Play Lists for Gatherings?

Gawd! Late to this party but I’m lucky enough to have one of the last pubs in London to do a proper sing along fairly local.
Honkey Tonk Dave on the piano and people come up and sing to whatever, when ever.

Main stays would include
My old man (dilly dally)
Any old iron
The Harem song
Don’t you talk about me when I’m gone
Five foot two
The bicycle song
The old dun cow burned down
Rambling rose
Mac the knife
Crazy world
London girls
Ain’t no pleasin’ you
Antinio the ice cream seller
Bye bye blackbird
Daisy daisy ( bicycle for two)
Mother Kelly’s door step
I’m forever blowing bubbles
Where did you get that hat

And usually finish on

We’ll meet again


That’s about as authentic as it gets there were very few requests for anything modern, well not much past the 1980’s and the was usually a good crowd in with an age range of 2 to 93 but I guess the average would be 40 to 60 something
There were also patrons who would do “their” songs something like
The street where you live.

Having said that the pub is trying to appeal to the 20-40 scene which it’s very good at but that is at the cost of less time for Dave, the oldies don’t drink so much.
Corporate cultural vandalism i calls it.

Any hoo don’t know if that was of any use at all but I have enjoyed the memories envoked while tapping away at this iPhone 5SE yes! I too am of the old school.

TT

tuneful twang said:

Having said that the pub is trying to appeal to the 20-40 scene which it’s very good at but that is at the cost of less time for Dave, the oldies don’t drink so much.

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Alas, this is the case with almost all pubs now. Twang is in that there London, and he's lucky to get one pub where people sing along regularly. We had one in Derby, my local city, but it closed during lockdown. There's a good open mic scene, but that's a different thing. That's people with guitars, amplifiers and backing tracks singing the stuff you hear at open mics in other parts of the world.

The real problem with pubs in this country is that they have one value as a centre of their local community and another as a piece of real estate. If the pubs don't attract people that drink a lot, they go out of business. But that's getting into politics so I shall say no more.

rps said:

Col50, a question if I may? I am interested in learning some old English pub tunes and was wondering what a song list would look like? I know Dilly and Dally, Mary Mack and a few others....but if I’m in a pub in the U.K. and someone starts singing....what songs do they truly all know and sing along with?

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I think that if you can do an older Disney song, people would recognise it. When I play at pubs to younger people I always start with Disney stuff. There's lots of regional variation at local folk clubs, but that's too much for here! I avoid Formby stuff outside of an environment where people ask for that - it hasn't aged well to the average listener.

It's not like the pubs of Ireland, say, where everyone has a little turn. Sad really.

I bet if you asked for the back velvet band, that wouldn’t go down too well either