Another Nightlife Story: Wild Pearl

In the first part of our Another Nightlife Story series, we explored how nightlife, both the idea of it and the form it takes in our society, has been transforming from indulgence and cathartic release to an intentional gathering—another type of release of sorts. But what we’d like to ask next is: could this new form of nightlife as we know it become something of a wellness activity, an outlet to recharge and refresh?

Ask Chris Shearmon of Wild Pearl, and he’d give you a resounding yes in a heartbeat.

In the second part of our series, we dive into the world that Wild Pearl has created—a community of people who prioritise health, wellness, and above all, good, heart-thumping music.

Founded by Chris and his good friend Andy Lines in back 2022, the collective first started out as an outlet for gatherings in the underground music scene. After all, Chris himself has deep roots in Western club culture, having grown up with club music in the United Kingdom and even working a stint in a nightclub while in university. When he moved to Singapore in 2012, he continued to seek out similar experiences and places with these familiar sounds, whether they were techno, house, or space clubs. But when Covid came along and shuttered these spaces, he took matters into his own hands and brought his own curation of music to the table, turning his spare bedroom into a club and regularly showing up at house parties with what he calls his questival bag—a stash of lights, kaftans, a smoke machine, and of course, DJ equipment.

As fate would have it, this is how Chris met his co-founder Andy—at a mutual friend’s birthday party in 2021 where they immediately hit it off, so much so that within six months, the pair found themselves signing the lease to a space that would soon birth the beginnings of Wild Pearl.

But just as nightlife in Singapore continues to transform and evolve, so has Wild Pearl. Today, the team is focused on broader creative and wellness experiences, fostering healthy human connections along the way. They do so not only by organising their own parties and events, but also by collaborating with other homegrown businesses on fun, one-off events like group cycling and run club sessions with live DJ tunes.

As the collective approaches their fourth year of existence, we sat down with Chris for a chat about what it takes to not just survive through challenges, but to thrive through them while staying true to what he and the team believe in.

Wild Pearl is challenging the conventional notion of partying, where late nights and alcohol are traditionally involved. Tell us more about the alternative that Wild Pearl brings to the table.
While we started out as an underground thing, we’ve evolved to become a mostly-daytime event as we see it as a way to lean towards healthier behaviours. By default, daytime gatherings are healthier because they fall within people’s circadian rhythms, which is really helpful for wellness.

That said, whenever we plan for events and parties, I’m our main customer, so whenever I’m feeling something, I’d want to pursue it to the highest degree. The reason why this is now wellness-focused is because two years ago, I decided to stop drinking alcohol. Back then, I had just started running Wild Pearl full-time after leaving my corporate career of about 11 years, and I just wanted more time in my day to work, rest, and feel more energised, so I created these daytime concepts mainly for my own sake. As it happened, a lot of our friends liked what we were doing, so we just carried on, which then led us to find a lot of other people who believed in this too and wanted to join us in our mission towards wellness.

Can you tell us what wellness means at Wild Pearl, and how this differs from the wellness that we as Singaporeans know?
Before we decided to dive headfirst into the wellness angle, I did a lot of digging around health and wellbeing in general.

What I learnt is that to live a long and healthy life, you need to take care of your personal relationships. Things like going out to see your friends, hanging our with people that you love, and surrounding yourself with people that you really get on with. And then on top of that, you also need to take care of your physical wellbeing, whether in terms of the food you eat or the environments that you sit within.

For me, creating Wild Pearl was sort of an extension of that. I love listening to music, and I see nightlife and club music as a form of art in itself. I don’t see it as merely a soundtrack to my weekend—rather, I see it as the main reason for why I even want to go out in the first place. So ultimately, at Wild Pearl we see wellness as a situation where you can listen to music like this as much as possible, without it affecting your health in a negative way.

Just as alcohol and late nights have been the backbones of the traditional club scene, we see now—with Wild Pearl and other contemporary collectives—that wellness and sobriety are backbones of the modern-day nightlife community. Apart from these, what other backbones do you think Singapore’s nightlife scene needs to build (or rebuild) in order to thrive in our current social climate?
This might not be so much of a backbone as it is a mindset that I feel is important, but I think the idea of quality over quantity, whether as a partygoer or a promoter, is a healthy backbone to have.

Partygoers and party promoters each have their own set of challenges, but the idea applies to both. If you’re a partygoer, it’s important to be a bit more discerning with the nights out that you have and the events that you choose to go for so that you can better manage your energy levels. For me, when I’m looking forward to an particular event or a night out, I would consciously choose to not go for events that drain me in between, maybe take a weekend off to rest and stay home, and plan my time and energy direction a little further ahead.

For promoters, I think it’s very important to have some downtime, and to not feel like you have to put on parties all the time or that you have to be constantly getting bigger just to get better.

We plan our parties quite far in advance, want to have just 80 people as our maximum capacity, and we’re not aiming too make any money—we just want to break even, and to bring in DJ sets that resonate with us and what we stand for. So whether that’s our local friends or people we know of in the region, we aim to not succumb to external expectations around the idea of growth and what it means to thrive as a collective.

Inspirational! But that said, we also understand that at the end of the day, Wild Pearl is more than just a group of party organisers—it’s a business as well. Can you tell us more about how the team is pushing the business aspect of the collective while still upholding this attitude and mindset towards healthy growth?
One big way in which we’re building upon the business aspect of things is with Wild Water, a product that we created with our friend Brendon, the founder of Boujee Botanicals. Basically what Brendon does is he creates medicinal, non-alcoholic drinks such as kombucha, jamu, and herbal elixirs, which I love consuming, especially since I’ve stopped drinking.

At our own parties or at other people’s parties, I would always be seeking Brendon’s drinks out because they’re tasty and so good for your health, with all these active ingredients like cacao and lion’s mane mushrooms. But when I go out to other clubs or bars, I wouldn’t be able to find drinks like these because all of the non-alcoholic options would be things that are either super boring or very bad for you with a ton of sugar, preservatives, or caffeine. This was how the idea of Wild Water came to be—to create delicious, healthy, non-alcoholic drink options that suited the specific environment that we’re in, aka the nightlife and party scene.

So I told Brendon that I really liked what he was doing with his teas and all, but that I had an idea to co-create drinks that could maybe help with focus and boosting energy so that I could DJ with them. This was when we invented Blue Energy. After that, we came up with a couple of other drinks, like a red drink that can help with better sleep and recovery after a night out, or a gold drink for immunity, especially for people in the community building space where you’re surrounded by lots of people or are always in rooms with poor air circulation. So yeah, this is one way in which we’re pushing out the business aspect of Wild Pearl while still staying true to our goal of promoting wellness.

It isn’t easy being a party organiser these days, much less running it as a business as well. What is it that keeps you going, and how are you holding on to the essence of Wild Pearl as the team and business continues to grow?
I think what keeps me going is the fact that this is what feeds my creativity. When I was in my corporate career, I realised I wasn’t satisfied creatively, so I would do all these side quests like helping my friend out with his record label, DJ-ing at home, and hosting parties. And then when the pandemic came about, it forced me to realise that the things around me that I enjoyed were not going to come back anytime soon, so this is why and how Wild Pearl was born.

Another thing that’s kept me going is that so many people seem to resonate with what we do, probably because this all comes from a really pure place.

It was never supposed to become a business—it was just supposed to be us having friends over, enjoying the space together, but eventually we found our mission from there, and we just kept feeding that energy, kept listening to people, and just kept making it bigger and bigger.

Not necessarily because we wanted to scale it, but because we just wanted to spend more time with our friends and doing what we love more often.

How I’m holding on to the essence of Wild Pearl is by giving back to the people who come to our space regularly. I wanted to be a community leader, and what I noticed is that while we’re here activating all of these spaces and being in all these different environments, I’m seeing more and more people who are like me. They have their DJ crew or restaurant or whatever it is that they’ve created, and they feel really strongly about it, and what I really want to do is to help them be the best at what they do. What I mean is, not every run club has the capability to buy their own speakers, and not every gym or wellness community knows how to run parties, so we step in and help each other out through collaborations. One example would be the cycling session we did with the local cocktail bar SANTAi in December last year: we had a DJ spinning tracks on the go, alongside participants as they cycled. We also did something similar with local creative agency OuterEdit and Okay Anot Run Club as part of Singapore Design Week 2025, where we were similarly spinning tunes for runners as they completed a trail around Singapore Science Park.

In this way, I get to do what I love in a different capacity, while they get to gather their people in a different way, and together, we get to build a shared community.

Finally, as nightlife keeps shifting, what are your hopes for where party culture in Singapore might go next?
I actually think that nightlife has a really important part to play in the local party culture. It’s going through this big change at the moment, but I don’t think it should be villainised at all, just as it’s not wrong for people to enjoy drinking alcohol and things like that. Yes, people’s relationships with nights out will change—there might be bigger DJs on our stages, or more extravagant parties being held, but what I would really love to see is more collaborations between these big players and smaller, local collectives. I really love to see people push the production further at parties, and I think there are loads of possibilities in that aspect. I think this is the year where people rediscover what it is that they enjoy doing the most, and trying to do it as much as they can.