Plug and Don't Play

In which The Author gets up to sing

Last night was karaoke night in the Lighthouse. I hadn't planned to go there this week, because I'm going to London tomorrow and didn't really need a late night. But you know what they say about the road to Hell, don't you?

I bumped into Lee and Hannah when I was leaving the library, and they were making their way to the pub. I had to call to Wilko first, and then popped into Thereisnospoon for a glass of Pepsi before heading to the Lighthouse. I had to go to Wilko because I needed a new memory stick. And that was almost where the fun started.

Several weeks ago I asked Tara if she had a song which I've fancied singing for about fifteen years or so: a Jacques Brel song called 'Jackie', in the rip-roaring version by Scott Walker. I first heard it on Jonathan Ross's Saturday morning on Radio 2, and it was pretty amazing. Then I found out that Marc Almond had covered it as well. Marc's version was okay, but Scott Walker's take is pretty much the definitive recording.

Tara hunted through her hard drive, but drew a blank. Then we had a quick look on YouTube, but the only videos we found were unavailable. I thanked her for checking and fell back into my tried and tested songs. But I knew there had to be a backing track out there. The only question was where?

Yesterday afternoon, in the library, I scoured the World Wide Web until I found it. Then I had to go through the palaver of registering with the website, downloading an app to my phone, and finally downloading the backing track itself. In the meantime I'd found another backing track on another site, this time as an mp3. I downloaded that to my hard drive as well, just to be on the safe side.

I knew there wouldn't be any lyrics on the screen, but that wasn't a problem – I'd already written them out in my notebook. I knew about three quarters of the song by heart, but three quarters doesn't cut it on karaoke. (Contrary to popular belief, it helps if you've got at least a working knowledge of the song you're about to attempt.) At least I had the music. That was a start.

And that was the reason for my trip to Wilko. My existing memory stick has decided not to play any more, so I needed to pick one up at short notice. Wilko doesn't close until 6.00, which is handy. I saved the mp3 to the memory stick, had a good chat with Martyn E. in Thereisnospoon, and headed around the corner.

When Tara was setting up her gear, I told her I'd found the backing track, and she was pretty surprised. But I haven't been using the internet for fifteen years without learning a thing or two about searching for odd things. Then the problems started. I asked her if she could copy it over to her hard drive. She said that the last time she'd tried that, her laptop had crashed and she'd had to reinstall all the karaoke software and song data from scratch. Understandably, neither of wanted to take that risk. Then she asked me if I had it on my phone. Bingo! We were able to jack the phone into her PA using the lineout socket. I grabbed my notebook, we fired up the song, and I smashed it.

Afterwards, my pal Martin – a very experienced singer – told me it was one of the best songs I'd ever done. Everyone else seemed to like it as well. I'm going to give it another go in a few weeks, as there's nothing worse than doing the same set every time. I'll have to do it again at some point, because Shaz was late on parade last night and missed it.

The mystery still remains, though, of why Tara's laptop won't work with a memory stick. I strongly suspect it's a Windows issue. I don't encounter any hardware problems on my Ubuntu setup because everything works straight out of the box, so to speak. As Sherlock Holmes observed, 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' Is a Windows glitch really that improbable, I ask myself.

As I told Tara afterwards, I have no doubt that Plug and Play will become a real thing on Microsoft systems at some point. I doubt if any of us will be around to see it happen, though.