Karaoke – a sing-song for the drunk and deranged

HANDS up – there are few things in life I hate more than a sing-song. The only songs I know the words of require a full band to disguise the fact that the notes I hit best are flatter than a midlands bog. But if there’s one night out that beats a sing-song – for all the wrong reasons – then it’s karaoke.

To hammer home the point, I was in a pub in Liverpool recently which happened to be one of those pubs that the Beatles played in when they started out.

Now you quickly realised that the number of pubs the Beatles played in is sort of their equivalent of the number of people who were in the GPO in 1916 – but this place had a photograph of the Fab Four sitting on a bench that’s still there against a backdrop of wallpaper that’s still there. So you have to accept both their bona fide and their indifference to changing trends in interior design.

But in this temple to the greatest band there ever was, we had Karaoke Night which was in full swing by 9pm and was set to run until half past four in the morning.

A succession of crows mixed with cats on the point of strangulation tested the ear drums for quite a while – until a lady of what might euphemistically be termed ample proportions brought things to a new low with the most tuneless version of Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All that has ever been inflicted on an unsuspecting public.

And the irony of it all – which still brings a smile every time I think of it – was when she murdered a particularly high point of the yodelling with the immortal lyric “they can’t take away my dignity”. Because by then her dignity was somewhere south of the Mersey tunnel and heading towards the Irish Sea at a rate of knots.

So what is it that convinces tone deaf people that the one thing to cheer up a pub-full of people drinking pints would be to hear them strangling a song by bellowing a series of screams into a microphone? The obvious answer is drink of course, but most of us can enjoy a few pints without ever thinking we’re the new Elvis Presley – unless we’re in a kebab shop later on, of course.

Is it that there is a performer in all of us trying to get out?

For more of Dave’s Column and his views on pub singing see this week’s Tribune.