Welcome to our Rockaoke Blog! Follow our posts to stay up to date with gig announcements, press features, festival news and everything Rockaoke.
About us:
ROCKAOKE are the UKs original, BEST and only SPECIALIST live karaoke band, inviting their audience to “live the dream” by taking to the stage and singing with a live rock band…
“One of London’s finest WTF experiences!” – Timeout London
A “beloved institution” – Rolling Stone
Even though ROCKAOKE had performed around 1,000 gigs with an estimated 25,000 lead singers, the band had never performed in their hometown.
SHEFFIELD
This all changed on 5th may 2010 at around 8.30pm when the mighty ROCKAOKE hit the stage @ The Boardwalk.
Here (see below) is Carl Reid’s EXPOSED Magazine review of ROCKAOKE’s hometown debut. And he’s gonna book the band for his birthday – it’s all down here in black & white!
It is rare that you get asked to be involved in something that has never been done before. On saturday may 15th, ROCKAOKE are going to be doing just that. Breaking new ground where angels and maybe even Robbie Williams soundalikes fear to tread.
TRIBUTE 2010 = see www.tributeni.com
TRIBUTE is a completely unique, alternative credit crunch festival celebrating the greatest rock and pop anthems of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s alongside a headline performance by live karaoke rock band, Rockaoke – and YOU!
For the first time in history, you, the audience will headline your very own music festival.
TRIBUTE will be an all-inclusive, sing-a-long extravaganza, playing out as a history through Rock. There are 3 of the UKs premier tribute bands on the bill. HOT FUSS, ZU2 (easy to work out what they are all about) and MAURICE JAY’S PLEASURE DOME (a tribute to the 80s). But they are only the warm-up for the star attraction. Which is you – with ROCKAOKE as your backing band.
We have worked in Belfast 3 times before – twice at The Empire Music Hall, 2 nights amongst the best gigs of our lives. And most recently in december doing “Caroloke” with the CHRIS MOYLES SHOW at the Mandela Hall, Queens Uni. Belfast is just such a terrific place to visit and to work in. And we can’t wait to get back there in may.
So much so, infact, that we are heading back there next week – 1 month ahead of schedule. We are flying into Belfast and then heading for Derry on the 8th april and Dublin on the 9th to do 2 launch night / warm-up / audition events – at Sandinos and The Village respectively. Here are some links to these events on Facebook:
ROCKAOKE North-West debut – Sandinos, Derry
ROCKAOKE Dublin debut – The Village, Wexford St, Dublin
We’ll be blogging more about these events next week and about TRIBUTE 2010 in the next month. And if anyone wants to come on tour to Belfast with us in may, please contact us using the usual methods.
OM crazy venues G! This is gonna be a right little winner!, as Danny would say.
After a slightly delayed start last night, due to Mat poncing around at a singing lesson, we managed to get on stage at about 8, full of pizza and topped up with Mojitos. What looked like being an intimate affair turned out to be a raucous free for all as the songs came in thick and fast.
Particular highlights included the one and only Roger Inocenti smashing the front and back doors out of Bon Jovi ( the bar tenders had to smother the glasses when he went awol on the top note near the end ). There was also a high voltage rendition of Don’t Stop Believing that nearly made me stop hearing ,and a very excited American contingent who stumbled upon us from their booth and got stuck into a bit of Blink 182.
Good news is that we think this night will be mega if the first one was owt to go by. It’s tough to find a good venue with cool staff and a ready flow of right minded peop’s to get on stage and have a smash, and Karaoke Box at Smithfields is definitely a goer. We just need to keep on telling the city folk that it’s there every other Wednesday and hopefully they’ll come down and help make it a cracker. There are even rumours of a Rockaoke themed Pizza being created especially! What dreams are made of…..I wonder if Kings of Leon have got their own pizza?
Until the next one…rock on!
LAUNCH NIGHT 31/3/2010 and every 2nd & last wednesday.
We are looking forward to our first ROCKAOKE NIGHT at Karaoke Box, Smithfield. It is live band karaoke’s first venture into hardcore karaoke territory in London and it will be interesting to see how we get on. Our nights at OK Karaoke in Leeds were successful – marred only by the tiny stage and the amount of Sambuca that seemed to find its way into our guitarist. Karaoke Box is small too – but the stage is OK and I think we are going to have a great night!
The signs are good. Already 10 songs requested at www.rockaokenights.com/karaokebox – get your song request in quick if you want to sing tomorrow. Admission is free and we will be on stage between 8-11pm.
The really good news is that there are drinks sponsors. Asahi beer – though I can’t help thinking that Singha beer would be a better fit at Karaoke Box. And Bacardi! That’s a dream come true for us. The Mojito is the official drink of Rockaoke as hotel night porter’s throughout the land will grudgingly vouch for. And now we have the name “Bacardi” on our flyers. Happy days.
Hope to see you down at Karaoke Box tonight 🙂
Shitbiscuits! I’m driving 🙁
Well so far this year ROCKAOKE at Punk in Soho has been shit-hot. We have been doing the second and last Fridays of the month at Punk, and ROCKAOKE has seen a packed house every time, with the usual array of weird and wonderful singers/performances. Some more memorable than others – i.e a very strange performance of “Poker Face” which the travelling fans from Sunderland (clearly a new thing to the North East massive) found quite off the wall!! Just a normal night a Punk then!
We have also seen the addition of two new ROCKAOKE boys – Steve (drums), and Al (Bass), to give the legends that are Basil and Jon a wee bit of respite from all the travelling. Jon and Basil must be the hardest working guys in showbiz!
With popularity of the live band karaoke concept growing week by week, Punk really is the coolest place in London to sing with ROCKAOKE.
We played in Brixton for the first time on saturday (27th march – Phil’s birthday). Was a great night @ Dex Club. Only threatening behaviour we encountered was the obligatory jobsworth parking attendant on Danny’s mission to acquire parking tickets in every London borough by the end of 2010. He missed out this time as drummer Steve assumed the mantle temporarily.
I was uncharacteristically on my toes. I sussed out the parking restrictions and parked some way off. Walking back to Dex Club I came across a chap trying to move a piano on his own. A thankless task – I offered my services naturally. And ended up pushing a piano from Brixton Village to the Dog Star.
London’s Cuckoo Club is not typical of the venues we have played. For a start, it costs about £25 to get in. Incredibly exclusive. So not exactly the class of punter that we started to out playing to in Sheffield and – errrr – Glasgow!
We did about 6 great shows at Cuckoo Club in 2009. There was usually a lot of hanging about. Then, turned midnight when everyone was ready, 45 minutes of rock mayhem! Rockaoke, casually straddles all boundaries of class, race, gender etc… And of course everyone loved it! They wanted to see more of us. But we were dead busy doing other gigs that happened to be paying better fees at the time. So I believe they even got another band in at one stage.
We almost landed a dream gig in Brindisi. One night we met this guy who wanted to fly us out to his villa and for us to spend the week there hanging out, rocking out etc… Sounded great to us. Less so to my wife. It didn’t come off though. I think I was just a bit too northern to take the guy seriously. It sounded a bit too good to be true. Maybe the other band went.
Anyway, we got a great article in COMPANY magazine’s october 2009 issue. “A Night Less Ordinary” was a very good description of our nights at Cuckoo Club. See the full article at https://www.rockaoke.com/company_oct_2009.pdf.
Last month we landed a gig at the prestigious Brits 2010 Aftershow. And the guy who booked us saw us at Cuckoo Club. So, no surprise we are keen to play at Cuckoo Club again in 2010. Because things happen down there…
Not got the greatest ring about it has it simvastatin tablets. Rockaoke’s first gig on a caravan site and my first ever vist to Porthcawl. 4 hours from Sheffield. Even longer coming back thanks to the M42 being shut between j10-11. We detoured via M6 (initially in the wrong direction), M5, A38 and the 24-hour Asda at Minworth where we tried and failed to find iced coffee or any Hershey products. Surely the biggest / least well stocked supermarket in the UK.
Was cold too. Frosty winds well and truly made moan!
It was a buyers/suppliers corporate event for Parkdean (the site owner) and we were there courtesy of Gaymers Cider. Unfortunately the Gaymers cider wasn’t there which seemed a bit of an oversight. I had a pint of water in a Gaymers glass at one point. At least Gaymers cannot be accused of promoting irresponsible drinking.
We had words last night actually. But what goes on in the van stays in the van. Even though the words we had were in the car park. Rules is rules. Suffice to say, we are all still very much in love. And we rocked Porthcawl like it’s never known!
Not only are ROCKAOKE the UK’s most in-demand karaoke band, they are one of the busiest bands in the UK full stop. Around 200 gigs in 2009! Over 1,000 gigs since they started out. A band that have had knocking on 30,000 lead vocalists surely deserve a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
While the band have been doing the business, the business has achieved something that most businesses dream of achieving but very rarely do. Like the weblog became the blog, sometime in 2009 rock band karaoke became ROCKAOKE. We can’t really claim to have invented the name and we don’t have a trademark on it – others have tried but have failed to stop others using it cos it is such a generic term. But we used it first, we popularised the word in London (and therefore the UK), we’ve attracted loads of press and media attention and now the word is on everybody’s lips.
Recent press in The Times and Cosmopolitan/Company/OK magazines use the word ROCKAOKE. Such is the general acceptance of the word ROCKOAKE as part of the English language that Chris Moyles regularly refers to us by our band name on the BBC – how’s that for priceless promo! And seeing the word ROCKAOKE up large at the recent Brits 2010 Aftershow was awesome.
In hindsight, it looks like we chose our band name and web domain well. It did seem like a good name at the time simvastatin 5mg. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Most of it involving hard work and stuff.
Back in 2005, we were a rock band without a lead singer. No viable future beckoned. But a couple of us were doing this Bandaoke thing – pimped-up karaoke with a couple of guitarists playing along to backing tracks. A music agency (Live Music Management) had started us off doing Walkabout bars. Frustratingly for us, they failed to see the potential of doing this rock karaoke thing on a bigger scale (i.e. with drums and for a decent fee) and the work was drying up.
So, we put our own website together – www.karaokeband.com and started promoting the concept of rock band karaoke where you get to sing onstage with a live band. Real drums and everything! We got a few enquiries but no work. LMM got us 1 or 2 gigs during this time but prospects were not good.
What happened next was mental!
One saturday morning in may 2006, I got a call from Manumission’s Andy McKay who wanted us to play Ibiza Rocks! The fee wouldn’t be great (cos the cost of getting us out to Ibiza was enormous) but the opportunity to launch our rock band karaoke concept was too good to miss. I suggested to Andy that he should call the nights “Ibiza Rockaoke”. He liked it so much he bought the .com and .co.uk domains. I did likewise with www.rockaoke.com (www.rockaoke.com was taken but we now have that too) and ROCKAOKE was created there and then.
We invented ROCKAOKE – don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise 😉
Our first night at Bar M, San Antonio wasn’t great. Lots of teething problems and lots of pressure. I realised this was a defining moment in my life and didn’t want to fuck it up. We got through it. The second night became a nightmare. Our guitarist refused to come. A good mate of mine Paul Faud (aka Jinx) came to the rescue. For such a scratch band we did amazingly well to get through the gig and to be asked back again. But jesus was it tough! Paul’s van broke down on the way to the airport, both guitar and bass never got out of Stansted (we had to hire instruments over there) and we missed the flight home – replacement flights cost us all the money we ever made from Ibiza Rocks!
But we did get asked back. And our third Ibiza Rockaoke night was ace! The Bar M stage was set-up for Ibiza Rocks which had kicked off the previous week. It was amazing. WE ARE SCIENTISTS, who had played Bar M 2 days before, were in with Kaiser Chiefs’ Ricky Wilson who had done a DJ set that night. All of them joined us on stage. ROCKAOKE made national headlines and folks still come up to us and say “I was there that night at Ibiza Rocks!”
It’s not often you get an opportunity to change your life. And when the opportunity presents itself, you have to recognise it and grasp it with both hands. Do what you have to do to the best of your ability. And try to enjoy it. Especially if what you have to do involves flying to Ibiza, drinking lots and playing in a rock band.
We did that – and IBIZA ROCKS became a massive turning point for us!
