But Joe insists that Bearpit Karaoke’s newsworthiness lies not in the violent history of where it happens to take place, but in the “sense of togetherness” it inspires.  A togetherness that happens not in spite of the wall, but regardless of it. He says that even though the history of the wall is unavoidable “up to a point, . . . the special moments we experience there really do happen without any [historical] context.”

Okay maybe Joe has a point. He does tell KaraokeTraveler that Berlin has had no success at getting Berliners to go to this amphitheatre for any other kind of event, like live bands or plays. But there is something about singing karaoke in the Mauerpark amphitheater that people love so much that thousands come every Sunday in the spring and summer to hear ordinary folk sing. He calls it “Bearpit Karaoke.”

          Crowd at the Maurpark Ampitheatre in Berlin
Hatchiban, who is a wiry, affable, redheaded bike messenger from Ireland, had a penchant for setting up karaoke sessions in strange places. He and his friends would show up at parties with laptops and start impromptu karaoke sessions. One day, Hatchiban who lives near the park, decided to hangout with his equipment and engage the Sunday flea market crowd, the rest is history.

Last summer, Hatchibans’ six hour outdoor karaoke sessions drew 2,000 people a week to the amphitheatre- a capacity crowd. It is a labor of love, since he doesn’t charge at all to sing, he only takes donations.

Songbooks Be Damned

Hatchiban could be called a karaoke “purist,” since he boasts that his patrons are just ordinary folk, not your typical karaoke characters, like the drunken Sinatra fanatic, or the perfectionist who you just know spent hours practicing in the basement to “nail” that Whitney Houston song. In fact, he is so opposed to contemporary karaoke orthodoxy, that he has no songbooks. This gets rid of the ones who clutch on to the songbook and spend the entire time leafing through it with no intentions of ever singing.

There is the guy who “makes Jim Carey look catatonic and uses his own child as a guitar for his big finish of “Let’s Go Crazy.” There is “Lucky Dip” day (remember, he is Irish), where he puts a bunch of song titles in a hat and the singer chooses. There is the one and only person allowed to sing Sinatra’s “My Way,” who Hatchiban describes as an older gent with a properly trained voice, who wore him down until he gave in. The crowd gives him a standing ovation every time.

 Hatchiban’s vision of karaoke is less self-indulgent and more communal, he says its “cool to have hit on something that [gets] people doing something with a real sense of togetherness,” and he says there are really “special moments” that happen , which of course have nothing to do with the “bullets that once flew.”

    

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