‘Tunbridge Wells sells out time and time again’: the bonkers craze for karaoke with Barry from Eastenders
On 26 January 2014, Darren Burnett defeated Mervyn King to win the World Indoor Bowls Championships, but the internet remembers that day for a different reason. On pre-match entertainment duties was Shaun Williamson, best known for playing Barry Evans in EastEnders (and “Barry from EastEnders” in the Ricky Gervais series Extras). His performance of Labi Siffre’s (Something Inside) So Strong – with its passionately delivered refrain “we’re gonna do it anyway” – has been immortalised in internet meme culture as the ultimate example of committing to a bit.
The whole bowls scene is deliciously awkward: Williamson belts out Siffre’s anthem to a crowd equal parts bored and baffled, and some seem to get up to leave. (They weren’t walking out, Williamson’s team insists; they were taking advantage of their allotted comfort break before the final.) Nine years later, an altogether more enthusiastic crowd waits patiently for Barrioke, Willliamson’s karaoke show, on a Friday night at Southend-on-Sea’s music pub Chinnerys. An hour later, the room is bouncing along to Chelsea Dagger and Chesney Hawkes as audience members join him on the mic, and remember the hard way that So Strong finishes with a key change.
Barrioke begins an ever-extending UK tour here, that already boasts soldout shows in Southend, Chipping Sodbury, and St Albans, twice. The team – Williamson, the star attraction; Noel Cornford, the producer and UK karaoke impresario; and Adele, Williamson’s wife and chief enforcer of karaoke discipline – generally has its audience sussed: “Tunbridge Wells just sells out time and time again,” Cornford tells me. In Southend, you can map generations of the crowd on to Williamson’s TV appearances, from EastEnders fans to Extras watchers to late-period Williamson ultras.
“More than anything,” Williamson concludes, “there’s large groups of middle-aged women across the country letting their hair down, which is great.”
Social media introduced “Barry” to a different audience. “Some bright spark edited it to make it look like I’ve sung at Donald Trump’s inauguration,” Williamson says. “Then they did it again – bloody Biden. I’ll be back in Washington next January …” Viral fame meant Sam Fender asked Williamson to join him on stage at his Truck festival headline slot last year, generating further virality, and the internet has an odd way of turning aspects of actors’ lives into unexpected spin-offs like this. Matt King has done DJ tours as his Peep Show character Super Hans, and also touring at the moment is Brian Butterfield, Peter Serafinowicz’s comedy creation whose Butterfield Diet Plan, a spartan regime with a weekly decadent splurge, is a perennial social media favourite despite only originally making it to TV a few times. Barrioke also sits in a tranche of British nightlife alongside heroically unfashionable and massively popular crowd-participation events like Bongo’s Bingo, where bingo is boosted with rave energy.
In a small room to the side of the stage, the Barrioke team snap glow sticks into life and blow up inflatable guitars. “There’s nothing worse than being stuck out there on Livin’ on a Prayer when there’s a 35-second guitar solo,” Williamson says as he signs large masks of his own face. At 9pm sharp, Williamson arrives on stage to the Rocky theme tune, wearing one of the masks and a purple hooded boxing robe with Barry printed on the back. There’s no escape from a character who died almost two decades ago, but Williamson leans further into crowd-pleasing as he goes. He reaches immediately for Tony Christie, where there’s elation in Amarillo’s sha-la-la’s, and an unsettling anger in his air-punched oi-oi’s.
It quickly becomes less Barrioke, and more Shaun’s Singalong. Many in the crowd turn their backs on the largely redundant lyric displays as C’est la Vie and I Want It That Way play, preferring instead to perform to the threes and fours they arrived with. Williamson bookends the evening with two “solo” songs, welcoming sign-ups on stage to sing duets in between. “It’s a gig, but they’re the stars of it,” Williamson notes, but the real stars are those off stage. It’s an extremely committed performance from a crowd possessing occasionally ferocious power, with a special energy reserved for badmouthing neighbouring areas, as Canvey Island and Leigh-on-Sea feel the heat from the Southend faithful.
Gradually, things get sillier. Before launching into Bon Jovi, Williamson picks a Pat Butcher mask out of the crowd belonging to Steve Whyley, 36, whose purchase of a Barry-themed clock as a Valentine’s Day gift for his wife began a tradition of “horrific” 90sthemed Valentine’s gifts. For him, the appeal of Barrioke is simple: “Nostalgia, and a want to return to 90s life, where everything just seemed a little less serious, a little more silly.”
“Me and the boys turn 30 this year,” Rob Watkins says, pointing to his three mates, “and we thought it would be a good thing to do.” They send off their twenties performing Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over the World with the man they remembered being pushed down the hill by Janine in January 2004, and receive a big “I’ve performed at Barrioke” sticker for their efforts.
“Part of it is just wanting to have a random night out,” Whyley reflects. “And part of it just so you can say to your mates: I sang Sweet Caroline with Barry Evans.”
• Barrioke is at Tunbridge Wells Forum, 6 October, then touring until 26 April.
At 9pm sharp, Williamson arrives on stage to the Rocky theme tune, wearing a purple hooded boxing robe with Barry printed on the back