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November 23rd, 2008

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Singing the night away

Andrew Remy brings Japanese-style entertainment to wannabe rock stars in Prague

June 25th, 2008 issue

By Rachel Shimp

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Customers at Remy's Be Kara OK! can rent their very own karaoke rooms in which to let loose their hidden vocal talents. The club is one of several karaoke choices in the city.

The Remy File

Name: Andrew Remy
Age: 39
Birthplace: California
Has lived in: Algeria, France, England, Russia and Japan
Favorite music to sing: '50s and '60s rock 'n' roll
Favorite silly karaoke video: ?Daddy Cool? from Boney M
Who's the competition? People who go bowling [instead of singing]

For the Post

It’s 3 a.m., and you aren’t ready to go home.

Now what happens? Two words: kara, or “empty,” and okesutora, or “orchestra”—otherwise known throughout the world as karaoke.

If you love to sing, or you have imbibed enough to attempt it, you, too, can pick up the microphone.

In Prague, the Japanese-style karaoke “box,” or rental rooms, of Be Kara OK! is a good place to start. First, it differs wildly from “normal” karaoke in mission and aesthetics by being a late- or all-night option. Instead of sharing the stage with strangers in public, and waiting for a turn, you can book a private room for a number of hours.

Here, you can sing in English, Czech, German, French, Italian and Japanese, in a Japanese-style establishment owned by an American in Central Europe — surely one of the moment’s most surreal cultural mishmashes. But, as a nightlife experience in Prague, it’s been slow to catch on so far.

Customers don’t know what to make of it when they come in, but they leave happy, says Be Kara OK!’s Andrew Remy.

Be Kara OK! — with “kara” pronounced the Japanese way, rather than with a long “e” — is the handiwork of businessman Remy and his wife, Martina. Remy conceived the idea after living in Japan in the late ’90s. He had done classic, Western-style karaoke before, but was introduced to the new style quickly in Japan.

“I was expecting it in front of a crowd so I was quite apprehensive. But then my colleagues took me to this room and I was wondering, ‘What’s going on here? Where are the people?’ And they just calmly started singing. I thought, ‘OK, this is nice.’ And it’s what I did all the time.”

Remy’s favorite artists to sing include Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.

“Sounds a bit boring, but, the classics,” he says.

Tokyo style

Remy got Martina interested in karaoke on a trip back to Tokyo in recent years.

“We went twice. Until 5 a.m., the first train,” Remy says. “She met my old friend and started singing right away — she had never sung this way and never English. And she sang English all night because of course there are no Czech songs in Tokyo. She was blown away.”

Afterward, they visited family friends in the countryside near Mt. Fuji, where karaoke was also the logical endpoint of the evening at a local inn. This time, parents and older people sang songs from their youth.

Back in the Czech Republic, the couple visited some wineries in Moravia, where they made a mental connection to their experiences in Japan.

“We started singing these traditional folk songs in a cellar, and we thought [karaoke] could be the modern version of the wine cellar. You’re drinking and singing in an enclosed space with people you’re connected to,” Remy says.

Operating a full-time karaoke bar might seem an unusual choice for a business opportunity in Prague, but Remy is no stranger to being a fish out of water.

While Martina is a native of the Czech Republic, Remy is a citizen of the world. He was born in Southern California to a father from Beirut and a mother from the former Yugoslavia. They moved continuously while he was growing up, going from Algeria to Brussels during Remy’s high-school years. After that, he attended the Sorbonne and continued to travel, studying languages.

“After I finished my bachelor’s degree in Texas, I got a scholarship to study Russian. I met Martina in Moscow, while we were students in 1993,” says Remy. After seven years, they met again in London, where they fell in love and lived until making the move back to the Czech Republic in 2005. Their intention was to open the karaoke box, which took two and a half years to complete.

“It would be a good test market, and this thing does not exist at all in Prague, or in most of continental Europe,” Remy says.

Not just an ‘Asian thing’

Other karaoke bars exist in Prague, including Karaoke Praha, a Korean-style club in Prague 2. Locals advised Remy that the “box” concept might not fly here, but he has now been open more than six months.

“They were under the assumption that it wouldn’t work because it’s an Asian thing,” Remy explains. “Czechs in general are, I think, a bit conservative in terms of what they do.”

Remy has a saying for the Czech conservatism, “chata, Chorvatsko, hospoda, hory,” meaning: cottage, Croatia, pub and mountains. He says it’s hard to get people to “break out of the formula” of those four things, so the “box” singing concept has been an uphill struggle.

Many people also seem to think of karaoke as a negative type of entertainment, Remy says.

“Of course there are places [bars] that have dedicated people and everyone is sharing and having a good time, but a lot of times people are booing the singer. They’re completely wasted. It leads to an unpleasant atmosphere. So most people think that’s the only way to do karaoke.”

Remy stayed undeterred in his plan to open the “box,” and, if all goes well, he wants to start a European chain. He counts on foreigners, tourists and business groups for revenue. Enough Czech people actually are into the idea, too, he says.

“We’ve discovered that there are [people] who are open and looking for new things,” he says. “This chata-Chorvatsko business is really tough to crack … but if it works here, it can work in any big city.”

With about 1,500 songs in English and around 100 each of the other languages, the songbook may be basic, but there are enough for a good night out.

Standards like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” can segue into Madonna or a German version of “99 Luftballoons,” or you can try your hand at a song by Slovak pop star Jana Kirschner.

But for certain rock ’n’ roll classics, like Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” (a glaring absence in Be Kara OK!’s songbook), one still needs to hit up the bars on their special karaoke nights.

A room at Be Kara OK! costs 800 Kč ($51.50) per hour. Once you get past the bland facade outside and descend into the luxe cellar with its vibrantly colored rooms and gorgeous lighting, you can see why. But for karaoke fans without a large group to split the cost, it seems expensive.

Choices, choices ...

There are plenty of other places where the only price of singing (and from a wider variety of songs) is that of any drinks you buy.

Karaoke Ken is a prominent local ringleader, with a long-standing Friday night at Legends.

Local culture bloggers (such as Prague Dog Eat Blog at Prague-spot.com) give the “KJ” and his host Melvis high marks for their song selection and their willingness to not get the party started until the “stag” bachelors have careened through the bar.

Then, the gay-centric New Town bar Friends, open since 1998, hosts a Tuesday karaoke night featuring Czech and international hits.

And the Žižkov bar Blind Eye, open for a little over a year, dedicates every Monday to the sport.

Theirs is the most familiar experience for Americans coming from cities where rock ’n’ roll karaoke never goes out of style. But with a locals-heavy clientele of various ages, Blind Eye feels far from being an expat bar.

Owner Noah Lucas declined to comment on the weekly karaoke night. Let’s just say it exists.

A recent Monday there got off to a slow start, with murmurs of it being canceled if nobody showed. But, after midnight, the famously grungy space transformed. Two microphone stands that had idled hopefully under a spinning mirror ball now got a constant workout by a crowd that seemed to come out of nowhere.

“They just graduated from TEFL! So they’ll be living here, not working much and drinking a lot of beer!” someone yelled into the mic after a rousing group performance. The crowd was crammed onto an elevated platform a little beyond the bar, where the action took place.

“I figured maybe 20 percent of the people in there would be doing it, but I think 100 percent of them are,” said Chicagoan Christine Tyler, who works for Artěl Glass.

Taking a star turn

Tyler said she needed to make it an early night for work, but was waiting for her song to be called — Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes.”

Getting over a cold, Tyler’s voice had achieved the required huskiness for the ’80s classic. And she finally got her chance.

While rock ’n’ roll karaoke prevails, a new fascination with the Japanese-style karaoke box started with Sofia Coppola’s 2003 movie Lost in Translation, which showed Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson singing with the city inhabitants in a glass room the shape of a capsule spaceship. For many viewers, it changed attitudes about a great night out, altering its final course from the street food stall to the karaoke “box.”

Be Kara OK! eliminates the need for the former, anyway, since you can order Pilsner Urquell and sushi from a touch screen in each room. Remy is banking on that hipness to carry Be Kara OK! over its hump, and to get people singing, of course.

Who they’ll be is anyone’s guess, but it’s safe to say most people could be game.

“Most people sing in the shower, the car, to themselves,” Remy says. “They love to sing, even if they don’t sing too well. [In karaoke,] you can be whoever you want to be.”

Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com

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