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He befriended Nirvana, discovered Ben Lee, put Wolfmother and The Presets on our iPods - but music guru Steve Pavlovic reckons his best ideas are yet to come
No one knows what happened in the swirling dreamworld of Stephen Pavlovic's mind. But overnight something in his 19-year-old subconscious clicked. When he woke at his Canberra home, he was overwhelmed by an urge to change his life. "It was so sudden," he recalls. "It was like an epiphany." Pavlovic didn't hang about. That very day he stunned his boss by quitting his job as a recreational officer at the YMCA. Returning home, he told his bewildered girlfriend their three-year relationship was over. "I didn't know what I was going to do," Pavlovic admits. "I just knew there was more to life than this." Two weeks later, he caught a lift to Sydney with a local band called The Plunderers. Striking up a rapport with the members, he talked his way into becoming their manager. Squashed in the van's back seat as it thundered along the highway, Pavlovic had inadvertently broken into the music business.
This dramatic escape from the Canberra suburbs reveals the characteristics that have propelled Pavlovic's career - a startling willingness to trust his instincts, bold opportunism and oodles of quiet charisma. It's a volatile package that's thrust him to triumph and disaster, and back again. Twenty-three years on, Pavlovic (or Pav as he's generally known) is one of the most influential players in Australian music. His label, Modular, balances underground credibility with commercial success, and has evolved into a global business with offices in Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London (Tokyo is next on his list).
Veteran promoter Michael Coppel knows all the machinations of the music business, having toured everyone from AC/DC to U2. "Pav has probably got the best set of ears of anyone in the Australian music industry," he says. "In terms of the acts he's signed and broken, his track record is pretty much unparalleled. I don't think anyone has been able to replicate that degree of success."
Today, Pavlovic is sipping green tea in the winter sun outside a Japanese restaurant in Sydney's Surry Hills. Dressed in a leather jacket, white Nikes and a T-shirt...