A Song For The Deaf.

As I'm sure you're already aware, karaoke is of Japanese origin - however, did you know what the word karaoke actually means? You may be shocked to hear that the word karaoke itself, when translated, literally means "to inflict misery and suffering upon anybody within earshot of your booze-fuelled yodeling as you, a modern day Brutus, stick the final knife into the slumped almost-corpse of the once-mighty Money For Nothing as it bleeds to death beneath a statue of yourself, microphone in hand, with your tie around your head in an attempt to both pay maximum homage to Knopfler and hide the receding hairline you are so gracefully sporting these days"? Didn't know that? Well then, did you know that all it takes is two pints of lager, a cheap instrumental backing and a microphone to turn The Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy For The Devil' into something in which Satan himself would probably immerse himself with glee, getting more and more frenzied by the minute until the climactic moment where Donny (an Australian technician who, by day, fixes photocopiers and by night sings "with a Rhea-esque gruff quality" that more closely resembles something from the back catalogue of strepsilcore-scream-a-thon group Converge) attempts to sing the guitar solo in a grotty, whining tone - at which point Satan would more than likely be forced to excuse himself, using a strategically-placed folder over his crotch to conceal the raging, serpentine erection with which he would undoubtedly be lumbered at the sound of such suffering being inflicted on innocent human beings?

I certainly didn't know any of those things until last Saturday, when we were punished - I assume we were being punished, I can explain it in absolutely no other way - with a karaoke evening. It was one of those things that just happens at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with all the wrong people - all these elements of the damned, brought together by fate, unite as one to chew away what paltry meat was left on the bones of Do The Strand. An Australian business apparently bought a local Welsh firm, whose chief executive at the time of the sale - who, despite now being rich enough to build a house out of solid gold, has decided to keep his house in the village (whether he will have it gilded at a later date is unclear) - is a member of the Village Watch. To celebrate the unexpected obesity of his bank balance, he decided to invite them all to the semi-regular Village Watch party, which just so happened to be karaoke this month. So Henry was asked if we could cater for an "enlarged" gathering (with the Australians) and karaoke. We certainly could, said Henry. Hence why last Saturday, our function room was twenty parts Village Watch Association, ten parts Australian superbusiness (from what I could glean, the firm were more interested in the patents held by the company for servicing machinery than the company itself), a hundred parts alcohol and two parts annoyed bar staff.

It went without saying that Eddie and I would be manning the bar, but who would be providing the karaoke? Henry had promised a karaoke service in with the price and a quick look at the maths - which didn't include a karaoke/disco rental - soon pointed to the fact that something didn't add up (especially when you consider that the event was less than six hours into the future and apparently nothing had been booked). Looking over our budgets for the week, I decided to ask Henry how we would be providing a karaoke party without a karaoke machine. I looked up in the flat; no, he wasn't there. I peered in through the function room window, a small pane of glass that provides an insight into the Pub Of Functions Past, as nothing is ever cleared away afterwards - the remains of a wedding cake were barely visible, but no Henry. I went everywhere in search of him until I checked the shed outside, where Henry sometimes finds solace and plans his impractical schemes (like Inspector Gadget after he lost all his money on scratch cards and had to make all his gadgets in a dilapidated old shed). Although, to be fair, it answered my question - I opened the door to the shed and saw an extremely surreal vision, so bizarre in its appearance that it hit me like a ton of bricks.

It was Henry, standing on a podium made of wine boxes and cases of Magners labeled for return, with a gigantic flashing sign behind him reading "DJ HENRY". In front of that was his computer rigged up to two ridiculously gigantic speakers; pumping out through it was a rib-rattlingly bass-heavy mix of Ring Of Fire. However, it wasn't the Ring Of Fire we all love; not the fantastic San Quentin rendition, nor was it any rendition featuring Johnny Cash's haunting baritone. It was, in fact, the karaoke-ready instrumental version that Henry had downloaded for the occasion, which was constructed with synth sounds so cheap that - for all the realism they managed to summon - they may as well have recorded a drunkard on a street corner slobbering into a kazoo between swigs of White Lightning and the occasional soiling of his pants.

I had some reservations.

First of all, the sign had evidently been made on the cheap - in fact you would have to pay somebody handsomely to dispose of it. It was a wooden box, painted back, filled with fluorescent lights, with the letters cut out with a jigsaw and covered with different coloured light filters in front of each letter. While this may sound good enough, Henry was obviously not a carpenter; or indeed somebody with enough common sense to know that if you only get one shot at permanently making holes in some wood, it's generally a good idea to make some sort of outline in pencil or something. But no, this is Henry Ginn we're talking about, who had obviously just gone for it, and had suffered as a consequence. The first three letters were opulently spaced, but as Henry obviously realized around the "E" that space was limited, he began to make the letters narrower and narrower, the letters so thin you could slice cheese with them, and he had compressed it all to the point that the last two letters are very nearly touching. It looked like somebody had ordered this piece of stage lighting from a payphone, and left it to the very last second of the call to tell the carpenter what the box should say, resulting in a mad scramble to fit everything in before the end. Not great.

My second reservation was Henry. Henry, obviously a frustrated DJ at heart, had obviously missed the meeting where everybody decided that the era of the zany DJ is one that should die a quick and dignified death as soon as is convenient, before the Musical Justice Committee puts a bullet in its head. Henry thinks that being a DJ is some sort of martial art, not just the ability to stand in front of a computer pressing buttons like a chimp. I've always hated DJs like that - the ones that feel they deserve some sort of undying adulation for their ability to stand in front of a pair of turntables or a computer and play other people's music. But I've especially taken a dislike to Henry's brand of DJing, which mainly involves two or three minutes of one-liners and prop comedy between each song. Which is why I was alarmed to see a hat with corks on strings placed firmly on Henry's head.

"There are no words."
"Good eh? I'm seeing about renting a kangaroo costume."
"A kangaroo costume!? That thing will be..." not funny. "...really hot, and..." not funny. "...really uncomfortable." And groin-achingly unfunny, but I couldn't bring myself to say so.
"Hmm, you might be right. I might just stick to the hat. Oh, get this though..." Henry slapped a few keys and the track abruptly moved to something else. I didn't recognize it at first.
"What's that?"
"It's the Stingray themetune." It took me a second, but when it hit me...
"Oh no, Henry, no, you need to wait at least a year for shit like that." While Steve Irwin's death at the hands of a dangerous animal seemed like a Pope-Catholic-Bear-Woods scenario to the rest of the world - an inevitability, a forgone conclusion - it apparently hit the Australian people quite hard; all they have left now in terms of national heroes is Russell Crowe, so you can understand how they feel. That'd be like the only remaining Welsh hero being that bloke who sings into a toy microphone on Queen St in Cardiff. Not ideal.
"C'mon, it's good stuff this." As the opening octaves of Led Zeppelin's epic Immigrant Song kicked in (but with the added twist of being performed on what appeared to be a toy synthesizer somebody found in a bin outside Keith Emerson's house), I soon realized that Australian wailing would tarnish quite a few of the records on my shelf, possibly forever, and my minimum wage payscale provides disproportionately small recompense when you consider how many songs I truly loved would be tainted forever by drunken businessmen.
"If you say so. Listen, have you got the keys to the function room? I think we'd better get the biohazard team in sooner rather than later; you know, seeing as this function is tonight." Henry went fumbling into his pockets and produced a set of keys.
"It's -"
"The key that looks like a castle, I know." I think sometimes Henry forgets that I've been here longer than he has; I left him to his own devices, closing the door on the sound of a comedy springboard with an Irwin-voiced "CRIKEY!" over the top.

In preparation for what would turn out to be one of the worst nights of my entire life, the function room was unlocked, and the biohazard team went in. The problem with the function room is "out of sight, out of mind". When you combine this with our other problem - e.g. passing the buck so fervently that it's a wonder the buck hasn't disintegrated to a heap of buck-scented dust from the amount of time it spends being viciously manhandled, as it is passed from person to person in our magical circle of "hey, it's not my problem" - it often means that 48 hours before a function, the biohazard team has to go in and deal with the oft-rotting remnants of the previous engagement. But who's on the biohazard team, I hear you ask? The elite squadron of cleaners who storm the function room when needed and get it back to its natural grandeur (well, not grandeur perhaps, but to it's natural state of not-quite-grotty-enough-to-be-condemned)? Who on staff is willing to step up to the plate and harden the fuck up against hardened stains and fucked-up leftovers?

As Eddie and I got our marigolds on and loaded a tray with industrial disinfectants, we got to work sanitizing the area - I treat it as a rather unpleasant part of the job that needs to be done in order to ensure the pub is not shut down and therefore we don't lose our jobs. Eddie, on the other rubber-gloved hand, pretends that we are the cleanup team sent in to sanitize a zombie outbreak.

"Did you see 28 Weeks Later? It's sort of like this, cleaning up the mess that people left when the zombies came and ruined their shit."

I don't care; Eddie seems to be immune to the smell of rotten pineapple-and-cheese cocktailers if he thinks they were stuffed down the back of the sofa due to an imminent zombie attack, so if that's what gets him through, so be it.

We broke the attack down into three areas. First, the bar. The bar is the lightest part of the job, in that there isn't much behind a bar that can go off or rot. Except, of course, for the stagnant water in the ice bucket, or the dried-out lemons on the back bar, or the piece de resistance, the glasswasher, which - due to it not being emptied out for a month - had apparently been inhabited by frogs in the meantime, as the water had developed a strange sort of mouldy frogspawn thing at the surface that, upon my attempts to reach through it to get to the plug, proved itself to be more like a skin that I wound up removing in one gigantic piece. This goes into a special yellow bin bag - we don't have hazardous waste collection so we simply put anything weird or sick into a yellow binbag to give people some warning of what's inside. It's a sort of sadistic lucky bag - you look inside, you take your chances. What'll it be this time? Glasswasher frogspawn? Bloodied bandages from where Eddie accidentally threw a dart in Dave's back? A soiled adult nappy from our semi-regular visits from a local mental hospital? Who knows! Put your hand in and find out. I dare you.

Next was the buffet; a long runway of mold-laden food, snacks for relatives and friends of the happy couple that had gone extremely bad with time (as the couple's marriage is sure to do if their in-pub dialogues are anything to go by). The appropriate procedure for food that appears to be reproducing asexually is to put it in two bin bags (it's double-bagging, just not how you may think of it); nope, we put it in the first hazard bag with the frogspawn and hoped against hope that we hadn't accidentally played God. If we suddenly found ourselves overrun with a bizarre mutant race of frogs made of twiglets, we'd deal with it when it happened, but at the time we were more concerned with what was at the end of the table.

And then came the big daddy; the boss at the end of the rotten runway - the discarded wedding cake. The festering, apparently-sweating tower of icing and sponge that made Miss Havisham's wedding cake sound positively scrumptious by compare. This was literally pushed into a fresh hazard bag, taken to a far corner of the car park and burnt. I'm serious, we took that out the back and burnt that shit, no messing about. I don't care if it's bad luck to burn a wedding cake, as Frances so ridiculously suggested (how the hell does somebody discover that it's bad luck to burn a wedding cake? It can't be that common an occurrence, surely; I don't know anybody - besides myself - who has even considered burning a wedding cake, but apparently it's 'bad luck' anyway), that shit was not hanging around in our Biffa bin for a whole week. Plus, Eddie and me like to burn things. But let me tell you something: burning, rotting cake smells super bad. Realizing we had probably made a fatal mistake in burning it and stinking up the whole carpark, we simply mixed it in with gravel and muck so that nobody would guess it was a wedding cake and went home. We absolved that the rain would wash it away, somebody else would be blamed, and that we had to go home to prepare ourselves for what lay ahead of us so we didn't have time to clean it up. Although unless we had gone home to the sound of cats being skinned alive to a synth backing, nothing - no amount of physical or mental prep - could have had us ready for what we wound up witnessing.

I will say one good thing about the standard of the performances, and that is that I no longer fear death. Seriously though, the only way I could experience a night more harrowing would be if I went to work one night, only to discover I was working the bar at a special Kick The Barman In The Balls night, where the objective is to get behind the bar and literally try your absolute damnedest to kick my balls off. And even then, that would only be one area of my body suffering, not both my eyes and ears.

The first to get up there was Mr. Mullet, an Australian businessman who evidently made his millions by psychologically tricking his clients into taking pity on him; with a mullet ripped cleanly from a 1980s football sticker book (business up front, party behind, but evidently nothing in the middle) and a personality so wet I very nearly put it in a glass and charged him for it, I have to believe Mr. Mullet has greatly used 'whoyouknow' to his sop-faced advantage, with either an uncle on the board of directors or a father with a stock option, anything. Because as he slowly began to get more and more shitfaced (along with the rest of his team) on pints of Fosters shandy (with the added instruction to make it "weak" shandy, asking for 2/3rds of the glass to be filled with R Whites), I really couldn't see him being important enough to be flown around the world to have a go at singing You Can Go Your Own Way in front of a gang of drunken businessmen and several disdaining Welshmen, possibly the boldest thing he has ever done. Now, not everybody was lucky enough to grow up with decent records; I realize that in that respect I was very lucky. However, for the first time in my life I wish I'd never grown up with Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, or anybody with an ounce of credibility and a popular album; as Mr. Mullet whipped out a revolver and put bullet after bullet into Fleetwood Mac in front of my very eyes, I began to wish I had never known the stack of LPs under the stairs. Before I reached boiling point, DJ Henry took to the decks to regail the Australian crowd. First out of the gate? A piece of traditional Australian music; a tasteful selection if I may say so, seeing as I thought he would - oh, hang on, my mistake, it's actually just the didgeridoo intro for the Skippy the Bush Kangaroo theme tune.

"You having that, eh?", cackled Henry, unable to believe his own comic powers. The tune was laden with overdubbed comedy "boink" noises; it's a well-known fact that if you're having trouble winning over a room full of Australian businessmen and eldery villagers (who just wanted a quiet, dignified round of karaoke before a quick dance and a chat), it's usually best to whip out the comedy "boink" noises, that usually gets the crowd moving. But this was truly a tough audience, and Henry was dying a death - it was obvious to everyone besides him, of course, as yet another comedy "boink" dragged the room, kicking and screaming, into his next selection, "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport". Henry was then forced to sit down, overcome with convulsions of body rocking laughter. It's not often you get a room of Australians around here, but to then take that opportunity to literally laugh in their face for ten minutes solid is really quite an achievement. As Rolf Harris' wobbleboard solo was just getting underway (tastefully undercut with the sound of Henry roaring with laughter), Gerald - the head of the Village Watch - came to the bar. Gerald is known for his interesting assessments of situations and his absolute refusal to take prisoners on any matter whatsoever.

"I'll tell you something, and it's not often I say this," began Gerald, taking an elongated sip from his pint as though Henry's charade had dehydrated him. "But this is genuinely abhorrent. And I mean that in the strongest way possible."

With that, he took his seat - but would occasionally look over at me throughout the night to shake his head at me in wonderment. I returned the gesture. Of all the village's elders, I think Gerald is probably the one with whom I have the most in common. Because I have no doubt that in fifty years' time, I will still be in this village, where the inmates run the asylum and hold mock-xenophobic karaoke evenings. And I will walk around the village with the look of mild contempt and disbelief that Gerald has worked down to a fine art. Feel free to come by in fifty years and check.

Another round of comedy boink noises brought the next Australian to the stage. "Space Oddity."

Then the next. "Tiny Dancer." Then the next. "Golden Brown."

Australian after Australian, stepping onto the podium and grabbing the microphone as if they were competing for the village's lone car, and therefore their one chance of freedom. Money For Nothing, Bat Out Of Hell, Stand And Deliver, Paranoid - if it's been popular enough that even a coma patient could hum a few bars of it, it was available for selection. But eventually, the Village Watch got tired of this, and were obviously bored. What you need to keep in mind about the Village Watch is that they are not Australian businessmen. They are not Roger, Pat, Donny, Mr. Mullet or any of the other equally annoying suits that got up to throttle my favourite Stranglers song; they are Gerald, Edith, Den and countless others who take no pleasure whatsoever in watching these drunken buffoons get up on stage and take a long, steamy leak onto classic tunes. They do not high five for ten, fifteen minutes at a time because Eddie went downstairs to change the keg of Fosters (Eddie became extremely wary of the Australians and after a while began to leave them hanging on their persistent high five requests). They came to have a bit of a knock about and a disco, and the Australians were seeing to it that this would not happen. Gerald turned to me and shook his head. It was time for action.

"Henry, I think the Village Watch might like a bit of disco now."
"Good call." With that, Pat's crooning was brought to an unamplified standstill as Henry announced - in his best Australian accent, no less - that it was now time for the disco. Before the Village Watch could join the Nolan Sisters in their mood for dancing, Pat - the particularly boisterous Australian who never got to inform us that he did, in fact, do it hiiiiiiiiis way - decided this simply wasn't competitive enough for his liking. Pat was ruddy-faced and sweating cobbs from his extremely physical singing a moment earlier, I did wonder just what it takes to run a business in Australia besides an overactive set of sweat glands and a voice like a fucking foghorn (I was later informed, much to my consternation, that Pat owns the Australian company and makes more money in a week than the collective income of all the people in the local phonebook will ever make). Pat then coned his hands around his glistening chops and bellowed to all and sundry:

"DANCE OFF!"

At this point, the Australians - obviously used to this sort of thing by now - formed a tight perimeter around Pat and began clicking their fingers in rhythm to the music as Pat began to dance in Gerald's direction, in an obvious attempt to lure him into a dance-off. With his compatriots clicking their fingers and striding, we had suddenly been thrown straight onto the set of West Side Story, although instead of the Jets vs. the Sharks, it was common sense and decency against ten grown men who wanted to dance-fight with a group of pensioners to the tune of My My My Delilah, a situation I'm sure nobody on our side ever expected in a million years. Eddie opened the door with an ice bucket.

"What the fuck is this?"
"A dance off."
"You've got to be fucking joking, I'm not hanging around for this." Eddie slammed the ice on the bar in disgust. He threw his jacket on and handed mine to me. I was ready to go, but then I remembered; the Village Watch. I couldn't leave them here. Gerald turned to me, but I knew what needed to be done, so I decided to assess our escape options. I turned around to make absolutely sure Gerald wanted out, but I was at first distracted; Pat was tending to a fallen associate who had apparently done his back in, trying to spin around on his head (a move that I felt should have worked when you looked at the shine on his balding nut) like a reject from the "Can't Touch This" video. Gerald was, at this point, nodding so furiously I feared his head would detach itself. Evidently wanting to get the hell out of there before anybody donned a pair of parachute pants, Gerald gave me a very visual all clear. I called downstairs to weigh up the chances of a relocation.

"Frances, are you busy?"
"No, there's only me and two regulars. We're all watching Schindler's List." Yes, it truly was party time at the pub. Schindler's List on one floor, middle-aged trans-equatorial dance-off on the other. Mag-fucking-nificent. "It's about the Holocaust, it is, it's so sad. What's going on up there?"
"Well, luckily the karaoke's stopped."
"Dammit, I really fancied a go at This Town Ain't Big Enough - what are they doing instead?"
"I wish I could tell you a dance-off hadn't broken out," I informed her as I watched Pat attempt the robot; considering the discipline and steady movement it requires, it was perhaps a bad choice of dance move for somebody who appeared to be less a man, more a gigantic water balloon, crudely stuffed into a shirt and trousers that are slightly too small. "But sadly, I cannot do that."
"Do you want to come down here then?" Hmm, Pat's dancing or a faithful retelling of one of the most harrowing events in the history of the entire world.

"Gerald," I began, as I slung my coat on.
"Oh thank fuck, are we leaving? Anywhere will do, honestly."
"Eddie and I are going downstairs to watch Schindler's List." This evidently seemed like a marvelous idea as the entire village watch gathered their shit and ran as fast as their prosthetic hips could carry them towards the door.
"Come on then." And with that, we all migrated downstairs to the bar, where the real party was; by the time we got down there Frances was already crying. I got everybody a drink courtesy of the Australians - who had left their tab ticking over and had foolishly stated at one point "sort yourselves out with drinks on us". "Yourselves", we decided, meant the contents of the pub; eighteen people in all, an extra £39 of drinks. It was the least they could do for the Village Watch, who resolved to try again in a month if Henry promised not to "merge" them again.

In the end, Liam Neeson freed his workers (I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing the Germans lost in the end) and it was actually getting on for one in the morning; with the punters long since departed, we decided to check on the source of the vague noise that had penetrated the ceiling all throughout the film; perhaps the Australians turned on eachother and danced eachother to death, or perhaps the sheer perspiration flowing from their every pour had filled the room to the brim, pickling them in a particularly disgusting brine of death. Well, apparently not, because as we flung the door open, ready to inform Henry of our impending departure, what we saw was extremely surreal; an aging landlord behind a speaker stack and a laptop, selecting tunes for a dozen hyperactive, drenched Aussies to jump around to like a bunch of hyperactive children. We walked past the various Travoltas and Astaires, only to find Henry was actually in some sort of glaze-eyed trance (his finger hovering precariously over the hotkey on his laptop, to which he had assigned the comedy "boink" noise). Watching a gang of soaked Australians dancing hell for leather must be strangely hypnotic after three hours.
"HENRY," we shouted. "HENRY." Louder still; no use. Eventually, Eddie took the initiative and slapped his gigantic headphones off his head.
"Oi, what was that?"
"It's one in the morning, we're going home!"
"OK, cheers. I'll mind this lot, their taxi should have been here an hour ago."

And with that, we were granted our freedom; freedom for at least twelve hours, until we returned the following afternoon with our hazard masks and yellow waste bags to pick up the slipped discs and pieces of well-buffed scalp that would no doubt be left behind by our ambassadors from down under.