Mao makes karaoke comeback as Chinese join chairman for sing-song

Beijing Letter: Wherever you go in China, you can be sure that a town will have at least two kinds of prominent building. One is a large, modern but plain Communist Party headquarters. The other is identified by the big neon letters KTV and by its typically garish exterior.

Some of the facades are souped-up versions of a traditional Chinese palace. Most are refugees from the Mecca of bad taste, Las Vegas. They have big plaster "classical" statues or towering golden columns or glitzy plastic dragons. Or all of the above. Even without the KTV (standing for Karaoke Television, and always pronounced in English) signs, you wouldn't find it hard to identify them.

Karaoke clubs are as popular in China as bars are in Dublin. Students hang around in them in the daytime, when the prices are cheap, and business people occupy them at night, when a mid-sized room at the weekend can cost over €30 to hire, not including drinks and food.

Singing badly into a microphone while trying to keep up with a cheesy video on a large TV screen isn't exactly my idea of fun. But the ubiquity of KTV makes it an obviously important part of Chinese life, so I went along to check one out.

It is astonishingly elaborate. Even before you reach the front door, there is a guard of honour made of at least a dozen bowing waiters. Inside, the floors are of polished marble and the crystal chandeliers illuminate a riot of gold leaf and chrome.

You pay at the reception desk and then a waiter in a hideous zebra-striped shirt and tight black trousers takes you upstairs to your room. The corridor seems for all the world like the business entrance to a high-class brothel, with soft lights and purple walls running between a succession of heavy wooden doors.

When you go into your room, the impression is enhanced. The flock wallpaper is purple and red, and there's a large, very bad oil painting on the wall of the kind that would have hung in a Parisian bordello in the 19th century - nakedly voluptuous European women displaying themselves on a carefully disordered bed.

The karaoke machine lists categories of songs, and each one is illustrated with a picture of a young woman with a come-hither look in her eyes.

The sleazy sexuality is not accidental: KTV clubs are often used as places for businessmen to meet prostitutes and in some (though not the one I was in) the female assistants are for sale. This side of the business is illegal, but the privacy of the closed, sound-proofed rooms makes it hard to control and the lurid decor suggests that many owners don't exactly try to do so.

All of this seemed particularly incongruous because the party I was with was very much a family group, with adults in early middle-age accompanied by their teenage children and, in one case, a 10-year-old girl. But nobody seemed to find the bordello-like atmosphere off-putting.

We ordered beer and a bowl of fruit and popcorn and the men, at first, took control of the karaoke machine. The teenagers gradually made their presence felt, choosing videos by Chinese girl bands to sing along with, but the parents held their own too, belting out older, more romantic ballads.

There was a reel of western songs on the machine, and both Delilah and Obladi-Oblada got an airing. Everybody could sing well and everybody, young and old, knew exactly how to follow the words on screen and stay in tune with the backing tracks.

The selection of available songs seemed immense, but it will probably get narrower. KTV clubs have operated for years without paying copyright fees.

The recent introduction of a licensing system in which clubs are forced to pay a modest €1 a day per room to copyright agencies led to a 50 per cent rise in the cost to customers, suggesting that no fees had been paid previously.

At the same time, the state, which is currently in the throes of one of its periodic attempts to control all media, has started a pilot scheme for a "National Karaoke Content Management Service System" which will supposedly enforce copyright laws, but also, more to the point, filter out "unhealthy" songs.

This may not be as necessary as the authorities seem to think. An interesting thing happened as my night in the KTV club wore on. The beer was flowing at a moderate rate by Irish standards, but it had sufficient effect to make the older people reassert their control over the karaoke machine.

They switched to a new category: patriotic songs and numbers from Maoist operas of the Cultural Revolution period, during which these adults would have been kids.

Images of warships and planes accompanied military anthems and big production numbers with stout comrades performing ballet in blue Mao suits provided the backdrop to stirring propaganda songs.

The tone of the sing-along was hard to define. There was an element of nostalgia certainly, though perhaps more for a shared youth than for a lost society. There was an undercurrent of irony, but not enough to take the edge off the evident gusto.

It all seemed surreal, until I thought of slightly drunken middle-aged lapsed Catholics in Ireland joining in a chorus of Faith of Our Fathers.