REVIEW: Wednesday karaoke - Cheers!

EXCLUSIVE where2sing.com KARAOKE GIG REVIEW

When a young, vibrant pub in the dead centre of Sydney puts on karaoke, it sounds too good to be true.

But I'm in the Cheers Bar on George Street, and I recognise not one person. Where are all the W2S regulars? Actually, where is everyone, because the bar is so dark it's difficult to see how many people are here?

Strangely, I've never been into the Cheers bar before, even though I must have walked past it a thousand times. Late at night there's a queue on the street outside, and perhaps at other times it has seemed to quiet. This bar is part of an establishment with good road frontage, and a flight of stairs at the side of the frontage leads down to this particular bar.

It's 'quality', with new paint and fittings, clean, stylised, and trendy. At the foot of the wide stairs is the bar, karaoke on the right, pool tables in the distance, and the bar on the left. The barman is attentive, courteous and efficient - obviously well trained. The layout of the room is good, with many places in which to sit, yet without the feeling of having the room divided. On the karaoke side of the room is a wall of monitors, all displaying the same sequence of inhouse promos.

But the karaoke is being held in a local black hole, between the wall of monitors and the audience. For the area is completely devoid of light, and the glare of the monitors forces only a sillouette of the singer. Such a black hole can only have been created by design in such an otherwise well designed pub, but the result is to render the performance no better than out of tune background 'musac'.

Those is attendance are almost all young - a group at the pool tables at the rear of the room, a couple at a low table almost in the black hole and which is playing cards, three or four on stools at a shelf looking at the kararoke, a table to one side with about eight young people, and a few more of us scattered around the room at other small tables. This looks like a karaoke recently started, when the resident locals are coming to terms with singing in front of an audience, and where they are yet to find their feet. The singers are ordinary, but enjoying themselves sometimes waving their arms around and experimenting with songs they obviously love but have not yet learned to sing.

'Give it up for ...' goes the lady KJ who seems to spend her time rummaging around at the console to one side of the singing area. We applaud. 'And now we have .... singing .....' she says, and '....' leaves our area and disappears into the black hole, visible only as a dark outline.

No, the singers are not bad, but there's nothing good or really entertaining to be seen, and rather ordinary is followed by rather ordinary. After a couple more singers, the lady KJ announces that we'll have some music while more people find songs, but almost as soon as she has announced it and started playing music, a couple . . .(full story on where2sing.com)

Read the rest of this exclusive Karaoke Gig Review, and find whether this karaoke gig is still running on Where2sing.com . . .

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