Smug Old Choral Bastards

I went out Saturday night not particularly expecting much. I mean I anticipated I would have more than a few drinks, engage in lively banter, and maybe steal a real estate sign or two on the walk home. In other words, my expectations were for a usual, good, celebratory night out. Nothing out of the ordinary.

            The occasion was a friend’s birthday. The location was the old Belgian Beer Garden on St Kilda Rd, now called, somewhat misleadingly due to the noticeable absence of thatched housing, a blacksmith and a portly major, Village Melbourne: a great big outdoor setting with picnic tables, heaters and a château-like bar with well-dressed, bowtie-sporting bartenders.

            With great aplomb, I arrived at the Village around 8.45, and proceeded to begin the important task of ensuring I raised my dangerously low blood alcohol levels. This was accomplished through the consumption of various fine lagers and cheap vodka.

            Things were going well. Merriment was almost a physical presence and it was causing quite the enjoyable, somewhat mischievous ruckus. It was well and truly welcomed by all.

            However, around 9.45 things changed.

            Firstly, as a group of young people entering a venue can bring with them a palatable sense of figurative fresh air, we were to discover that the exact opposite can happen when the elderly decide to venture out. Particularly when they venture out in great numbers, with nefarious, curiously patriotic choral impulses.

            I didn’t see them enter, but I felt the air change. Things kind of went quiet in the manner a kid will go quiet when they’re clearly up to no good and the parents enter the room at the precipice of their misguided play. A hush descended and the multitudinous voices of the elderly rang out across the picnic tables: a mixture of old, beer-soaked Australian accents and the distinct sound of dear ladies clucking.

            Looking up from my beer and away from the companion I had engaged in ridiculous conversation, I saw about forty to fifty geriatrics, with a few younger people scattered in their ranks (all of whom  looked a little peculiar - comb over, bad makeup weird), potter into the Village Melbourne, carrying with them a chuffed sense of their well-aged experience and a projected, optimistic insouciance, as if they were all secretly proud of themselves for going and getting amongst the ‘young’uns,’ defying their age the sly old dogs.

            In a sense, though, this was not particularly alarming. Indeed, there was a certain novelty about the scene: a kind of turtle on its back struggling to get to its feet cuteness that perfectly captured the futile, but oddly respectful, effort of these old folk to recapture their youth.

Good on em, I thought. Why not go out? You never know when a hip is gonna go, might as well make the most of it while you still can. With drunken subtlety, I raised a glass just above my forehead and quickly back to my lips.

This feeling of encouragement and almost pride was short-lived as they proceeded to completely block up the bar and sit down across from us and begin their chattering. They ordered expensive wines, and a few had pots (POTS!) of beer, while others just sat forever on diet cokes and lemon lime bitters (or bitters lime and lemon as some of them insisted).

Within the space of half an hour, most of the beer garden had emptied out. The loud presence of these elderly figures, spectrally projecting a kind of collective authority figure anyone drinking with our sort of youthful abandon is clearly trying to avoid, was too much to deal with for most. We, however, fought it out, trying hard not to get elbowed or accidentally knock one of them over at the bar, while making a gentle kind of fun of them, noting the rapid, and 50s-appropriate, split of the men—mostly gathered inside, in an old-man-knot of Georges and Franks—and the women—mostly seated outside in what essentially amounted to an enormous knitting circle minus the needles.

We just copped it and drank on.

Curiously, it didn’t occur to any of us to ask why such a large group of old people was wandering around. Or why they’d stopped at our bar. They don’t usually gather in such roaming grey packs. We should have been alarmed at the brazen bizarreness of it.

We got an answer to the question we didn’t ask quickly enough.

Seated outside, directly beneath one of the open French doors, we began to hear singing: a triumphant rumble of men in neat harmony. It sounded like what I imagine a 50-year Ivy League (say, Harvard) reunion would sound like: a bunch of men in cardigans thrown across their shoulders, wearing polo’s, singing victory songs from their rowing days, while raising flagons (or, in this case, pots) in hearty celebration of their past glory.

The joke was instantly put forward that it was a barbershop quartet or, at least, a ‘Presbyterian choral sesh.’ We laughed it off, thinking that the bar was playing some strange, old-people music to keep the newly arrived swarm in order.

Painfully, we were not far off in our jokey guesses.

When I arose from the table to get a drink, I walked past the old ladies seated and observed with some humor as one of them pulled from her handbag a tuner. She blew an E (I think) and the old birds began squawking some song, looking to each other with cheeky smiles and raised painted eyebrows, swaying rhythmically from the shoulders.

Upon getting inside, I saw all the men in a concentric circle singing, led by a much younger man with a terribly unbecoming blond beard, horn-rimmed glasses and beige shirt buttoned to the top conducting from the middle. They were blocking the way to my precious beer service and making an almighty racket.

Again, the initial novelty value made it mostly ok. It is not often that you go out to a good quality inner-city bar, where you expect to consort with like-aged people, and instead get bombarded by a senior’s choir.

We shouted out requests and tried to throw them off with bad harmonies. We laughed. We pointed. I danced past the old ladies as they bopped some tune, and was disappointed when no wolf-whistle was forthcoming.

We realized that his was not about to end anytime soon.

And, then, their smug began to permeate the air, filtering out from the bar and the old lady tables on an implacable march of self-satisfaction; of being happily old and loud and invasive of a younger person’s space, fat with the knowledge there was absolutely nothing we could do to shut them up, given physical presence by their constant dipping and leaning in and smiling.

It was this, more than the singing, although the singing was its instigator, that was insufferable about them.

Song after song was sung, and the smugness just kept escalating in proportion to how high their hands soared into the air when they hit a big note; to the vicious rocking of their arthritic affected swaying; to how dense their singing circles became.

I recognized one Billy Joel number—that one about the lion—and little else. I kept shouting at them to play Led Zeppelin, but they were impervious to my desire. They just kept fucking smiling at each other and raising their eyebrows and singing, radiating smug like an excreted perfume.

Then some of the women ventured inside and they were everywhere. The circle, stretched out in a wonky oval and still led by blonde-beard, began to sing ‘I Am Australian,’ and the château-bar, distinctly German in its wood panel design, was infiltrated by the jingoistic nonsense of perhaps one of the worst, most self-righteous, smug songs ever written. Again, they kept looking at one another with what was by then their characteristic deep, collective gratification: a pride in their brutally touted Australian-ness (they were all white by the way and, I strongly suspect, powerfully middle-class) and their raised, carefully practiced voices. 

I was at the bar with a couple of strangers—people blessedly my age—when ‘I Am Australian’ was being sung, and we were in hysterics, talking loudly about the unlikelihood of this vain, patriotic spectacle. Our laughter was much to the quite visible frustration of one of the old ladies who had been pushed to the rear of the group, who still vainly sang on, but kept turning around to peer at us with shadowed eyes beneath a pink perm.

As they reached their crescendo:

I am, you are, we are Australian,

I am, you are, we are Australian!

I jokingly yelled to one of my new friends, ‘oh I get it, it’s a One Nation gathering!’ Fortunately, they understood my 90s-era gag and guffawed appropriately, bringing the ire of the old woman on the rim to focus solely on me—she had clearly heard what I said—and if it weren’t for the white pride soaring through the air, I might have heard her ‘tsk’ disapprovingly at me.

But I didn’t, and I was drunk enough to stare right back at her with a dumb grin as I sidled past to continue my night of musical frivolity, drenched in the heavy atmosphere of elderly choral self-importance that still clung to me well after I stumbled home.