Karaoke Epoc Review: The Second Karaoke Bar, and the Room Is Everything

The private box is the Japanese format and the stage is the British misunderstanding, and they are not the same activity

Karaoke Epoc holds a 4.2 from two hundred and fourteen people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is the second karaoke venue in this survey.

And the format matters more than anything else about it.

The two karaokes

We wrote at Lucky Voice about where the word comes from – kara, empty, the same as in karate; and oke, a shortening of the Japanese rendering of orchestra.

Empty orchestra. Which is precisely what the machine produces: the band, with a hole in the middle of it, shaped like you.

And there are two completely different activities that go by the name.

The box

The Japanese format is a private room. You book it, with your friends, and you shut the door, and you sing to each other and to nobody else.

And the effect of the door is total. Nobody is watching. Nobody is judging. There is no audience, and therefore no performance, and therefore no fear.

Which means that people sing – properly, badly, enthusiastically – who would not open their mouths in any other circumstance in their lives.

The stage

Which is the Western import, and which is a different thing entirely.

Singing in front of strangers, in a pub, with a microphone, while people who did not come to hear you are trying to have a conversation.

It is an audition. It is terrifying. And it selects, ruthlessly, for the two kinds of person who will do it: the very good, and the very drunk.

The Prat’s acoustic desk regards the pub karaoke stage as one of the great British misunderstandings and notes that the entire point of the invention was to remove the audience.

Why the singing matters

Because we know what it does, and it is not a joke.

Group singing synchronises breathing, releases endorphins, and produces measurable reductions in stress markers – and it does so more reliably in a group than alone. Choirs have been studied extensively. The effect is real and it is not small.

And Britain removed the pub piano in the 1960s and 70s because a jukebox was cheaper than a man – and we wrote about that at the Piano Bar, and at the Nellie Dean, and the arithmetic was correct and the outcome was worse.

An entire national tradition of amateur singing was dismantled in about fifteen years because a machine did not need paying in beer.

And the karaoke box is, in a small and roundabout way, giving it back.

Verdict

Good, cheap, and get a room.

And raise a glass to Daisuke Inoue, who invented the machine in Kobe around 1971, never patented it, made nothing from it, and has said cheerfully that it never occurred to him to.

He was given a prize

An Ig Nobel, in 2004 – the annual award for research that makes people laugh and then makes them think.

The citation said he had provided an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

And he accepted it in person, in front of a hall at Harvard, with enormous good humour, and the audience gave him a standing ovation that went on for over a minute – which is not what usually happens at the Ig Nobels.

The man who gave away billions of pounds by not filing a patent stood on a stage and was applauded by physicists.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]