Image: ST PHOTOS
Radio presenter and musician John Klass did not get much sleep the night before he made his debut helming the drivetime show on SPH UnionWorks' Kiss 92 station two weeks ago.
He says: "I tossed and turned in bed and I kept on running through in my head what I'm supposed to do in the studio. What if I make a mistake and leave the audience with dead air on radio?"
Nothing of the sort happened, but his nervousness was to be expected. After all, it has been 15 years since he last appeared on radio as a DJ for the MediaCorp radio station now known as 987FM.
The singer and bass player of now-defunct local pop band Kick! - best known for their 1993 hit songs Jane and Freedom (In Me) - quickly regained his groove to helm the show, simply called John Klass, which runs weekdays from 4 to 8pm.
He replaced the slot's previous DJ Jeremy Ratnam, who is taking a sabbatical to concentrate on raising his children.
"I have been itching to come back to radio, so when I got the offer from Kiss 92, I said yes. I am a performer, I am an artist, so all these different platforms excite me, just to be on air every day," he tells Life! in an interview at the station's studio.
Klass, 43, might not have been in the spotlight much in the last decade, but the man has been hard at work behind the scenes in the local and overseas entertainment industry.
Together with his wife, Valerie, also 43, the couple run multimedia entertainment company Klass International, which has a head office in Singapore and partnerships in the region, as well as in Europe and the United States.
Besides managing Klass' current pop-rock band, The Professionals, the company also produced a showcase of Singaporean artists at music trade fair Midem at Cannes last year. The couple have two daughters, Victoria, 13, and Venetia, eight.
"My wife runs most of the business, logistics and administration parts while I concentrate on the creative side," he says.
Klass says that he still keeps in touch regularly with his Kick! bandmates, guitarist Jai and keyboardist and sequencer Dinesh Bhatia.
In their heyday, the trio, which released only one album Freedom (In Me) in 1993, had hit songs on local and Malaysian radio and, at one point, played to crowds as big as 60,000 in Malacca. They also picked up two awards, Best Group and Best Song (for Jane) at the 1993 Radio Music Awards.
The group disbanded around the same time that their record company, the Japan-based Pony Canyon, pulled out of Singapore in mid-1997. "We really did try to get back together and go into the studio, record and release some songs for fun. But everyone was so busy with his own work and it was almost impossible to get our schedules to match."
Klass plans to go even further with The Professionals, which formed in 2011. They have released a single, Funk It Up and are currently working on their debut album, expected to be released by the end of the year. "We do not just want to make ourselves known in Singapore, we are also looking at making it in the global music industry.
"That's the beauty of being a DJ here at Kiss 92, I get to be on air, yet I also have the flexibility to travel and do my own work and music."
This article was first run in The Straits Times newspaper on June 3, 2013. For similar stories, go tosph.straitstimes.com/premium/singapore. You will not be able to access the Premium section of The Straits Times website unless you are already a subscriber.