REVIEW: Broadway Hotel

EXCLUSIVE where2sing.com KARAOKE GIG REVIEW

Looking rather like a minature castle from the outside, this is a relic from the days when all Brisbane traffic filtered down the old Logan Road on its journey southbound. Indeed, when I first came to Brisbane, this was the tortuous route taken to head down to the Gold Coast, a narrow road winding through suburbs like Kangaroo Point and Woolloongabba - the last being where the Broadway Hotel sits on a corner, and indeed at the end of a wide street that no longer has major traffic, but which now has extensive parking down the middle.

Fallen for some years into disrepair, this wonderful relic was restored a few years ago, and has since sought to capture a trendy local market. However, without much success, and it now features backpacker facilities prominently on its website.

I think that one of its uphill battles has been customer service levels, or rather, as I was to discover, customer dis-service.

The website lists an alluring single room at $30 a night, and boasts free Internet access. Out of the country as I was, I emailed a couple of times and got an autoresponder assuring a reply soon - but never the actual reply. When in the country, but down in Sydney, I rang. 'Would you have a single room available?' I asked the Queensland voice on the other end. 'Nah, mate' was the instant reply. 'When would you have a single room available?' I persisted, hopefully. 'Not for a few weeks, not for a single room' was the similarly unhelpful reply.

It is a Friday night, and since the karaoke is an Aussie Rock Karaoke production, I'm assured of good sound and a great songlist. I park my car night next to the pub, a benefit of a pub with 'drive 'em away' service. There's a guitar player on the outside porch playing to a crowd of four or five, and sounding good. I head inside, and stop at the first bar, presumably the main one, and holding half a dozen aimless souls. 'Yeah?' enquires the barmaid minus a smile, and on pouring my drink states the price as 'two fifty' no please. But I do get a 'thank you' when I hand her the exact change, so what am I complaining about?

As a renoved building, this place has a myriad of rooms, all at different levels and serving different purposes. There's the main bar at which I'm sipping my beer, and a walk around the front and just inside of the porch with the guitar player takes me past a small room, or perhaps better described as a large alcove, in which there's comfortable seating and not much else. Then on and into a hallway, beyond which seems to be the Internet room, but I walk down the passage and into a sort of middle-of-nowhere no-defined-purpose room with a pool table and a bit of nothing else in particular. I could explore the areas on the right, but they seem to head towards a starcase presumably up to the accommodation, and ahead of me in the outside rear BBQ area of the pub that seems, today, to be holding no one.

But turning left at this point, approximately at the back of the main bar into which I first entered, and I go up a few stars into the karaoke room. You can get into this area by walking out the back door of that main bar, and you can go from this karaoke area out the back to the BBQ area. Still with me? Great.

But, walking into the karaoke section, I see what all W2S regulars should be delighted to see: Kristy. Kristy is singing, and she does this well, but more importantly, Kristy is Aussie Rock Karaoke - and wherever you find Aussie Rock, you seem to find a genuinely good karaoke.

It seems not to matter that she's running her system through the wall-mounted house . . .(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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