Melbourne Karaoke Festival 2017

words by niall roeder

Karaoke sits in one of two categories. You either absolutely love jumping on stage, grabbing the mic and spreading your oral wings to Nelly Furtado’s I’m Like a Bird and Bieber’s Let Me Love You. Or you dismiss the whole thing as lame, reluctantly tag along and when you’re there you surprisingly love it – you channel your inner 8-Mile and embrace your spaghetti sweater moment, fearlessly dropping renditions of Nas’ Halftime, Avril Lavinge’s Complicated and Hound Dog by Elvis. In the end, everyone loves karaoke.

Whichever group you fall into, just know that this city will soon be holding the first Melbourne Karaoke Festival. The free event is going down at 206 Bourke Street, the very same place that brought us the legendary Melbourne Dumpling Festival.

The programme starts at 5.30pm and will include three categories: Best Band, Dynamic Duets and Soloists. At 9.30pm, champions will be crowned from each group, with each receiving a generous $1,000 prize money and bragging rights for the next 365 days.

Not just about the singing, the organisers have wisely invited some of Melbourne’s best dumpling restaurants, like Tim Ho Wan Melbourne, China Red, China Chilli and Dragon Boat, to keep the rowdy crowd fed. If the singing is terrible, sit down with a mother load Xiao Long Bao and let the soupy parcels do their thing.

St.Gerry’s will also be on deck for the night, serving up limited edition disco doughnuts and like any good event/thing/day, there’ll be refreshing Sample Brew beers to calm nerves and quench thirsts.

Note – the first 400 people to arrive at the Sample Brew pop-up from 5.00pm, will be treated to a free beer, so make that the first point of call.

*Drops the mic*

The Melbourne Karaoke Festival will take place April 28 at 206 Bourke Street.