The first time I met Neil French

I first met Neil French at the Wine Bar in Wisma Stephens.

Somewhere between copy, courage and cigarettes.

Not a stage. Not a seminar. Not a jury room with lanyards and name tags.

Just a bar. Low lights. The smell of cigarettes.

And the low thrum of advertising egos trying to out-drink each other.

I was a young copywriter at Ted Bates located at Wisma Lim Foo Yong then.

Eager. Hungry. Still learning how to choose words the way chefs choose knives.

Next to me was Ham, already with McCanns. A sharper dresser. A calmer presence.

We both knew who Neil was long before he walked in.

You always did.

Not from awards. From the stories.

He didn’t arrive like a celebrity.

No fanfare. Just presence. The kind that bends a room without trying.

When he spoke, it wasn’t volume that carried him. It was weight.

His words had gravity. They didn’t rush. They landed.

We spoke about copy. About Asia. About why most ads shout when they should whisper.

He told us something I never forgot:

“Copy isn’t about selling products. It’s about selling thinking.”

At that moment, I realized – this man wasn’t teaching craft.

He was redrawing boundaries.

Neil didn’t romanticise advertising. He respected it. And respect makes you precise.

He spoke about writing the way jazz musicians speak about silence.

Not what you add. What you remove.

About letting language breathe. About trusting the reader’s intelligence. About never insulting their time.

And suddenly, Wine Bar didn’t feel like a bar anymore.

It felt like a classroom without walls.

A place where ideas moved between half-empty glasses and full arguments.

What struck me most was not his brilliance – but his refusal to perform it.

He didn’t need to impress. He needed to provoke.

Because that’s what great teachers do.

They don’t give you answers. They leave you with discomfort.

The good kind. The kind that cures laziness.

From that night on, something shifted in how I wrote.

I stopped trying to be clever.

And started trying to be clear.

Neil didn’t make me want to win awards. He made me want to deserve sentences.

Decades later, when I see cluttered copy, over-designed decks, ideas screaming for attention, I think of that bar.

Wine Bar. Wisma Stephens. A glass in hand. A notebook in my mind.

And one man, speaking quietly while an entire generation of Asian ad men learned how to listen.

He was a magical inspiration, yes.

But more than that, he was a correction.

And we are all still adjusting.

Now he’s gone.

No spotlight. No curtain call. Just silence.

The kind he always understood.

Not empty silence. The honest kind words leave behind when they’ve done their job.

Rest in peace Neil French.

You didn’t just change how we wrote.

You changed what we thought writing was for.

And for that – Asia’s ad men, its quiet copywriters, its late-night bar thinkers will keep raising a glass.

Not to you.

But to the standards you left us with.