Michel Elefteriades on bringing Beirut scene to Dubai

Michel Elefteriades looks like the kind of character who pops up in a Bond film; the bit where 007 visits the casino and finds himself sharing a high-stakes poker table with an impossibly glamorous and exotic assortment of international billionaires, criminal masterminds and arms dealers.

For this interview he’s adopted the imposing sartorial code of a South American dictator: paratrooper boots, black military-style jodhpurs, an epauletted coat that looks like it’s been borrowed from the wardrobe of Erwin Rommel and more finger bling than rap royalty. Each bit of his outfit is from a different part of the world – apt considering he’s the self-styled ‘Imperial Highness of Nowheristan’, (more on this later).

He’s here to talk about the project for which he is perhaps best known: Music Hall. In January, the ten-year-old temple of eclecticism in the heart of Beirut got a branch in Dubai’s Zabeel Saray Hotel. Famed for its anything-goes music policy, the original venue has seen the likes of Sting, Kevin Spacey and any Lebanese celebrity you care to mention pass through its doors since it opened in 2003.

With a plush interior reminiscent of a Thirties Berlin cabaret club and no prior announcement of what acts are playing on the night, it’s certainly a radical alternative to anything Dubai has seen before. Guests are expected to let their hair down and get into the swing of things; there’s no room for wilting wallflowers here.

As for its charismatic owner, Elefteriades comes across as an amalgamation of Dr Frankenstein and an Arabian Simon Cowell (he has been a judge on X-Factor Arabia), bringing together on stage the unlikeliest of performers. “I once put a legendary Lebanese singer with a Spanish gypsy guitarist, it was a very good combination,” he says. He claims this is typical of the chimerical nature of those performing at Music Hall.

Music Hall usually hosts an assortment of acts (up to a dozen), with each appearing for just a few minutes. It’s indicative of Elefteriades’ low boredom threshold. He’s a modern-day Renaissance man, always engaging in several different things at once. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he says of his multifaceted career (although career probably isn’t a word Elefteriades would use). “People don’t take you seriously in any discipline.

I could have become a well-known music composer, for example, because I’ve composed a lot of songs. People say is he a composer or a producer or a film maker? They like things to be specialised so they do not accept anything else.

“I’m someone who gets bored easily. So sometimes even if something is quite successful I might drop it. I’m not someone who, once something works and everything is going well, says, ‘OK, now I’ll take my early retirement.’ I like challenges and sometimes when something is working I’ll still try something new. I also have a lot of self-discipline. “I cannot do things like go out on a boat and relax. I’m motivated by productivity. If there’s something where there is a risk, a totally crazy project where the chances of success are very small, I will still go for it.”

However, he did decide against opening the first overseas Music Hall in Qatar a few years ago, which seemed likely at one point. “We had a lot of projects in the pipeline in 2007,” he says. “We stopped everything. But the UAE is one of the countries that is doing really well at the moment. Since it is doing well and has such a cosmopolitan crowd, I thought it would work, maybe more so than in Beirut, where people don’t really understand what I am trying to do.

“I try to change nightlife, to get people laughing and talking. This is not DJ culture, it’s not about showing off. I go back to the tribal thing, the ancient rituals of enjoying music when the whole village would get together to enjoy and have fun. It’s almost a family thing, so it’s healthy. It’s not like a nightclub where people go to hunt and the place is charged with sexuality. I mean if a guy wants to chat with a woman we’re not going to send him to jail, but it’s not the main thing.”

Having appeared as a judge on X-Factor Arabia, Elefteriades has achieved a certain degree of fame in the region, but for such an exhibitionist he is refreshingly self-effacing, telling previous interviewers that 11 of the 13 documentaries he has made were “lousy” and admitting that none of the 150 songs he has composed have been hits. Asked how recognised he is, he says, “If I go to New York, people are not exactly running after me in the street, but if I go to Cairo it’s a different story. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I go crazy. It depends on my mood.”

In the Nineties, having formed a military group (the Unified Movements of Resistance) and engaged in political activism, two attempts were made on Elefteriades’ life. Perhaps inevitably these brushes with death resulted in his increased zest for life and desire for fun. “I treat every day that I live as extra time, like in a football game,” he says. “That’s why I don’t take things too seriously. I have a very postmodern approach to reality. I’m not self-conscious.

If I lost everything tomorrow or if I won the lottery I would not panic. I think this is due to the assassination attempts and what I’ve been through such as losing friends and having very dear people that were close to me getting killed. After that you have to say [life] is all a big joke, like a dream, and it allows you to live differently.” No one could accuse Elefteriades of taking the prosaic path in life. He’s even emperor of his own theoretical utopian country, Nowheristan, which has several thousand members all over the world.

Anyone can be a citizen and its official language, according to its website, is “Globish or poor or broken English”. “It’s an ideology that I proposed eight years ago,” explains Elefteriades. “It’s based on my vision of the world. I have a vision that is the sum of my experience of having lived under different systems, meeting so many people, of having suffered and seeing people suffer from the way the world is being run today.

“It has a light side to it, but it has serious content, too. It’s totally the opposite of what is being done now in politics. They give us silly ideas in nice packaging, but I’m giving good ideas in silly packaging.” Elefteriades gives a rare smile and sits back, sipping the tea he has requested to sooth his sore throat. We end the interview talking about subjects as varied as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, philosopher Noam Chomsky and the letter by Napoleon Bonaparte he recently bought at auction.

When I ask him how he manages to juggle fatherhood with his many interests, he says that he finds it impossible to be a typical family man. “I can’t live with anyone. How could I when perhaps I need to stay up late and work and play Wagner at full volume at four in the morning?”