[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":209},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-gerald-wickremesooriya":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":169,"description":170,"died":171,"era":172,"extension":173,"heroImage":174,"imageCredit":175,"imageLicense":176,"imageSource":177,"meta":178,"navigation":179,"notable":180,"path":181,"roles":182,"seo":184,"sources":185,"stem":207,"translated":179,"url":188,"__hash__":208},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fgerald-wickremesooriya.md","Gerald Wickremesooriya",null,1920,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":160},"minimark",[11,15,18,21,26,29,37,40,44,51,58,61,65,76,79,127,130,133,137,144,147,151,154,157],[12,13,14],"p",{},"In 1938 a young man in Colombo saw a photograph in the newspaper. It showed Ananda Samarakoon and his wife Chandra, just back from Rabindranath Tagore's school at Santiniketan. The young man wrote to Samarakoon asking whether he could study with him, and shortly afterwards found himself in a small house down a by-lane in Dehiwela, one of a handful of students learning from a teacher almost nobody had heard of yet.",[12,16,17],{},"\"This is going to be a big concern one day,\" Samarakoon told them.",[12,19,20],{},"The student was Gerald Wickremesooriya, and he was right about the concern, although not in the way either of them expected. Thirty years later he would be running the record label that made Sinhala pop a commercial industry — not as a musician but as a shopkeeper who happened to have an ear.",[22,23,25],"h2",{"id":24},"ambalangoda-estates-and-a-childrens-bookshop","Ambalangoda, estates, and a children's bookshop",[12,27,28],{},"He was born on 22 March 1920 at Ambalangoda, on the south-west coast, and educated at Dharmasoka College there and then at S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia. In 1948 he went into the plantation sector, joining Bogala Estates.",[12,30,31,32,36],{},"He kept the farming for the rest of his life. Every weekend he travelled to his own land in the south, walking his fields with his wife Dulcie at the wheel of their Austin A40, and on Sundays he sold vegetables from his own back garden in Colpetty at the weekly ",[33,34,35],"em",{},"jathika pola"," on Bullers Road. It is a useful picture to hold on to: the man who would later put an orchestra on a floating stage in a swimming pool also stood behind a table selling brinjals.",[12,38,39],{},"In 1959 he and Dulcie opened The Children's Bookshop at No. 20 Queens Street, near the Fort clock tower in Colombo. It sold children's books; then it sold children's records; then it started importing vinyl, EPs of Jim Reeves and the Beatles, and turned into one of the most popular lunchtime hangouts in the Fort. Wally Bastiansz and Clarence Wijewardena were among the people who drifted in.",[22,41,43],{"id":42},"fifteen-minutes-a-week","Fifteen minutes a week",[12,45,46,47,50],{},"The problem the shop revealed was structural. Sinhala group songs — the guitar-based, harmony-singing style that young listeners were falling for in the late 1960s — had almost no airtime. The Sinhala service of the state broadcaster is remembered as having allowed the genre something like a paltry fifteen minutes a week. Officialdom regarded it as ",[33,48,49],{},"thuppahi"," music: a sneer aimed at anything westernised or mixed, and, in the words later used against it, unsuitable for the intellect.",[12,52,53,54,57],{},"What broke the deadlock was a family and a shopkeeper. The Coreas — Sri Sangabo, Vernon and Vijaya — had standing in the ",[33,55,56],{},"English","-language stream of the broadcaster, and used it to get the Moonstones a Saturday evening slot. They then talked the bookshop owner into backing the band.",[12,59,60],{},"Wickremesooriya did not stop at backing them. He lobbied publicly and wrote newspaper articles defending the musicians and their songs against the ban — one of the very few people in the trade willing to argue the case in print rather than wait for the policy to soften.",[22,62,64],{"id":63},"sooriya-1968","Sooriya, 1968",[12,66,67,68,71,72,75],{},"The Sooriya label was founded in 1968 by Gerald and Dulcie together, out of the bookshop. Its first release was the Moonstones' EP ",[33,69,70],{},"More Hits by The Moonstones",", carrying a catalogue number, CHB001, whose letters were those of the bookshop it came out of. Sooriya also issued the first Sinhala LP ever produced in Sri Lanka, ",[33,73,74],{},"The Sooriya Show",", catalogued CHB LP 1.",[12,77,78],{},"Talent was found the simplest way imaginable: weekly auditions at Wickremesooriya's own house at 5 Sea Avenue, Colombo. Out of those sessions came the Golden Chimes and the Super Golden Chimes, the Three Sisters, the Dharmaratne Brothers, M. S. Fernando, La Bambas, Desmond de Silva, Milton Mallawarachchi, Priya Suriyasena, Eranga and Priyanga, the Spitfires, the Mendis Foursome with Maxwell Mendis, and the saxophonist Stanley Peiris, whose record with The Fortunes is described as the first instrumental record of Sinhala pop made in Sri Lanka.",[12,80,81,82,85,86,85,89,85,92,85,95,85,98,85,101,85,104,85,107,85,110,85,113,85,116,85,119,122,123,126],{},"The hit list from those years reads like a catalogue of what the 1970s sounded like in Sri Lanka: ",[33,83,84],{},"Dilhani",", ",[33,87,88],{},"Ramani",[33,90,91],{},"Gonwassa",[33,93,94],{},"Muhudu Ralla",[33,96,97],{},"Kalu Kella Mamai",[33,99,100],{},"Paan Mama",[33,102,103],{},"Kimada Naave",[33,105,106],{},"Durakathanaya",[33,108,109],{},"Konda Namagena",[33,111,112],{},"Podi Nona",[33,114,115],{},"Kandasuriduni",[33,117,118],{},"Call Me Fisherman",[33,120,121],{},"City of Colombo"," — and Victor Rathnayake's ",[33,124,125],{},"SA",", which is a different order of record altogether.",[12,128,129],{},"Sooriya also ran a weekly radio programme and staged live concerts that sold out. The 1974 Sooriya Show was performed on a floating stage in the St Joseph's swimming pool, with shadow dancers posed on the diving boards.",[12,131,132],{},"Wickremesooriya was clear about who had made it possible. \"Without Vijaya, there wouldn't be Sooriya,\" he would say of Vijaya Corea. The other two names that belong beside his are Mervyn Rodrigo, the engineer at Sarasavi Studio in Kelaniya where most of the recording was done, and A. M. Harischandra, who designed the sleeves.",[22,134,136],{"id":135},"the-awkward-experiments-and-the-royalties","The awkward experiments, and the royalties",[12,138,139,140,143],{},"For a man running a pop label he was unusually willing to lose money on ideas. He produced Tamil pop when nobody thought it commercial. He fused instruments used in Hindu temple ritual with electrified Sinhala pop arrangements. He set local drum rhythms against a symphony written by Winston Jayawardena. And he went backwards as well as forwards, recording ",[33,141,142],{},"nurthi gee"," — the songs of the old Tower Hall stage — at a time when almost nobody under sixty had heard them.",[12,145,146],{},"The most consequential thing he did was less glamorous. Wickremesooriya pioneered paying royalties to Sri Lankan music creators under intellectual property rights, at a point when the idea was effectively unknown in the local industry. Performers' remuneration in Sri Lanka has remained a sore and unresolved subject ever since, which is the measure of how far ahead of the field he was: he and Dulcie were still writing to the newspapers about song copyright in the 2000s.",[22,148,150],{"id":149},"going-blind-and-what-was-left","Going blind, and what was left",[12,152,153],{},"He had been blind in one eye since a sports accident in his mid-teens — a fact he kept quiet. In 1981 a cataract operation failed and he lost his sight completely. He gave his time to the Sri Lanka Council for the Blind, and Dulcie continued to look after Sooriya's interests. He died on 9 January 2006.",[12,155,156],{},"Ten years later his grandson Sanchitha Wickremesooriya, a Berklee graduate, reopened the name as the Sooriya Village on Skelton Road in Colombo — practice rooms, a recording studio, an arts library, a lecture room named after Vijaya Corea, and a hall of fame for the label's musicians. The family wanted to relaunch the label; what they built instead was a place for the next set of auditions.",[12,158,159],{},"Which is about right. Wickremesooriya's real product was never a record. It was the thing the country had lacked: somewhere for a Sinhala band to be heard, recorded, paid and defended in public.",{"title":161,"searchDepth":162,"depth":162,"links":163},"",2,[164,165,166,167,168],{"id":24,"depth":162,"text":25},{"id":42,"depth":162,"text":43},{"id":63,"depth":162,"text":64},{"id":135,"depth":162,"text":136},{"id":149,"depth":162,"text":150},"22 March 1920","The bookshop owner who founded Sooriya Records, Sri Lanka's first local label, held weekly auditions in his own front room, fought the state broadcaster's ban on 'thuppahi music' in the press, and started paying Sri Lankan musicians royalties.","9 January 2006","1950s-2000s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fgerald-wickremesooriya.webp","Sooriya (via Uditha Writes)","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fudithawrites.wordpress.com\u002F2020\u002F04\u002F06\u002Fgerald-wickremesooriya\u002F",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fgerald-wickremesooriya",[183],"Producer",{"title":5,"description":170},[186,189,192,195,198,201,204],{"title":187,"url":188},"Gerald Wickremesooriya — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FGerald_Wickremesooriya",{"title":190,"url":191},"Sooriya Records — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSooriya_Records",{"title":193,"url":194},"Gerald Wickramasuriya, 'Dancing to our own tune' — The Sunday Times, 18 October 1998","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F981018\u002Fplus5.html",{"title":196,"url":197},"Reincarnation of 'Sooriya Label' — The Sunday Times, 18 September 2016","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F160918\u002Fmagazine\u002Freincarnation-of-sooriya-label-208460.html",{"title":199,"url":200},"Many Worlds, One Village: The Sooriya Connection — Echelon","https:\u002F\u002Fechelon.lk\u002Fmany-worlds-one-village-the-sooriya-connection\u002F",{"title":202,"url":203},"A cinematic journey back to the heyday of Sinhala pop — The Sunday Times, 28 September 2025","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F250928\u002Fplus\u002Fa-cinematic-journey-back-to-the-heyday-of-sinhala-pop-613189.html",{"title":205,"url":206},"Chamila Talagala, Performers' Rights in Sri Lanka: Singers' Melancholia (Springer, 2019)","https:\u002F\u002Flink.springer.com\u002Fbook\u002F10.1007\u002F978-981-13-6668-0","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fgerald-wickremesooriya","M5K7FgxR2YmelDfMwrvQrwYok5I725vvPjGEEaSd4yA",1787999331802]