Earworm

I spent last Friday evening at one of my usual haunts: there is a Russian Karaoke Bar in the party capital of Malta, Paceville – ‘the Devil’s ville’ as one taxi driver described it when I first moved to the island. My friends and I went for a few drinks, a dance, and to warble our way through a few crowd-pleasers before heading home in the early hours of Saturday morning.

It was a wonderful evening because I enjoy a bit of karaoke, and it got me thinking about my history with singing in public. I suppose my earliest start was with both my sets of grandparents. When I was a little boy, they would stand me on a stool and give me 20 pence to sing a song like some infant jukebox. To be honest, I thought it was an easy cash grab, mercantile toddler I was, and it gave me a chance to belt out my favourite tunes on the radio. I think my most performed hit was Millennium by Robbie Williams. I had not really memorised most of the lyrics to the verses, but my logic was that if I sang the chorus enough times, it would count as a full song. I do not think my Grandparents minded, either, because they used paying me for songs as a loophole for my Mum’s rules on giving me too much pocket money.

Outside of my family, however, I was too shy to sing openly when I was younger. Sure, famous pop stars spent their lives performing for others, but the way I saw it, that seemed like an oddity not meant for your average Joe. Then I discovered, as I mentioned in my article about my Mother, that people did enjoy singing to each other in the mysterious phenomenon of karaoke. It was a revelation!

As having a sing-song in public now seems to be a bigger part of my life than I imagined it would be, I thought I would dedicate this week’s post to my top five karaoke songs, based on a few fond memories. Let us get stuck in!

Suggested Music Listening

1. The Floral Dance – Terry Wogan

Only those of a University of Essex persuasion will truly understand why I have included The Floral Dance in my list. None of my current crew will likely have heard of Terry Wogan in their lives, never mind this particular ditty of Cornish origin.

A UoE alumnus friend of mine, Terry had a penchant for this unusual number and used to turn up every Monday before Milk It – the student union’s premier night of cheesy songs – and perform The Floral Dance at karaoke. In one hand, he would clutch his microphone in the same style as the famous BBC radio DJ; in the other hand, he twirled a bouquet of flowers he bought from God knows where on his way to campus, promising to gift them to ‘the most beautiful lady in the room’ – or more likely the one with which he thought he had most chance. Let us just say that I do not need fingers on my hands to count how few times it worked. Still, it made for much amusement.

2. Twist and Shout – The Beatles

Keen Earworm readers will know that I already included Twist and Shout in my week 35 suggested playlist – ten points to Gryffindor if you spotted this – but The Beatles’ classic is getting another mention for my fond memory of singing it at my university’s summer ball in 2014 with one of my best friends, Jordan. Actually, I say ‘singing’, but the video evidence below may give you more an impression of screaming cats.

The choice of song came about because it was a staple of our piano-room visits. In our free time in the evenings or between lectures, we would often get bored of sitting on the same benches in the cold, so we would borrow the key from the security office to go have little jam sessions in a room more akin to a big wardrobe than a practice space. Jordan would twinkle the keys whilst I added some impression of singing, and many an hour we would pass in our pseudo-melodious way. I remember one time that we convinced around 10 persons to join us, all sat around Jordan’s piano, all singing Twist and Shout, and all before one of the security guards kicked us out for being two hours over our time slot. She did, however, encourage us to play another couple of songs before we left.

3. Your Man – Josh Turner

Baby, lock the doors and turn the lights down low…

Your Man has a convoluted history in my family. It all started at the Howick Club in Auckland, New Zealand one Sunday afternoon with my parents. Having bought a car a few weeks before, my parents were very much enjoying the opportunity to have a few more liquid accompaniments with their meal than I could have on account of being the designated driver. As we sat in the bar post-meal, a country music act took up in the back room, resulting in my Mother commenting that she was not a fan of the genre because ‘there are no happy country songs’. I disagreed. I rattled off around five examples, but neither parent would have it on the grounds that they recognised none of them. That is when they insisted on acquainting them with my suggestions with only my voice. After five minutes of them chanting in unison Sing one! Sing one! Sing one! whilst I sat quite shyly still on the other side of the table, they eventually tired of the topic and changed the conversation.

When I eventually got up the courage to share this song with my parents, they immediately loved it. The song became a meme in my family, with the first line or two being sung every time there was even the smallest sexual innuendo in the conversation. (Imagine Michael Scott from The Office with ‘that’s what she said’ but musical.)

he true value of Your Man, however, came to a peak one night in Valletta when I went to a party with my Father, two friends, and now girlfriend. At the time, my beautiful Julija and I were in the awkward pre-relationship stage where we were both fond of each other, both knew how the other felt, but were both still timid. My Father, being the funny bugger he is, thought it would be hilarious to start asking Julija a few little innocent but probing questions about the status quo. She politely answered him, my Father trying to mask his coy smile as I turned as red as beetroot from embarrassment. When he finished his little investigation, he smiled, left for the loo, got just out of sight around the corner of the stairs, and started to serenade us all with Your Man. All of us nearly spat out our drinks from laughing.

After that day, Your Man ended up enjoying greater popularity amongst my friendship group, and for a short while, we seemed to start a trend in Malta of others requesting to sing it at karaoke. It certainly beat hearing The Cranberry’s Zombie every five minutes!

4. Uptown Girl – Billy Joel

It was a Billy-Joel toss-up as to whether I went for Piano Man or Uptown Girl. The former reminds me of Piano Man bar, my favourite pub in Vilnius, which has a beautiful mural of the characters of the song all the way across the back wall. In the later hours each weekend, the pub tends to switch on Piano Man, although a little later than ‘nine o’clock on a Saturday’, and the crowds of buzzed Balts that go there end up bellowing the lyrics in brilliant form. Since this is, strictly speaking, not quite karaoke, however, and because I have strong memories of the contending song, I thought I should opt for Uptown Girl.

In 2020, just before COVID arrived in New Zealand and the dreaded lock-downs began, my best friend from the UK flew the 27 hours to come to visit me. We went on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, wherein we spent three to four weeks travelling around the north island of the country. We saw everywhere from Cape Reinga at the top to Wellington near the bottom, and in the latter stages of our adventure, we happened to swing by a little town called Napier. It is a quaint place in Hawke’s Bay, and the town is full of Art Deco architecture.

One evening at one of the nicer watering holes in Napier, Hammond and I had the genius idea to abandon our comfortable, rather tame surroundings in search of greater thrills. That is how we ended up at a dinghy sports bar that had karaoke in the front and slot machines in the back. After a few Lion Reds – those familiar with the beer will know instantly what sort of establishment this bar was was by the fact it was the best beer they sold – it was time for Hammond and I to hit the floor and sing Uptown Girl. The looks on the faces of the other patrons were priceless. There was a group of 60/70-year-old ladies that wiggled along to it and subsequently would not leave us alone for the rest of the night, even pushing for us to leave and join them at a party in Hastings so that we could meet there granddaughters. The rest of the scene was like that at Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers. You would think we would have left it alone at that point, but I remember following our performance with a shockingly bad version of Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher. Think we should have just stuck with Rawhide.

5. What’s Up? – 4 Non Blondes

And I said hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Hey, yeah, yeah,
I said hey,
What’s going on?

I am playing fast and loose with the term ‘karaoke’ for this one, but given I ended up singing with a band with which I am not associated and that I ended up reading the lyrics from my phone, I am taking it.

It was a fateful Tuesday evening two or three years ago, and, excited from winning a pub quiz at an Irish pub we rather liked, my gang and I decided to have one for the road at a bar called Crossroad not a million miles’ walk away. It was an added bonus that there happened to be an open mic night going on, organised by a friend of ours. The music was lively, we were on form with our jokes, and all in all, it was a pleasant evening.

‘This is going to be the last song for the evening. Does anybody want to sing?’ I heard as I was waiting to grab a cider from the bar.

‘Yes, he does,’ my friend Indrė yelled, pointing straight at me. I did not notice till I turned around to see the whole room staring in my direction. I scooched my way to the stage, avoiding eye contact with the expectant crowd, desperately trying to think of a song that the band might know how to play. Nothing came to me.

‘Do you know that one that goes “hey, yeah, yeah”?’ What the hell had my friend asked me?

‘You might have to give me a little more than that.’ Thankfully, the guitarist strummed the opening chords and I was on the money.

After getting up the lyrics on Google, the nerves killing off the long-term-memory files in my brain computer that has What’s Up? perfectly stored, I waited to start. The first verse went well. The second verse went well. The prechorus was going well till I remembered that I had to make a decision for the chorus about whether I was going to try to mimic Linda Perry’s legendary high notes in bad fashion or mumble through it in an equally terrible way. Thankfully, the crowd saved me. By the time we got to ‘and I said…’, you could not hear me any more. The room was having the best time and nobody noticed at that point whether I was singing well or not. I think I could have rattled off lines from the Nuremberg rallies and the crowd would have kept on singing What’s Up? without realising. It took the pressure off, and it ended up being one of my all-time favourite performances.

Final Thoughts

I love a good karaoke night. I love choosing songs that I think a crowd will like and trying my best to give a performance that at least lives in the same country as the original.

Do you enjoy singing in public? If so, what are your favourite songs to sing? Do you like more classic karaoke songs like Frank Sinatra’s My Way or do you like to sing something a little bit different? Let me know in the comments. I would love to hear about your karaoke experiences!

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About the Author

Lewis Brown

Lewis is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Earworm. His deep passion for music is what inspired him to create Earworm as a music magazine for lovers of all genres.

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