ADAM WILKES AND ZARAN VACHHA

Before the pandemic, a day in the life of promoters like Adam Wilkes and Zaran Vachha meant they could be eating Peking duck with A$AP Ferg and his posse in a private Hong Kong dining room before his soldout warehouse concert one day, and watching the sunrise over a misty Thai jungle following a nine-hour set by French music collective Ed Banger at Wonderfruit music festival the next.

“We work from Tokyo to Mumbai to Sydney to Beijing,” says Wilkes, adding that in 2019, he was travelling for about 70 per cent of the year. “It’s wonderful, but it takes a physical toll. Despite the obvious professional setbacks of 2020,

I’ve been able to focus on getting healthy and spending time with my family. I’ve watched my daughter go from one to two-and-a-half years old, and that’s the silver lining. I wouldn’t take it back for anything.”

For Vachha (right), 2020 started with crushing losses. Collective Minds had a stellar roster of Asia tours lined up for the year, including UK rapper Stormzy, DJ and founder of Acid Jazz Records Gilles Peterson, and Jamaican-american singer Masego, who in April received his first platinum certification.

“It was meant to be our biggest year. We had booked over 200 shows, and then we had to cancel them all,” Vachha recalls, adding that the year was ultimately a hard push in a better direction, forcing his team to reevaluate who they are and what they do.

“I originally started Collective Minds as a creative agency that propped up creativity in the region. We were on a tram track with the concerts we were doing before the pandemic. It’s all we felt we were good for,” he says. “We were able to start again. We got to choose, for the first time, what we want to do versus what we have to do. We’ve been able to explore other facets of creativity and entertainment.”