The deep dish on this Big Fish

There is no killer party here; only posters of past events mounted on the muted walls of an office the size of a shipping container. Employees are shuffling about and it’s business as usual for production company Bigfish International. Yet the vocal house music resounding from a couple of mid-sized speakers mocks the office’s workaday atmosphere, and the fact that Pixie Cheah, the woman at the company’s helm, is tired.

Disco Widow

“It’s TC’s birthday today,” she mutters hoarsely under her breath, the statement tainted with more recognition than acceptance. It’s 5 p.m., the sky outside is bordering on somber, and Pixie has just returned from the cemetery where Tuck ‘TC’ Cheah, her late husband and once a veritable lord on the decks of Manila’s most monumental parties, is now six feet under. If the name is unfamiliar, the events might signal a euphoric flashback: God’s Kitchen, the Cream Halloween Ball, and Hed Kandi all stemmed from a Malaysian DJ who’d hopped a plane to Manila to meet a sturdy denizen of the local party scene named Domini Primero, the partnership of both having evolved ’90s-era raves to become what they are now — the strobe-lit social bacchanals of Manila nightlife. But despite the death of its founder, this office is still bustling. A whiteboard behind Pixie is scrawled with a calendar of corporate and grand-scale events, one, two, or three of which you might find yourself scouring a ticket for in the next few months.

 “When I came into the picture, it was really tough. Basically, my job is a man’s job eh. But at the time, I had to learn the fast way because nobody is gonna do it. That was biglaan talaga,” Pixie explains of her husband’s unforeseen passing to a misdiagnosed aneurysm almost three years ago, one that couldn’t have come at a more frenetic time considering TC had booked the eminent Paul Van Dyk to spin at an event two months after his passing. A wife who worked as a jeweler and kept in the shadows of the party mechanism — preferring not to pose and smile for the society cameras and instead overseeing production while Primero handled public relations and her husband booked the acts — was immediately harangued with the task of entrenching herself in the operations of club events. “I didn’t even have the chance to mourn. If I would cry, it would be in the car lang. I was not in the scene, being in the background. But I said ‘No, I’m gonna push through with this,’ ‘cause I know my husband’s passion, and that this was exactly what he would have wanted. I was left there only to find out that it was practice for me.”

Spun to a Frenzy

The death of TC created a tempest that Pixie had no choice but to forge into, a female abruptly thrust into the pissing contest of male promoters who tried to book the more larger-than-life act that would assemble a righteous mix of househeads, hell-raisers and hip A-listers to pack a massive venue. Along with re-establishing relationships with huge acts who declined to deal with the wife of a fellow DJ they’d already become acquainted with, Bigfish found itself swimming in waters infested with mistrust and intrigue.

Behind the music was the money and, by 2006, Bigfish and another company headed by a rising party player named Stephen Ku were in the throes of a bidding war for trance godhead DJ Tiesto. In the end, it was Ku who would step forth with the hefty amount that the DJ’s handlers had requested, Pixie deciding to pit the Hed Kandi brand against the exalted Tiesto and mount the event on the same date that he would be spinning. The party sphere revolved around a single date and the head counts would be each event’s infantry. Yet even if both were considerably buttressed by attendance, Tiesto’s would be more unforgettable to revelers. 

Tensions filled the air of clubland like a haze from a smoke machine, yet it would be Ku’s crossing of borders at Bigfish’s Boracay Sunset Sessions that would signal the imminent lynching of Pixie Cheah. Confused by Ku’s entry into the VIP area after a squabble with Primero at what was then called V-Bar, Pixie requested the promoter’s exit from her venue.  “A lot of people wrote about it, questioning me about good vibes. [Stephen] became the underdog and I became the kontrabida,” she says of how the glitzy society press that stood behind Ku disagreed with her decision to banish him without explanation, articles peppered with the high drama that had overruled the celebratory atmosphere. “I just felt hurt, and after that, I tried to explain in the papers that we weren’t the bad people, apologizing to whoever I offended. Everything began to pile-up after that, especially when Motorola pulled sponsorship ‘cause they felt na tinuloy ko pa rin ang away,” explains Pixie. “I’ve always been misunderstood, but then there was a lot of miscommunication. Later on, I found out that it wasn’t Stephen Ku but the firsthand promoter who dealt with the manager of Tiesto.”

The Party Goes On

Bob Sinclair’s World, Hold On is playing from the stereo, the redemptive tone of the dance track affirming the stance Pixie Cheah has taken at this point in time. The song is one of 14 from “Track Record,” the album that Bigfish’s Activ8 label launched on May 25 to fulfill a stream of plans including forays into DJ magazines, music channel programs, and the forthcoming rise of a radio station as a tribute to Tuck Cheah, the dance purist who was all about the eradication of party politics, the progression of music and the education of the people. It’s why a steadfast party chronicler like Tim Yap has bequeathed her the title of “Cory Aquino of the local dance scene” — someone who has emerged a dance floor doyenne focused on her late husband’s aspiration to uphold the music rather than the money, the drugs, or the egos that flounder in nocturnal society. 

After a turbulent year that included the departure of partner Domini, the party always has to go on and Pixie has embraced the new promoters who have allowed the music to disseminate as much as she and her fiancé, Activ8’s Ricky Daker, have coursed into new avenues to do as well. The events will keep coming and this time, amid a crowd of pumping fists and swaying arms that she herself gathered, she’ll step into the blinking lights and relish the thumping beats that her husband was once the electronic conductor of.  “This is everything [TC] wanted. I’m involved deep in it already and I’ve grown to love it,” she says, staring at the skyscrapers outside her office. “To me, I don’t even care if people don’t like me but I’m happy if they’re happy. I can go out in the venue, enjoy the music and have a smile on my face.”