Karaoke

After our big adventure over the weekend, Danil and I were shattered. We toyed with the idea of going home and getting an early night, but decided to go to a party in town instead. I knew nothing about the party other than the facts that it was a birthday and that I didn’t know the birthday girl. We arrived at a very swish restaurant, where there was a whole table reserved, and the party was in full swing. The table was groaning with food, and there were fifteen completely unfamiliar faces around it. I couldn’t help but feel like I was intruding slightly, but Danil introduced me to Tanya, the birthday girl, and soon I had a queue of people who wanted a photo with ‘the Englishman’. It’s great how popular being English makes you in Russia. I feel like they must have an incredibly misplaced idea of England, but I’m not going to shatter their illusions as long as turning up to a stranger’s party and saying ‘I’m an English gentleman’ makes you the guest of honour + designated selfie spot.

Danil bailed after an hour or so, but I made the mistake of mentioning singing, and that gave someone the bright idea of going to a karaoke bar to ‘hear me sing’, so my fate was sealed.

The karaoke bar wasn’t the saddest place I’ve ever been, but it was a strong contender. It’s up there with the pet crematorium and the teetotallers' club night. There was a heavy red velvet curtain over the entrance, which I think served the dual purpose of stifling the sound (so that people on the outside didn’t change their minds about going in when the noise of awful singing greeted them) and making it look just that little bit funereal. Inside, there was a large projector and sound system, two bored looking staff members running the machine, and twelve empty tables. In fact, only two tables were occupied – one by two middle-aged women in leopard print dresses, and one by an old man in a suit. Honestly, it was a strange dynamic, both figuratively and acoustically. I assumed that the three of them were there together, but actually the two women were there as a group, and the man in the suit (who appeared to be a regular) was on his own. He just kept on drinking martinis and watching, while the two women competed with each other for who could sing the loudest, most agonising song. As soon as one took the microphone and started to wail, the other would sprint up to the staff on the karaoke machine and request a song immediately after. When we came in, one of them was trying to sing Yesterday. It was a rendition uninhibited by concerns like tonality and faithfulness to the English language. When it didn’t feel desperately sad, it quite funny. I had to stop myself from making eye contact with any of my party pals after we had a few bouts of the giggles. The weirdest thing was the martini guy, who was watching the two women keenly, but never spoke to them after their songs, and didn’t sing a single song himself. And this wasn’t a bar with a karaoke night, it was a karaoke bar. He’d paid extra to come into a karaoke bar, sit by himself, and watch two drunk women fight for the title of worst leopard-print-sporting middle-aged singer in the room.

Meanwhile, the two people running the karaoke machine had made the imaginative and entirely understandable decision of putting in earphones and listening to their own music.

For some reason, the idea seemed to be that I was going to sing something, but I couldn’t think what to sing. I wanted to do something Russian, but there wasn’t much that I knew well enough, and most of the stuff I did know was not exactly karaoke style. I agonised over the decision for a good ten minutes, while the two leopard print women continued their performance. Every thirty seconds, Tanya would lean over and say ‘please choose a song. Any song. Just stop them singing. Please.’ It was only when one of the women graduated to music of the mambo/crooner genre that, without me consciously willing them to, my legs dragged me across the room to the staff, and I found myself blurting out the first song that came to my mind ‘Viva la Vida, Coldplay’.

It wasn’t a bad choice by my subconscious. It’s a good tune, easy lyrics, and there was a good chance that some of the others would recognise it. But dayum that song is high. I figured that, because it was a karaoke night and nobody cared, I should just try and blast out the high notes in chest voice. It was fun, in an offensively tasteless kind of way. If videos of it ever get out, I will never be seen in a choir again. Suffice to say that I achieved my unspoken goal of getting the woman on the sound desk to turn down the mic.

Then I tried to leave, but the others were having none of it. I had duet and trio requests, ranging from Californication to Sway. Apparently it didn’t matter that I only kind of knew those songs, which is just as well.

By the time the Russian patriotic songs – which I didn’t know – came out, I found myself unable to join in. The leopard print women had left, and I began to feel a bit like martini man, who was still sitting forlornly at his table, watching just as intently as ever.