There were three main culprits that gave the karaoke night a touch of the Jekyll and Hydes. The first one is a fuck. Well five fucks actually. A somewhat dubious Turkish schnapps called Fuck (there may have been some tampering on the original label) was served up in five identical shot glasses set in a neat row along the bar. You then downed each glass one by one until the last one which you picked up with your teeth and simply threw your head back to down the drink. When this remarkable feat was completed, the barman handed you a certificate that read: ‘I had five fucks at Club Hab’.

The second culprit was a Flügel (vodka and Red Bull – and this was before you could find Red Bull in any bar anywhere). The drink was deadly, but more deadly for the barman. The drink was served in a large wine glass with a big chunk of ice in it. After you’d skolled your drink you flicked the large piece of ice at the barman as hard as you could. With ten or so people downing their drinks at once the barman would get a blitzkrieg of ice.

The third culprit was the most bizarre of all. It was called a ‘Nipple Suction’ and if that name conjures up horrible images, well, let me tell you that it was a whole lot worse. An iridescent blue drink was poured into a wine glass, set on fire by the barman and placed carefully on (usually) a man’s chest over his nipple. The oxygen is sucked out of the glass by the flame, the flame goes out and the person is left standing there looking rather silly with a glass of strange blue stuff stuck to their chest. The recipient then jumps up and down and dances around while the glass  remains firmly stuck. When it is finally pulled off, making the noise similar to a wet plunger being pulled off a kitchen sink, he would skoll the drink. What stopped me ever trying it was the terrible looking red welts left on the poor guy’s chest – which would often scab up. Seeing girls do it was even more entertaining – the glass would be full of breast. It truly was a weird and wonderful sight to behold. More amusing still, I once saw a guy try out on his testicles. This was not a pretty sight. He ended up with singed, smelly pubes and a rather red face.

Needles to say I can’t quite remember in detail many of those karaoke nights, but the photos on the wall always looked like everyone was having fun.

Sadly Club Hab closed down a few years ago, so I’m not sure where the visiting folk in Kirchberg get their fucks from anymore.

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Austria

Next week on Brian’ s Karaoke World Tour: Thailand

Picking a song was very hi-tech. Around the room were computer screens where you simply scrolled through the song list on the touch-screen and picked your song and put in your table number. When your table number flashed up on the TV screens, the waiter handed you a microphone. I did get a little confused with the song list, but a very friendly local girl in a very tiny mini-skirt helped me (very friendly in fact – she put her hand on my knee while she helped me).

On the way back to my seat I noticed lots of very friendly local girls in tiny mini skirts with their hands on mens knees. Men who were probably double their age. Ah, I was in a hostess bar. These girls were flirting with these men and laughing at their bad jokes, so the men would buy them very expensive drinks (and the girls took a cut from the bar).

I left after an hour. I waited to sing, but my song was way down the list. Plus the waiter was getting a bit pissed off with me saying that I hadn’t made up my mind about what drink I wanted. And, worst of all, my ears couldn’t take the men singing soppy wailing Mandarin love songs to their ‘dates’ any longer.

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Moscow

They didn’t have yodelling on the karaoke list in Switzerland, but they did have songs about asparagus and breasts. It’s Chapter Seven of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour and this time we’re off to the Swiss Alps. I know Swiss karaoke bars pretty well because I must have gone to the same karaoke bar in Wengen, Switzerland at least fifty times. I was working in a ski resort for a tour company as a ski guide and we would take the ‘clients’ up to Sina’s Bar in Wengen every single Monday night for karaoke. But, hey I didn’t mind. Not only do I love karaoke, but I got free drinks all night. I did get bored singing the same songs all the time, though, so I used to experiment quite a bit. I’d try singing songs I’d only heard a few times – I even sang songs by Mike and the Mechanics and Lionel Ritchie (I told you that I was bored!). But, then I discovered a whole bunch of great songs in a section at the back of the karaoke song book. They all happened to be in German, but I thought I’d give it a try. I started singing the Germans words up on the screen then found it easier (and a lot more fun) to sing my own German words. Most of the clientele in the bar were Brits and Aussies, so they had no idea what I was singing about, but the few Germans and Swiss folk in the crowd would suddenly prick up their ears. That’s because I would sing about things like how ‘Mein sesselbahn ist voll mit spargel spitzen’ (my chairlift is full of asparagus). But what really got their attention was when I’d sing something like ‘Sie haben schöne Brüste. Kann ich sie küssen? (You have beautiful breasts. Can I kiss them?).

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Singapore

Well, better get back to work then. Okay, okay Im really going back online to sing a few more songs. I’ve just noticed that they’ve got a bunch of Tom Jones’ songs… It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone…

It’s Chapter Six of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour and this time I’m in the Philippines. I was in Manila ‘couch surfing’ for my book Sleeping Around when my host suggested that we do what all good Filipinos do. Go to karaoke. We went to a small karaoke bar and when I told Jude that I was going to sing ‘My Way’ he said, ‘You can’t sing that. You’ll get killed!’ Only the week before a man had been shot dead in a karaoke bar for singing My Way. He was halfway through the song when the bar’s security guard yelled at him for singing out of tune. He ignored him and kept singing, so the guard pulled out a thirty-eight-calibre pistol and shot him dead. His defence was that it was his favourite song and he didn’t like the way he was singing it.

It makes ‘and now the end is near’ rather prophetic, doesn’t it?

Apparently violence is common in Filipino karaoke bars and My Way is the most frequent cause of fights and deaths. A few months earlier another man had been killed and his friend seriously wounded when they sarcastically applauded a student who was singing My Way off-key. The student felt insulted, so when they left the karaoke parlour, he ambushed and shot them.

‘There have been maybe fifty or more shootings because of My Way in the past ten years,’ Jude told me. ‘And after the recent murder many karaoke bars in Manila have taken My Way off the song list.’

 ‘So what song did you pick?’ Jude asked as I handed my song request to the waitress.

‘My Way.’

I thought I’d give it a go. I actually won a karaoke competition once singing the song—okay, most of the other contestants were drunk, but that’s not the point. Besides, the large group of drunk Korean guys looked friendly enough. There was only one tiny thing that worried me. The security guard at the door was brandishing a rather large shotgun and was wearing a fully loaded ammo belt.

‘That was very good,’ Jude said with a somewhat relieved smile when I’d finished singing. ‘You won’t get shot for that version.’

‘Let’s do a karaoke bar crawl,’ I said excitedly. ‘Then I can do My Way in every one to see if I can get shot.’

There was no one in the second karaoke bar to shoot me. Unless Jude suddenly decided he didn’t like my singing. We were the only patrons.

The hosts of ‘Let’s Have Fun’ karaoke bar were definitely full of gayness. Two transvestites—who had lovely long, shapely legs I have to say—were hosting it. Their place was one of many large outdoor karaoke bars on the waterfront promenade. Because of the holiday they were all busy, but we stopped at the largest, which would have had more than a hundred people in the crowd.

I put my name down and had only taken a sip of my beer when ‘Miss Diva’ called me up onto the stage.

‘Where are you from?’ Miss Diva purred.

When I told her the two leggy transvestites hopped around the stage impersonating kangaroos.

‘So, what song would you like to do?’ Miss Diva asked when she’d finished her hopping.

‘My Way,’ I said brightly.

There was a loud ‘Ohh’ from the crowd.

‘You’ll get shot!’ Miss Diva said gravely.

I looked out at the crowd. ‘Hands up if you have a gun?’

‘See, it’s safe,’ I said when no hands were raised.

Miss Diva smirked. ‘Yes, but there’s a sniper up in that building.’

Our last karaoke bar was a midget bar. The bar itself wasn’t small, but all the staff were midgets—or dwarves, or little people, or vertically challenged folk or whatever is PC and accepted in polite company nowadays. Although the bar was called Hobbit House, Jude didn’t tell me about the bar’s unique staffing prerequisites and I got quite a shock when someone down at my knees asked if I wanted a drink.

We grabbed a table and when our waiter returned with our drinks, little hands came up and plopped them on the table. The bar may have been run by small people, but they had big prices. Our beer cost three times as much as in the last karaoke bar. I also noticed that they didn’t have Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’ on the song list.

‘How do you say cheers in Dwarfish?’ Jude asked, after I’d got through my fourth and final version of My Way for the night without a single shot being fired in anger. 

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Switzerland

I was in Blackpool with my dad for my book I’m not eating any of that foreign Muck. Now, I rarely pass up a chance for a bit of karaoke, but I did hesitate at the door of Jim’s Karaoke (12th season), which was next door to Pat’s 10p Bingo Hall. The place was packed with pissed folk (of that speaking-incoherently-dribbling-flashing-your-bare-bottom type), and there was some poor bloke up on the stage who, judging by his gut-wrenching wailing, was obviously being tortured. I dragged Dad in, but we didn’t get very far. Our feet had stuck to the carpet. A large sign next to the stage said ‘Anyone swearing, swinging mikes or chanting football chants will be cut off’. Most of the crowd was made up of blithering drunkards from separate buck’s and hen’s nights.

A succession of people wailed into the mike, before one guy got up to sing ‘I will always love you’ wearing an Osama Bin Laden mask (which had better looking teeth than he did). After I sang a song (I got rapturous applause because I didn’t fall off the stage), I went upstairs to the loo and walked past one of the hens giving one of the bucks a blow job in front of the ladies’ toilets. It was on that note that I decided to call it a night (although I had to stop Dad from going up for a look).

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Philippines

In Part Four of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour we’re off to Sweden. And Finland. Well, it’s actually in the middle of the two on the overnight Stockholm to Turku ferry (this was part of my ‘Ferry’ chapter for my book Planes, Trains & Elephants). I was leading a group of Hong Kong Chinese on a Russia/Scandinavia tour for tour company Top Deck and my passengers were very, very excited because there was an all-you-can-eat buffet followed by karaoke. I both love and loathe buffets. I love them because you have so much food to choose from, and I loathe them because you have so much food to choose from. I feel I should try everything, and end up heaping my plate with 14 different dishes. And I can tell you with some authority that Thai red curry chicken, spaghetti marinara and sausage rolls don’t taste that flash all mixed in together.

My passengers were already in their seats when I arrived. They were all eyeing off the piles of food just waiting for me to give them the go-ahead. What happened after that was sheer madness. I have to admit that I’ve been known to stack up the odd prawn or two at a buffet, but my passengers would have even out-stacked Santa Claus. They made me look like Weight-watcher of the Year. One fellow had created a feat of engineering that rivalled the Great Wall of China. He’d somehow managed to pile at least 50 prawns on to one plate. On second thoughts, maybe it looked more like the Eiffel Tower. The massive display of smoked salmon was gone in seconds. Other diners looked on in horror. I wouldn’t be surprised if it became forever known, and often talked about, as the Great Salmon Riot.

I think the passengers got ‘All you can eat’ confused with ‘Can you eat all?’. Dessert was another free-for-all. Even the normally sensible piled their plates high with leaning towers of cheesecake, apple Danish and chocolate mousse. And the not-so-sensible ones? Well, I thought I mixed odd food combinations together at a buffet. One guy had smoked eel on his Black Forest chocolate cake.

My group had been looking forward to the ship’s karaoke bar for the past few days. So much so in fact, that they’d been practicing—to the dismay of our neighbours in the campsite in Stockholm. I left the food frenzy to get a good table at the karaoke bar just as one of my passengers returned to the table with his fifth serve of cheesecake. The bar was quiet. There were only a few beautiful Scandinavian types propped up at the bar. No one was singing yet. I moved several tables together so my group all could sit together. An hour and a half later I was still sitting at the now-very-large table by myself. Not one single passenger had turned up. They couldn’t possibly still be at the buffet—they’d already eaten every prawn on the ship. They must have got lost. I’d better find them, I thought. Besides that, I was getting tired of saying, ‘Sorry, these 22 seats are taken.’

I found them in the enormous duty-free store. They were spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP on perfume and stuffed toys. ‘Yes,’ they told me, ‘we are coming to karaoke soon.’ Three came. The rest collapsed in their rooms under the weight of prawns, cheesecake and perfume fumes. I sang first then my three remaining passengers got up together to sing. They did an extraordinarily accurate impression of a dying cat. By the time they had finished singing then promptly left they had cleared half the bar and I had 22 seats all to myself again.

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: England

I picked the fellow with the flashiest lights and nicest plastic chairs and paid him twenty cents to let me sing a song. As I waited for my turn to get on the microphone, a small crowd of curious locals gathered around to hear the scruffy-looking tourist belt out a number. I was only halfway through what I thought was quite a moving rendition of ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’ when most of the crowd got up and walked away. By the time I’d finished there were only three people left. One of them, who had only stayed in order to sing, immediately got up and launched into a badly sung, god-awful soppy Russian love song. My choice of song obviously wasn’t anywhere near sickly enough.

I thought I’d try another ‘karaoke set-up’ further down the street when I was robbed by a bunch of incredibly friendly locals. As I was walking down the street, three clean-cut young fellows smiled and said hello as they strolled past. When they discovered that I spoke ‘English’, they all wanted to shake my hand. After a few big hugs and some boisterous high fives they disappeared into the crowd. Oh, and after they’d taken the money out of my pocket. Mind you, when I realised what had happened I was more amused than upset. Their rather elaborate ruse had netted them just over two dollars. The rest of my cash was spread out over the other five pockets of my cargo pants. But, more importantly, they left me with more than enough money so I could pay to sing a few more songs (and scare off a few more locals).

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Sweden