[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":198},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-fifteen-minutes-a-week":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":163,"description":164,"era":165,"extension":166,"featured":167,"heroImage":168,"imageCredit":169,"imageLicense":170,"imageSource":171,"meta":172,"navigation":173,"path":174,"rawYear":175,"seo":176,"sources":177,"stem":196,"translated":173,"url":180,"__hash__":197},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Ffifteen-minutes-a-week.md","Fifteen Minutes a Week: How the State Rationed Sinhala Pop",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":153},"minimark",[9,13,16,21,29,32,39,43,46,53,56,60,63,66,73,85,95,99,102,112,116,119,126,130,150],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Friday afternoon, 1969. A schoolboy gets off the bus and runs the last stretch home, because at two o'clock the Sinhala commercial service comes on and the family's Grundig valve radio has to be tuned in time. He is not running for a long programme. What he wants — Sinhala songs by bands, with guitars in them — has been allotted, in the memory of the man who was that boy, \"a paltry 15 minutes a week.\"",[10,14,15],{},"That figure has been repeated for half a century, and it is the reason the story of Sinhala pop is not really a story about a band. It is a story about how a genre gets past a state broadcaster that does not want to play it.",[17,18,20],"h2",{"id":19},"what-the-ration-was-for","What the ration was for",[10,22,23,24,28],{},"By the late 1960s the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation — Radio Ceylon until 1972 — was the only way a Sinhala song reached the public. It graded its musicians, reviewed lyrics before broadcast, and decided what a national music ought to sound like. Since the early 1950s that had meant ",[25,26,27],"em",{},"sarala gee",": sitars, violins, tablas, flutes, poets with reputations, a genre invented at a radio station to counterbalance film music.",[10,30,31],{},"Guitar bands did not fit anywhere in that scheme. The station's English stream had room for them; its Sinhala stream, guarding a national style, had fifteen minutes.",[10,33,34,35,38],{},"The boy at the radio, Sasanka Nanayakkara, remembered in the ",[25,36,37],{},"Sunday Times"," in 2025 what the audience actually wanted. They had heard the Latin-sounding Colombo groups of the mid-sixties — Los Caberlos, Los Flamingoes, Los Muchajoes — and admired them without feeling they were theirs. They had begun to listen to the Beatles, to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and to prefer plain arrangements. Then, in 1969, they heard the Moonstones.",[17,40,42],{"id":41},"the-family-in-the-english-stream","The family in the English stream",[10,44,45],{},"The Moonstones were managed by an advertising man, Sri Sangabo Corea. Two of his relatives were among the best-known voices on the island: Vernon Corea, who had joined Radio Ceylon in 1956 and presented shows heard right across the subcontinent, and Vijaya Corea. Both worked in English.",[10,47,48,49,52],{},"That turned out to be the crack in the wall. Clarence Wijewardena and Annesley Malewana's songs were first broadcast not on the Sinhala service but on the ",[25,50,51],{},"Saturday Star"," programme on the English service — Sinhala pop reaching a Sinhala audience by way of an English-language slot, because that was the door the Coreas could open. Nanayakkara puts it flatly: \"we were starved of their music on the SLBC… it was the mighty Corea clan, Sangabo, Vernon and Vijaya, who having influence in the English music stream of the SLBC, gave fans like us a chance on Saturday evening on their radio show.\"",[10,54,55],{},"Nothing about that arrangement was official policy. It was standing, used on behalf of two young men from Ratnapura.",[17,57,59],{"id":58},"a-childrens-bookshop-in-the-fort","A children's bookshop in the Fort",[10,61,62],{},"Radio alone could not make records. The second thing the Coreas did was to persuade a businessman to pay for them.",[10,64,65],{},"Gerald Wickremesooriya had opened The Children's Bookshop in 1959 at No. 20 Queens Street, near the clock tower in Colombo Fort. It sold children's books, then children's records, then imported EPs of Jim Reeves and the Beatles, and by the late sixties it was one of the busiest lunchtime hangouts in the Fort — Wally Bastiansz and Clarence Wijewardena among the people who drifted in. In 1968 Gerald and his wife Dulcie turned the shop's record trade into a label: Sooriya.",[10,67,68,69,72],{},"Its first release was the Moonstones' ",[25,70,71],{},"More Hits by The Moonstones",", catalogue number CHB001. Its method was as unofficial as the radio slot: weekly auditions held at Gerald's own house at 5 Sea Avenue, Colombo, where anyone might turn up and be heard. Out of those auditions came the Golden Chimes and Super Golden Chimes, the Three Sisters, M. S. Fernando, the La Bambas, Desmond de Silva, Milton Mallawarachchi, Priya Suriyasena, the Dharmaratne Brothers, the Mendis Foursome, and the saxophonist Stanley Peiris, whose record was the first instrumental release in Sinhala pop.",[10,74,75,76,80,81,84],{},"Sooriya then did the thing that had not been done before: it pressed ",[77,78,79],"strong",{},"the first Sinhala long-playing record made in Sri Lanka",", ",[25,82,83],{},"The Sooriya Show",", catalogue CHB LP 1. Up to that point a Sinhala record meant a disc cut abroad or a short EP. An LP made at home was an argument about how seriously this music should be taken.",[10,86,87,88,91,92,94],{},"The label built its own audience where the radio would not. There was a weekly ",[25,89,90],{},"Sooriya Show"," on air and a live ",[25,93,90],{}," that sold out; in 1974 Gerald staged one on a floating platform in the swimming pool at St Joseph's College, with dancers on the diving boards.",[17,96,98],{"id":97},"snobbery-not-statute","Snobbery, not statute",[10,100,101],{},"It is worth being exact about what was happening, because the word usually reached for is \"ban.\" No statute prohibited Sinhala pop, and no gazette outlawed a guitar. What the genre faced was a taste hierarchy enforced by the people who controlled airtime.",[10,103,104,105,108,109,111],{},"The judgement behind it was old and openly stated. Music associated with the coast, with Burghers, with dance halls and with English had long been dismissed as ",[25,106,107],{},"thuppahi"," — half-caste, mongrel, not properly Sinhala. Gerald Wickremesooriya is credited with writing to the newspapers to defend songs the station would not play against exactly that charge, though the article usually cited for it — his own 1998 ",[25,110,37],{}," essay \"Dancing to our own tune\" — is a history of Sinhala music from the Donoughmore era and contains no such passage. What that essay does show is a man who had studied under Ananda Samarakoon in a small house in Dehiwela in the late 1930s and who thought about Sinhala music as a continuous argument rather than a fixed inheritance. It is not hard to see why he backed the boys with the guitars.",[17,113,115],{"id":114},"what-fifteen-minutes-could-not-hold","What fifteen minutes could not hold",[10,117,118],{},"The ration broke from both ends. Records made the songs available without the radio; the English service made them audible in spite of the Sinhala one; and the audience did the rest. By the early seventies Clarence Wijewardena and Annesley Malewana were topping the charts on both the Sinhala and the English services of the same corporation that had rationed them, and Sooriya's roster had turned into the mainstream of Sinhala popular music.",[10,120,121,122,125],{},"The last irony belongs to Vernon Corea. In 1976 he was invited to present the first Asian radio programme in English on BBC Radio London, ",[25,123,124],{},"London Sounds Eastern"," — and used it to play Clarence and Annesley to a new audience, five thousand miles from the fifteen minutes.",[17,127,129],{"id":128},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,131,132,133,135,136,139,140,80,142,145,146,149],{},"The \"paltry 15 minutes a week,\" the Grundig radio, the Corea family's use of the English stream and the role of the Children's Bookshop come from Sasanka Nanayakkara's 2025 recollection in the ",[25,134,37],{},", written as a review of the biographical film ",[25,137,138],{},"Clarence: Rhythm of the Guitar",". The founding of Sooriya in 1968, catalogue CHB001, the auditions at 5 Sea Avenue, the first Sri Lankan-made Sinhala LP and the label's roster are documented in the Wikipedia articles on Sooriya Records and Gerald Wickremesooriya, which cite contemporary reporting in the ",[25,141,37],{},[25,143,144],{},"The Island"," and the ",[25,147,148],{},"Sunday Observer",".",[10,151,152],{},"Two cautions. The fifteen-minute figure is a remembered one — no SLBC schedule or internal document confirming it has been published, and it should be read as a description of how thin the allocation felt rather than as a measured quantity. And the widely repeated line that Gerald wrote publicly against songs being kept off the air as \"thuppahi music\" is asserted in reference works but is not supported by the 1998 article they cite; the sentiment is well attested for the period, the specific intervention is not.",{"title":154,"searchDepth":155,"depth":155,"links":156},"",2,[157,158,159,160,161,162],{"id":19,"depth":155,"text":20},{"id":41,"depth":155,"text":42},{"id":58,"depth":155,"text":59},{"id":97,"depth":155,"text":98},{"id":114,"depth":155,"text":115},{"id":128,"depth":155,"text":129},"controversy","The national broadcaster gave Sinhala group songs a quarter of an hour a week. What broke the ration was one family with standing in the English service and a bookshop in the Fort.","1960s-1970s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Ffifteen-minutes-a-week.webp","Lnbogoda (Wikipedia)","Public domain","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Super_golden_chimes_9.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Ffifteen-minutes-a-week",1969,{"title":5,"description":164},[178,181,184,187,190,193],{"title":179,"url":180},"Sasanka Nanayakkara, 'A cinematic journey back to the heyday of Sinhala pop' — 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":182,"url":183},"Sooriya Records — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSooriya_Records",{"title":185,"url":186},"Gerald Wickremesooriya — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FGerald_Wickremesooriya",{"title":188,"url":189},"Annesley Malewana — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FAnnesley_Malewana",{"title":191,"url":192},"Vernon Corea — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FVernon_Corea",{"title":194,"url":195},"Gerald Wickramasuriya, 'Dancing to our own tune' — Sunday Times, 18 October 1998","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F981018\u002Fplus5.html","en\u002Fstories\u002Ffifteen-minutes-a-week","b0QMeRe_CgWdGHbVyzZxvk_jc435t-YD9N4pRkQ4QvQ",1787999337755]