs Inc -Mash-ups and remixes.

SOUND Phuket nightclub opening in battle of DJ parties is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.