“We like to party!” cries Tito Jackson. “All over the world we party!” Tito proceeds to list the various cities in which the Jacksons party and demands of the crowd, “Are you ready to party with us?” The screams appear to indicate yes, the crowd are ready to party with the Jacksons. A satisfied Tito launches into Rock With You. Some fifty feet away, I contemplate the fruit platter on the table in front of me and help myself to another grape.
Welcome to the inaugural Dream Fest, the hottest new music festival in Azerbaijan. To be more precise, welcome to the VIP hospitality area of DreamFest where guests pay a substantial sum to enjoy a hearty dinner, unlimited booze and close proximity to the main stage. There are two smaller stages: the sun stage is over on the other side of the crowd and the moon stage is basically situated in hospitality itself, only separated from the tables by a swimming pool.
Nobody knows they are watching one of Tito’s final performances, the pop legend passing away from a heart attack in September. On Friday evening, the Jacksons share the bill with Godfather actor Gianni Russo, Turkish pop star Rafet El Roman, Swedish singer Bosson and Engelbert Humperdinck. Jason Derulo was here on Wednesday; Craig David played a TS5 set last night; Canadian composer David Foster and Nicole Scherzinger headline tomorrow. More than a hundred artists will play Dream Fest across six days. Can’t attend? No matter: the whole thing is being broadcast on Azerbaijani TV.
While thousands of people attend the festival every night, the dream belongs to one man: Emin Agalarov, a 44 year-old Azerbaijani pop star. The son of billionaire real estate developer Aras Agalarov, Emin is responsible not only for Dream Fest but also the coastal resort that hosts the festival, a gargantuan sprawl of villas and apartment blocks named Sea Breeze that isn’t even close to being completed. Emin is very, very rich and very, very driven – two useful traits when creating an international music festival or a coastal resort you intend to become the next Dubai.
Emin moves in high places. His former wife is the daughter of Azerbaijan's president. The music video for his 2013 single In Another Life featured a load of Miss Universe contestants and a speaking cameo from Donald Trump. I’m pretty sure Emin is the only artist in history with a music video featuring a President of the United States, past, present or future. A few years later, Emin and his Mancunian publicist Rob Goldstone were suspected of helping the Trump Campaign collude with Russia in the 2016 US Presidential election.
Emin and Rob Goldstone
A former tabloid journalist with a penchant for dirty jokes and silly hats, the 63-year-old Goldstone is a remarkable figure in his own right. He once interviewed Muhammad Ali for a Birmingham radio station and travelled with Michael Jackson on the BAD tour. It was his email to Donald Trump Jr that inadvertently triggered the whole collusion investigation and made Goldstone a person of interest to the FBI. Full disclosure, I liked him immensely – and not solely because he secured me some swimming trunks after I left mine in London. “I can find you some trunks,” he said with breezy assurance. “I once got Emin a penguin.”
On our arrival to Sea Breeze, Goldstone presented us with a lanyard. The lanyard ensured access to everywhere, plus free food and drink. I walked around feeling like I owned the place – until Thursday night when I lost Goldstone and security wouldn’t let me into the main VIP area by the stage. Instead I was directed to some lesser VIP tables at the back of the crowd. Never be fooled into thinking you own a place just because you’re hanging out with the manager of the guy who literally does. It was rough at those back tables. They even charged me for a tequila shot.
By Friday, I’m back in the cosseted if rather loud embrace of Big Boy VIP. Those on the table include Jethro Sheeran (cousin of Ed), Kieran ‘Kash’ Harrison, a very talented singer from Derby, and Gianni Russo, who played his set earlier that evening. He’s 82 years old, clad in a beautiful designer jacket and boasts a tan to make Donald Trump resemble Casper the Friendly Ghost. As well as playing Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather, Russo worked for crime boss Frank Costello. He shot Pablo Escobar’s cousin in a nightclub and lost his virginity to Marylin Monroe – which I suppose is the right way round to do it.
I’m staying at the resort so the journey to bed is pretty painless. (Although don’t attempt an early night unless you like being lulled to sleep by Turkish pop music.) Sea Breeze is already the size of a small village; one day it will be the size of a large town. Accommodation ranges from studio rooms to cottages to gigantic mansions for permanent residents. Many of the mansions are being constructed to their owner’s specification: there’s one the size of Buckingham Palace with its own private mosque in the courtyard. We take a golf buggy down the promenade to the recently opened Nikki Beach and the shells of various buildings stand like Tetris blocks along the road. It’s like a ghost town, except everything is coming alive.
Before it becomes sand and rocks, the promenade is basically the physical manifestation of a teenage boy’s psyche. There’s a room full of arcade games. There are miniature crates equipped with air conditioning and consoles. There’s a water park. A go-kart track. Tennis and padel courts. Beach bars, restaurants, fast food stands. A McDonald's whose giant yellow M dominates the skyline – another giant yellow M stands on the beach with a swing hanging from each arch. A Costa, possibly the only Costa in the world that has its own swimming pool, but then basically everywhere here has its own swimming pool. When in doubt, build a swimming pool seems to be the Sea Breeze philosophy.
Central to the ever-evolving dream that is Sea Breeze will be a massive apartment complex shaped like a cruise liner standing just off the beach. Currently it's a hole in the ground surrounded by cranes but in a few years that hole will become the Caspian Dream Liner. Here you will find Baku’s inaugural casino – gambling is illegal in the country but the CDL will technically be situated in the sea. If reality isn't satisfactory, build your own, a few metres offshore.
At some point during the week, I’m meant to interview Emin. Finding half an hour in which Emin is free to be interviewed proves tricky: eventually Rob suggests I come to a rehearsal and collar him afterwards. Emin lives on Sea Breeze in a building that I suppose I should call a mansion but could equally be described as a compound. How big is the mansion? I couldn’t say but the roof of the porch is held up by multiple columns like a Greek temple, and on the way to the bathroom I pass an elevator.
The rehearsal takes place in a gigantic room of marble and gold. How big is the room? There must be 30 people in here, plus an entire band, plus recording equipment, plus a gigantic marble table, plus an air hockey table (not marble), plus a bar in the corner – and all these humans and objects are contained quite comfortably in less than half its overall area. The other half of the room contains another bar and a snooker table and more sofas and armchairs than your average DFS. Through the floor to ceiling windows I can glimpse a swimming pool that seems to stretch on forever into a cloudless blue sky.
Our host wears a yellow T-shirt, green cargo shorts, a green New York Yankees baseball cap and sunglasses that we can safely assume to be designer. David Foster – he of five wives and 16 Grammys – sits at the keyboard. Italian tenor Alessandro Safina stands beside Emin, dangling a microphone. They are rehearsing a cover of Muslim Magomayev’s Blue Eternity. Known as the ‘Soviet Sinatra’, Baku-born Magomayev was one of the most famous singers in the Soviet Union and Emin’s mentor before his death in 2008. He was awarded the People's Artist of the USSR award in 1973; Emin was awarded the People's Artiste of Azerbaijan in 2018.
Emin performs with Nicole Scherzinger
While I'm sure being the son of a billionaire didn't hurt Emin’s musical career, his success can’t solely be attributed to his parentage. Dude can sing. His strong, muscular voice isn't overwhelmed by Safina on their duet. Emin’s vocals are impressive considering he was singing at last night's after-party at 6am. When he isn't singing, he puffs incessantly on a vape. At any given moment, approximately half the people in here are recording a video on their phone. Some film the rehearsal, others the audience. A couple of them continuously film Emin. I notice a camera pointed in my direction and offer an enthusiastic wave.
David Foster’s fifth wife Katharine McPhee duets with Emin on It’s Now Or Never. Along with Muslim, Elvis Presely is the other great musical influence of Emin’s career. The Washington Post once dubbed Emin the ‘Elvis of Azerbaijan’ to his great delight. He recently released Now or Never, an album of Elvis covers that included a duet on Help Me Through The Night with the King’s old friend Engelbert Humperdinck, still going strong at 87. He's performing on the main stage this evening before Ukrainian singer Ani Lorak and the Jackson Five (well, three of them).
“We're thinking of doing this little song that I wrote years ago at the end as a way of getting everyone on stage,” says David Foster. “You don't have to sing it but you have to look like you're singing!” This little song turns out to be Got To Be Real, the much-sampled 1978 debut single of Cheryl Lynn. Emin and Katherine will alternate between the lines ‘your love is my love’ and ‘my love is your love’. Foster nods. “It's bullshit but it's a hit.”
Emin, David Foster, Katharine McPhee and Ani Lorak
While we wait for the rehearsal to finish, I might as well expand on the whole Russian collusion thing. Emin’s father Aras asked his son to broker a meeting between the Trump family and a Russian attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya, who supposedly possessed damaging information on Hilary Clinton. Emin passed the request onto Goldstone, who duly sent a brief yet hyperbolic email to Donald Trump Jr. Neither Emin or Goldstone had any idea what this hypothetical information might be.
A meeting took place at Trump Tower where it became apparent the attorney was far more interested in discussing the Magnitsky Act, a ban on Americans adopting Russian children, and had used the Clinton stuff to get in the room. Goldstone was mortified at wasting Trump Jr’s time and became a good deal more mortified when the American media got hold of the story. He had to testify before a Senate committee and later wrote what he cheerfully describes as “my worst selling book” Pop Stars, Pageants and Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life.
The arrival of pizzas signal the rehearsal is finished. However Emin has a meeting to attend. He suggests reconvening at the Italian restaurant Scalini in an hour and combine the interview with a working lunch. He proves a remarkably forthcoming interviewee, both sharper and more self-aware than perhaps one might expect. After the interview there’s another meeting followed by his daily game of padel – Emin is fanatical about padel – and I’m invited along to the latter.
Emin is already on the padel court when we arrive. I watch the game for a few minutes and the quality is high – one guy plays like Spiderman, leaping around the court, attempting tweeners, sometimes extending a leg mid-rally to launch himself off the far wall. “He's the number one padel player in Baku,” Emin tells me. “Official. But he can never beat me. Unofficial.” I think he’s joking but it’s hard to tell.
Between matches, Emin vapes and downs a Corona. The heat is so intense he must sweat out the booze about a minute after swallowing it. I had rather hoped to play with Emin but the teams appear to be fixed and one can't expect Baku’s number one padel player to make way. Instead I hit with two Russian guys, Andi and Constantine. They are very friendly; I have absolutely no idea whether they’re musicians, millionaires, friends of Emin or some combination of the three.
Here’s my conversation with Emin. (Edited for brevity rather than any PR demand.)
Square Mile: Impressive resort you have here…
Emin Agalarov: We've been working on it since 2006. The first phase is six kilometres long and it'll give us about five million square metres of residential, hotel, mixed use development.
SM: What made you create this destination?
EA: I grew up on this beach. When I was little there was not one single kiosk on this beach, absolutely nothing to do. So my dream was to create something that people could actually enjoy and use. I always believed that this beach is very underrated in that sense: zero infrastructure, the world doesn't know about its existence, but it could be a new Bodrum or a new Dubai or a new St Tropez.
SM: And how did DreamFest come about?
EA: There’ve been a few under different branding. The first festival was officially held in 2016 but the first concert I did was in 2009 or 2010. My solo concert, which inspired me to understand that music and entertainment will attract attention to this project. The first year I did just my show. Next year, I did some local artists and some Russian artists. I decided to do a festival with 30, 40 artists in 2016. Next year it was 80 artists. Every year it’s getting bigger and bigger. You can come with your grandmother and your grandchildren and everybody will find an artist that they absolutely love.
SM: Do you have a particular favourite artist who's performed here?
EA: [Azerbaijani singer] Jony is one of my favourites. I've been involved in his upcoming album because he was on my label. David Foster is my friend, I love him. Craig David did a show here ten years ago. He said, ‘man, this has changed in ten years! There's just so many names.
SM: Anyone you want to perform here?
EA: Definitely. Jennifer Lopez, Enrique Iglesias, Andrea Bocelli. Some of my favourite artists. Julio Iglesias – I’m going to do my best to bring him here next year. Robbie Williams! Ed Sheeran – his cousin is here performing.
SM: What’s your wildest music festival story that can be included in print?
EA: All the stories come from the after parties. The way the festival is set up, artists are not stuck in green rooms. I created those VIP areas by the pool where they get full service – food, drinks – and they become part of the party. So the festival itself is already a party and to take it to the next level, we create these after parties. It becomes such a vibey area – the funniest stories come from those afterparties. But I'm not going to tell you about them!
Emin and Jony
SM: What’s one thing that would surprise people about Baku?
EA: History and culture. Azerbaijan is a country with an amazing history, starting from the first oil being found here in the world. The Rothchild and Nobel families were the first investors to come here early last century. It's where East meets West in terms of culture, architecture, music. During the Soviet Times, it was one of the places which had a yearly jazz festival. The city has an old city and a contemporary, modern city. It's an amazing city with all different territories. You can ski in the winter, you can swim in the summer. In terms of climate, we're very diversified.
SM: You had quite a peripatetic upbringing right?
EA: Yeah, I lived for two years in Switzerland when I was young. Then I lived for six years in the States where I finished university. Then I lived in Russia for two years. But I travel all the time and everything that I see in the world that I think is awesome, I want to bring to Sea Breeze. So Nikki Beach, my first time was in St Tropez. Now Nikki Beach is open here.
Armani hotel in Milan: we're now negotiating to do an Armani hotel here. A Nobu restaurant, Zuma. All the different brands. Fashion brands as well. I want to bring every amazing fashion and jewellery brand to Sea Breeze. So this will become a hub, a city within a city – with entertainment, concert halls, sporting events, tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, the best restaurants, best brands. A lot of hotels.
SM: What made you go into music rather than business?
EA: I never separated the two. Music has always been a dream; I started my music career in 2006. My first four albums were English, I was recording in the UK. And simultaneously I was in the family business with my father. Sea Breeze is my project. It was a side project initially, now my main business is here in Azerbaijan.
So music has always been in line with my business development because entertainment always helped me. Entertainment always helped me get attention to my projects. And being quite famous in this region, being the face of my project, it’s easy to post on Instagram. ‘We’re opening Nikki Beach today’ – and it's packed. So it helps me. It's like an instrument now.
SM: What's been your proudest professional accomplishment?
EA: Probably an album that was produced by David Foster that came out last year. An album of Elvis covers. I'm a big fan of Elvis and I always wanted to do a proper Elvis album but the only person that I wanted to produce it was David Foster.
Emin and Elvis
SM: What’s been the biggest ‘pinch me’ moment of your career?
EA: Donald Trump taking part in my music video.
SM: I think you’re the only artist in history to have a US president in their music video…
EA: Well that was before he was president. Nobody ever believed he'll become president but I always believed
SM: How come?
EA: Trump is a winner. He's a man that I don't think has ever lost a battle with anybody. And before he became president, I had a chance to be in his office and ask him, ‘what about the rumours going around that you're going to run for president?’ He said, ‘I'm thinking about it. I still haven't made a decision but if I run I'm going to win.’ And two weeks later he announced.
SM: How did you meet him?
EA: I did Miss Universe in Russia. We flew to Las Vegas for Miss USA, which at the time he also owned, and that's how we met.
SM: Have you spoken to him recently?
EA: No, we haven't been in touch. Not since we were accused of taking part in influencing the American election, which is completely ridiculous. But I realised that any contact from my side would be used against him. I like the guy. I don't want to bring any heat.
SM: Rob found it a very stressful period. Did you find it difficult too?
EA: Well, we went through some difficulties because Rob had to testify to Congress. Some of my friends and people I worked with in America as well. Complete bullshit. Where am I and where's the fucking American election? What do I have to do with it?
SM: Apparently Rob got you a penguin once. Why did you need a penguin?
EA: This was probably ten years ago. My father and I were building an oceanarium in our development in Moscow and we wanted to get penguins. So we said, ‘Rob, can you help us find some penguins?’ Well, we didn't just need penguins, we needed snakes and some fish.
SM: What's the craziest thing you’ve ever requested?
EA: Something ridiculous? Penguins is probably one. Penguins is very high up there to be honest.
SM: What's your most treasured possession?
EA: It's hard. Material things are not something that I remember even owning. [Pause before suddenly remembering he owns a massive beach resort] Sea Breeze!
SM: That's quite a good one. What's your most expensive purchase?
EA: A Rolls-Royce.
SM: Also good. What's next on the shopping list?
EA: What's in line? Well, Sea Breeze has become such a big project. Now it's at the level where I'm communicating with huge international developers. Over the next three to five years, this will be a very recognisable project in the world. If for example, you bring companies like Steve Wynn, Trump, MGM, these huge operators of world class entertainment, this will really put Sea Breeze on the worldwide map.
SM: Your daily routine sounds nuts…
EA: A rehearsal in the morning, a huge Nikki Beach meeting. Now we're doing the interview and then I have sound checks. It's a nonstop thing for me. I don't know how I get through every day!
SM: Where does your drive come from? A lot of people would be chilling on a yacht…
EA: First of all, I don't own a yacht. And I don't own a plane. One day I might. Every time I have a possibility to financially purchase one, I'd rather invest that money into my developments. So I never really had the money.
I start my day with my accounting meetings to monitor how much money flows into the company – and every day I spend it to zero. So every day, at the end of the day, I have zero money. Money should never just sit around. It should be always reinvested and spent. So in reality, if I want to buy something, I need to take that money away from my inspiration: the business. I never really do that.
SM: Can you tell us something that no one in the world knows about you?
EA: I'm a crazy man. People think I'm sane, but I'm not.
On Sunday, I head into Baku and discover Emin was right – the city is truly incredible, a mixture of East and West, ancient and modern. The beautifully preserved Old City is ringed by fortress walls dating back to the 12th century; within those walls you will find countless breathtaking architecture, including an 11th century mosque, a 15th century palace and the Maiden Tower, where a king supposedly imprisoned his daughter only for her to commit suicide by jumping off the top. The Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site so you needn’t take my word for its splendour.
The Baku beyond the fortress walls isn’t short of beautiful buildings either, the most striking being Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre, a marvel of flowing surfaces and seemingly impossible geometry. (Imagine a gigantic bed sheet in the process of being folded.) The city is a place of trees and open spaces: I enjoyed a gorgeous couple of hours simply strolling along the promenade beside the Caspian Sea. Museums, bookshops, outdoor chess games, wine bars – yeah, Baku and I got along famously. I even booked myself an Airbnb there on Monday to experience the city without a massive hangover.
The hangover was a legacy of the Dream Fest closing party. Well past midnight I found myself sitting in a beautiful outdoor courtyard filled with tables covered by food and drink; Azerbaijani after-parties are simply an excuse to have another dinner. They’re also an excuse to toast everyone in the room: those granted a toast from Emin included Gianni Russo, Alessandro Safina, Jack Savorotti, Ani Lorak, Nicole Scherzinger and Emin’s mum. “Westerners tend to get embarrassed by all the toasting,” said Rob. “But by the end they think it's quite sweet.”
Gianni spent all evening signing copies of his autobiography Hollywood Godfather. After his toast, he sang an acapella version of Speak Softly Love. It was genuinely quite moving to hear this beautifully weathered voice pierce the night, a voice that has exchanged words with Monroe and Sinatra and Brando and a thousand other pieces of human history. He got a standing ovation and returned to our table to tuck into some fish.
For more information, see Dream Fest
