Interpreting | 2009.10.01
Tonight's special turn | Lynsey Hanley
Lung-drubbing karaoke favourites remind me of the days when social clubs gave us X Factor
It was an evening like any other in the Cammell Laird Social Club. The sausage roll mountain had dwindled to pastry dandruff, long-married couples on the dancefloor were remembering how and why they fell in love, and the bar was a mess of wet beer mats. We were gathered to celebrate a 50th birthday, though largely silently as there was not much point trying to compete with a mobile disco loud enough to necessitate sign language.
Not so the night\'s special turn, a straight-backed, self-possessed woman wearing an evening gown that resembled a swath of starry night. She turned to the karaoke machine next to her, pressed a button, closed her eyes and sang Céline Dion\'s hit Think Twice in what can only be described as "the club style".
Her mic-free hand, jutting and grasping, appeared to be attaching imaginary crampons to a sheer mountain face as she tackled each line: "Nooow ev-ah-ry-thing a-depe-hends on-a-yooou." As the song reached its declamatory apex – "No, No, No, No!" – we all grimaced and shook our heads too.
Céline, along with Whitney, Mariah and latterly Beyoncé, are the patron saints of amateur singers, but they are only the latest in a long line of melismatic entertainers. In Richard Hoggart\'s 1957 study of working-class life, The Uses of Literacy – about to be reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic – the club singer, along with circuit comedians and the blind piano player whose hand reaches out "to the spot where he knew they put his pint", was at the centre of working-class social life.
Hoggart termed it the "big dipper" style of singing, or "the verbal equivalent of rock-making, where the sweet and sticky mass is pulled to surprising lengths and pounded; there is a pause in which each emotional phrase is completed, before the great rise to the next and over the top". This style arose, he wrote, from "the need to draw every ounce of sentiment from the swing of the rhythm" in order to communicate fully with the audience.
"The result," suggested Hoggart, "is something like this: You are-er the only one-er for me-er / No one else-er can share a dream-er with me-er / (pause with trills from the piano leading to the next great sweep) / Some folks-er may say-er …"
The swoops and trills of the club singer became a comedy staple through the panel game Shooting Stars , which has just returned to television as welcomely as if summoned through Noel Edmonds\'s cosmic ordering service. My favourite from Vic Reeves\'s "club style" canon was his rendition of the Edwyn Collins song, A Girl Like You, which he performed in the manner of broken-microphone impersonator Norman Collier and came out translated as "Huh-nuh-muh nuh-muh noo-noo-noo nerr-nerr".
Without the persistence of the club style, and its mutation in the hands of ambitious, if not exactly imaginative, young men and women in thrall to the glassy professionalism of American pop stars, there would be no X Factor, because there\'d be no contestants. The popularity of karaoke, with its lung-drubbing repertoire of Dolly Parton, Gloria Gaynor and Frank Sinatra standards, comes from the fact that you can work on every aspect of the style you wish to emulate, much of which is expressed in the way you hold the mic.
My dad\'s club, of which he\'s been a member for 25 years and where countless family dos have been held, is declining now that alcohol bought from supermarkets has never been so cheap, nor domestic refrigerators so big. For several years, on Boxing Day and New Year\'s Eve, there was no other place I wanted to be than the club, such was its warmth and the sense that everyone you wanted to be there, was there.
It was the people who made the place, and the people are now going elsewhere. Those seasonal parties, which used to pull in 220, now struggle to attract 80, because there\'s always somewhere else more glamorous to go than down the road. In town, the acts are more polished – they have that American glassiness – but in clubs, even if the song is borrowed and the mannerisms stolen, the emotion is self-created. Those who love to sing for others draw from their own well of social longing, their desire to share, and generate it among those who love to listen.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/social-clubs-singing-x-factor
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1520
Here’s a ‘Brand-New’ Massive Multilingual Dataset for Machine Translation views: 1503