People and noise

A Journey to the Dark Side

It began as the office was closing on Friday evening. “Let’s go for a drink around the corner,” said the people from the next office. As far as I remember, this was the first time they had ever suggested such a thing. A number of excited conversations ensued. As I finished collecting together my stuff and shutting down my computer, I added my voice to the hubbub. “Yes. Let’s go. Let’s go.” As we left the office, Helen turned to me and said, “So, you’re ok with going to the karaoke tonight.”

“Umm…what?”

My musical snobbery means that I have a natural aversion to karaoke, but in reality I don’t dislike it as much as I think I should. Nonetheless, I always, always find it difficult to actually go to a karaoke bar. So it was with a degree of shock that I discovered that I’d somehow signed up (or been signed up, the dark hand of Helen has not been ruled out of my suspicions) for a night out to one. The situation wasn’t helped by discovering it was effectively a girl’s night out, and I was to be the lone male. I began to wonder if there was an escape route.

Happily, the after-work drinks went relatively swingingly, and our alcohol intake, combined with Helen suffering from a slight tummy bug, meant that she wasn’t up for a big night out. At 11pm I trotted the short distance to the karaoke, safe in the knowledge that we were just going to show our faces and we probably weren’t going to be there long enough to sing anything.

We walked in to a dark room, which appeared to be a bizarre hybrid of a small 70s discoteque and a second-hand funiture store. What light there was came from a small, seemingly well stocked bar (though it mostly served jugs of beer, freshly decanted from bottles) and a single, occasional disco light, emanating from the neighbouring DJ booth and occasionally bouncing off the mirrored tiles lining the walls of the dancefloor. (Dancefloor is perhaps a generous term for a small corner of the room where an arc of carpet is cut away to reveal a patch of concrete, but I’ll run with it.)

The rest of the room was filled with tatty old sofas, arranged into several impromptu u-shaped booths where groups of friends sat, each with a view of one of the three televisions. A couple of books of available songs made their way slowly round the room with accompanying torches providing the light to read them. One man swept quietly through the darkness, snatching the microphone from a person as the final words of a song left their lips, and ghosting it over to the next singer just as their track began. None of the singers got up from their sofa. Part of the fun was working out who was holding the microphone at any one moment.

Every so often, the music moved uptempo, the screens were switched off, the disco light on, and people made their way up to the dancefloor to shake their stuff for three or four tunes (no more) before the serious business of the evening continued.

I thought the place was amazing. The more I considered it, the more I realised they were on to something great. They’d somehow stumbled upon a fusion of a quiet night out, a retro disco, and a drunken night in doing karaoke in your living room. Of course, there’s only one of these that holds any appeal to me, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a big market for it. The anonymity of the darkness helped people sing without inhibitions, though staying stuck to the sofa didn’t do anything to aid the quality of their vocals.

The song book had a section dedicated to English language records, which might have been enough on it’s own to keep Helen and I entertained, littered as it was with opportunities for pedantry and giggling at funny spellings. We couldn’t begin to imagine what the apparent Carpenters hit “There’s a Kind of Shum” might be. Elton John (occasionally Jhon) did especially well with the tracks credited to him. I particularly enjoyed “Now Here Man”(?) and “You Gotta Love Bom Bone.”

As we made our way into the slightly lighter darkness of the night outside, a man grabbed us. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“England,”
“I’m from Spain. I came here years ago, met an Iquitos girl, and I’ve never left.”

With that he wandered off. A random end to a random night.

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