What comes to mind when you think of Manchester: the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Oasis, New Order, Joy Division, karaoke.
Wait–what? Karaoke?
Along with some great music, Manchester was also the birthplace of the karaoke machine. In 1975, an inventor named Roy Brooke built something he called “Roy’s Sing-a-Long Machine.” The concept was simple. A cassette machine played an instrumental version of a popular song while someone sang along into a microphone. Both the music and the singing were funneled into one amplifier and one speaker—and suddenly, anyone could be a singer.
A Japanese company then picked up on the idea, renamed the machine “karaoke,” which means “empty orchestra”–and life, as we know it, has never been the same since.
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