Stage falls silent as city’s dirty little secret loses its voice

The Village People famously declared that you can’t stop the music. Nicola Spurrier begs to differ.

La Sing’s owners Jason Makarenko and Ung Chin. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

The Village People famously ­declared that you can’t stop the music. South Australia’s chief health officer, Nicola Spurrier, begs to differ.

For the past four weeks and for more than two months during last year’s double lockdowns, the ­microphones have fallen silent at Adelaide institution La Sing, the delightfully dingy late-night karaoke bar that has been a haunt for crooners, exhibitionists, party animals and the profoundly intoxicated since 1994.

Situated at the scungier end of Gouger St opposite the postal ­exchange and near a 24-hour petrol station with a Hungry Jacks drive-through, co-owner Jason Makarenko proudly describes La Sing as “Adelaide’s dirty little secret”.

For the Adelaide cognoscenti, entering the world of La Sing is akin to joining Fight Club.

You might be in a meeting at a respectable law firm, seeing a real estate agent or lying on a dental chair, and through a knowing nod of the head you realise the fellow you’re talking to is the same one you saw kneeling on stage with his shirt undone at 2am the previous Saturday singing George ­Michael’s Careless Whisper.

La Sing is special in that it is one of the few Australian karaoke bars that has a stage instead of private rooms: when you’re up there, for a few joyful minutes you are pretty much Freddy Mercury at Live Aid, the raucous crowd cheering your every note and move.

“Karaoke is the great leveller,” Makarenko says.

“It’s a shared release for people at the end of the day. And I mean all sorts of people. We would never say so publicly, but you’d be surprised who we get through here.”  Would you ever. For almost 30 years La Sing has been the go-to destination for those who should probably have already gone home – and its client list goes right to the very top. There’s even a wall-mounted laser disc featuring a photograph of Steven Marshall next to the bar, on stage in full cabaret mode, with a signed endorsement by the Premier dated 2021 reading: “Best after 2am destination in the world!”

His declaration might be heartfelt but is rendered somewhat hollow as the South Australian government cedes its decision-making authority to health ­bureaucrats and police, making La Sing the biggest victim of lockdowns and restrictions in the ­entire state.

Premier Stephen Marshall’s wall disc. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

This is because singing has ­become the No. 1 form of banned public behaviour amid fears that the aerosol spread of the Delta variant makes it impossible to control an environment where songs are sung and cocktails consumed with gusto.

June 30, 2021, was the day the music died for La Sing when it was ordered to close a full week before the state went into a hard lockdown. It has not opened since and there is no timetable for its reopening. Makarenko and his business partner – whom everyone knows simply as Ung – have lost their ­entire revenue stream with scant compensation for the losses sustained, not just from this latest lockdown but the two lockdowns last year.

“It is hard to work out the inconsistencies with their messaging when you consider there will be 15,000 people at the AFL down the road this Saturday and the crowd and players will be singing the team song after the game,” Makarenko says.

Knockabout former state treasurer Kevin Foley is another La Sing aficionado who famously went viral after one of his late-night escapades ended with video emerging of his thumping rendition of Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler on the La Sing stage.

Foley, treasurer for nine years in the Rann government, says he is troubled by the ease with which people’s livelihoods are being up-ended by the state.

“The advice coming from the health bureaucracy is always going to be overly reactive and overly conservative,” Foley says.

“In my experience the public servants go into these types of ­issues wanting to make sure that they emerge from any future royal commission smelling like roses.

“You need a strong premier, or under the current arrangements a strong police commissioner, who can work through this (and) strike a better balance and ignore some of the more hysterical advice.”

Labor this week called for the creation of a $200m fund to help hospitality businesses affected by bans on patron numbers of 50 per cent or under, the ratio at which hotels are all still trading as the state slowly winds back restrictions post-lockdown.

None of that makes any difference for La Sing, which remains shut until further notice and its seven staff now unemployed.

Makarenko says he wonders what the city will look like when lockdowns and restrictions finally end. “We can’t go on like this forever,” he says. “The way things are going there might be only half of these businesses left.”