HOW TO… KILL IT AT KARAOKE
TEXT AL NEEDHAM
ON THE FACE OF IT, karaoke is only 30 years old. In fact, it started long before that, when a load of people in a cave discovered that bonking a couple of boulders together and grunting about killing sabretoothed tigers was a marvellous way to spend an evening. The making of music and the drinking of alcohol have lurched together down through the ages, arm-in-arm, stopping every now and then for a drunken snog – from travelling minstrels earning their night’s stay by doing a turn at the local inn, all the way down to the Beatles’ Hamburg residency in the early 60s, where you could watch them learning their chops for six hours a sitting, as long as you kept buying drinks and didn’t pass out.
However, by this time live singing in pubs seemed to be on its last legs, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of the jukebox. At the end of the 60s, most pubs still had their obligatory piano in the corner.
But by the time Saturday Night Fever had come out on video (creating a further threat to the pub trade, but that’s another story), they were clogging up junk shops around the world, hav ing been usurped by Crazy Barry’s Mobile Disco and its ilk.
Unbeknown to everyone, the elements of karaoke were already in place long before its invention in the early 70s. The bouncing ball technique, used in film musicals to get the audience to sing along, made its debut in 1925, while a record label called Music Minus One released songs without vocals as long ago as 1950. But it took the popularisation of the cassette tape and a musician from Kobe, Japan, called Daisuke Inoue to put the two together.
Some punters asked him for a tape that they could sing along to, so he invented a tape recorder that would play songs for 100 yen a pop, and started leasing them out to local restaurants. One nifty new title later (kara=empty, okesutora=orchestra), and karaoke was born.
Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to patent it, and a Filipino inventor called Roberto del Rosario did. He’s the one who raked the cash in when, thanks to the advent of the CD, karaoke spread like wildfire across the world in the late 80s. Nowadays, you can’t escape it.
If it’s not in the pub, it’s at the cinema (with specially-adapted versions of Mamma Mia, The Sound of Music, and thousands of Bollywood musicals). Come home, and you can’t hear yourself think because your daughter and her mate are playing SingStar. When you finally get the telly back, The X Factor’s on. You can get karaoke on your computer. On your phone. Even – if you’re lucky enough to own the Chinese-built and fantastically wellnamed Beauty Leopard – in your car.
In fact, the only place to get away from karaoke is North Korea. They banned it a few years ago, in order to “prevent the ideological and cultural permeation of anti-socialism”. So unless you want to go and live there, you’d better take note of the following.
HOW TO DO IT PROPERLY
Select your song with extreme caution
If this is your first time making a serious attempt, you can’t just roll up, run a finger over the booklet, and think: “Yeah, I’ll do that one.” Treat every song like it was one of those graphs the TV flash up during the mountain stages of the Tour de France, with its peaks and troughs, and plan accordingly.
Let’s take It’s Oh So Quiet by Björk. You know the whispering bit at the beginning is easy, and you’re sure you can nail the “Another big RRIOTT!!” peak to such an extent that everyone at the bar will drop their pints in awe. But what about the next, even bigger peak at the chorus? Are you going to collapse by the lyrical roadside, or career helplessly down to the next dip with nothing left in the tank for the next climb? Bottom line: if you can’t do all of it, do none of it.
The shorter the better
If you’re not up to standard, get in and out as quickly as possible. Three minutes may seem like no time at all, but when you’re up on a raised platform being stared at by a pub full of people, while you desecrate someone’s favourite song, it can feel like a lifetime.
Go for hits from the late 50s and early 60s, where putting the record on the turntable and fiddling with the pickup arm took longer than it did for the song itself to play – at one minute 27 seconds, (Let’s Have A) Party by Elvis was the shortest ever UK hit, while the shortest No 1 was What Do You Want by Adam Faith, lasting a comparatively drawn-out one minute, 39 seconds.
And for God’s sake, keep away from Bohemian Rhapsody (five minutes, 55 seconds), Stairway To Heaven (eight minutes, two seconds), Free Bird (nine minutes, nine seconds) and All Around The World by Oasis, which lasts a whopping nine minutes, 39 seconds.
Don’t step on anyone else’s vocal cords
Another huge mistake newcomers can make is picking a song that one of the regulars has claimed as their own. Not only will the awkwardness caused make everyone in the pub want to disappear, but the person you’ve usurped will unleash the kind of death-ray glare that they would normally reserve for someone slipping a hand into the back pocket of their partner’s jeans.
Songs to steer clear of include: Angels by Robbie Williams (usually sung by the lad with the bumfluff ‘tache who thinks it’s acceptable to wear tracksuit bottoms on a night out); Crazy by Patsy Cline (reserved for the woman on her own who looks like she got lost on the way to bingo); I Just Called To Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder (earmarked for the bloke who has his own organ in the front room and a stack of demo tapes in the garage); I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor (best left to the divorcee who is so over her ex that she has to remind us about it every single week); and New York, New York by Frank Sinatra (usually sung by that bloke with the organ again, who is still resentful that his career as a pub singer has been ruined by karaoke).
Get yourself a juhachiban
No, it’s nothing technological – it just means a signature tune that you excel at. The word is derived from the Japanese term for the definitive collection of kabuki plays. In Hong Kong, it’s more sensibly known as a “banquet song”. My advice - spend a lot of time in the shower, and don’t come out until you’ve found one, even if it turns you into a walking prune. And if you still can’t find a tune you can nail from front to back then go on to the next step.
Find a song that everyone knows, but no-one has ever thought of singing
The shock factor works so well in karaoke. The trick here is to find a tune that has fallen through the cracks of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, but that everybody in the place can also instantly recognise. I got through the first five years of my karaoke career with my rendition of Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas – a No 1 hit novelty record with lots of shouting, and the opportunity to cover up any vocal slips by kicking the air and screaming. Then it became a hit all over again in 1998, and I had to go looking for something else.
My advice here is to pick something that was No 1, but for a very short time. Anything from 2000 is perfect – there were a staggering 43 No 1 singles that year, including a succession of 12 new entry chart-toppers.
If you really can’t sing, pick songs sung by artists who couldn’t really sing either. I don’t want to get into an argument with die-hard fans out there, but yes, I’m referring to Bob Dylan. And Jimi Hendr ix. And Steve Harley on Come Up And See Me. I’m not saying that they were really bad singers, or that their efforts compare badly with the endless, tiresome vocal gymnastics performed by many among today’s generation of pop stars – it’s just that it’s easier to imitate some singers than others.
Don’t attempt to rap
Not ever. If you think it’s just a bunch of disaffected yooves talking, please have a go – if only to discover how ridiculously hard it is. The average hip-hop LP has up to five times as many lyrics as the average rock album and you can easily come a cropper on something as comparatively basic as Run-DMC’s Walk This Way.
Keep a beady eye on the screen
This is critical. You may be ready to belt out Total Eclipse Of The Heart by Bonnie Tyler and preparing for the plaintive opening piano chords, but karaoke bloke has left that CD at home and has put on the rubbish 1995 dancey biff-boff version by Nicki French. You are totally within your rights to stop this debacle before it starts by telling him to sort it out – but unless you clock the information on the screen before the music starts, you are obliged to tough it out. Other examples of this include: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye (Soft Cell good, David Gray bad); Always On My Mind (Elvis good, Willie
Nelson okay, Pet Shop Boys bad); and American Pie (Don McLean great, Madonna bloody awful).
But don’t read out the non-lyrical instructions shown on the monitor. You won’t be the first person to shout “Whistle!” during Dock Of The Bay, it’s not actually funny
Use the vocal monitors to your advantage
See the little amps pointing in your direction? They’re your best friends. Not only will you hear yourself singing, but you’ll also be able to adjust your pitch and volume on the fly. One of the biggest mistakes novice karaoke singers make is to hold the microphone right up to their mouth, making it hard for them to hear the backing music and ending up right off track.
It’s OK to be rubbish
No, it really is – particularly in the UK, where we love our heroic failures. You only really fail at karaoke by refusing to get up when your name’s been called. .
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