Backing For Pub/Club Singers
It really doesn't matter how well the audience member can sing. As long as he or she is willing to grab the microphone and try their best, I'll do my best to accompany them. Taking part in the fun is what's most important!
These gigs have been called many things in the past such as "sing-songs", "singalongs", "go as you please", or "open mic" nights among other names. However they are essentially always the same thing - audience members getting up on the stage, wiggling their tonsils, and entertaining each other with their dulcet tones (take look at the video above).
Despite the distinctly amateur status of the audience members singing at these types of gigs, providing the live musical backing and accompaniment for them is a very specialised job which many professional musicians - even musicians of many years standing - are unable to do. The audience member comes up to the stage, takes the microphone, tells the musician the name of the song they are going to sing...and off they go, leaving the musician with literally seconds to find their key and join in with them.
This differs of course from modern day karaoke shows. At a singsong gig there are no words and no pre-recorded music. In fact it works the entirely opposite way from karaoke, because the musician is playing live and so the music is following the singer as opposed to karaoke where the singer is following the music.
The reason I say that this is a wonderfully old fashioned type of gig is because the audience members who like this type of entertainment are usually of an older age group. You see, back in the day when there was no karaoke, no TV screens to show the words, no prompts when to start singing or when the verse or the chorus should begin, it was just the singer and the backing musician, nothing else.
This meant that every singer had to know every word of the song they wanted to sing from start to finish and they had to know the songs full structure and arrangement.
Strange as this may sound to a young person today, older people know nothing else and are perfectly comfortable with, what younger people would probably consider, this rather odd approach to singing.
In fact, most older people don't enjoy karaoke. They just can't cope with the strict rigidity of karaoke, especially as many of the older "crooner" types of songs they like to sing are not in a strict tempo. Many of these old songs were recorded with an orchestra which followed the conductor while the conductor followed the singer. So for audiences of a certain age, having proper authentic "live" musical backing is the ONLY way they can get up on stage and enjoy singing.
A Bit Of Personal History:
This concept of providing musical backing for audience members is actually how I began my professional playing career.
In 1974 at the tender age of 11 years old I remember asking the committee of our local social club in the village where I was born if I could have a play around on their brand new electric organ they had just bought for the club (the name of the club was the Carmyle Social Club which stood on the banks of the Clyde in River Road, Carmyle, Glasgow - like most clubs of that era, it has long since gone now).
The committee of the club, who pretty much consisted of the mums and dads of my school friends, knew I was a keen organ player so kindly agreed to let me come to the club on a Saturday afternoon when the clubs concert hall was not in use.
I remember the organ was a Haven organ which was a sort of Hammond copy with big chunky red drawbars. Similarly, the rotary speaker was not the usual Leslie speaker but rather a UK copy of the Leslie speaker called a Sharma. While I'm happy to admit that the Haven was no Hammond and the Sharma was no Leslie, they did sound quite well together and the Sharma speaker sounded surprisingly good. I remember it was more powerful than its Leslie equivalent and weighed a lot less too. I ended up buying a Sharma speaker myself some years later to hook up to my then double manual Farfisa portable organ (which I used with EKO bass pedals if my memory serves me correctly).
Anyway, I started to play the clubs Haven organ every Saturday afternoon in the concert hall (privately and purely for my own amusement). However almost immediately I noticed that a few of the club members were beginning to wander in from the bar/games room and plonking themselves down on seats to listen to my music! It wasn't long before those same members were asking if they could come up on to the stage and sing along with me.
And that's how, despite being thrown in at the deep end (or more probably because of it), I learned how to provide musical backing for all types of singers no matter how professional or amateur or good or bad they may be.
The rest, I suppose you could say, is history!