The Greyhound Hotel

Cnr. Carlisle St & Brighton Rd, St Kilda, Victoria, Australia
Ph: +61 3 9534 4274
Melways Reference: 58 C11
Tram route numbers: 69 (from St Kilda), 3, 67

This pub is my local so I thought I should write something about it. It has also been called 'The bar from Star Wars' by some musicians, sometime to do with it's 'colourful' patrons perhaps?

I should warn people going there that the pub is on the opposite corner to where all the streetwalkers hang out so I would escort any women friends to avoid harassment by people when travelling to/from there.

Famous for it's Drag shows that are now on four nights a week (as well as a dance party on Saturday nights (which is why some people call it the 'Gayhound').

The main reason I go there is to see the live bands that play in the public bar.
So far I have seen the following bands there:
The Prayerbabies, Shonytonk, Violent Mood Swings, The Twits, The Gamma Rays and a few others.

For a long time I used to go to the karaoke on Sunday nights. The reason for this is that it is different to any other karaoke show I have heard about as there are large amounts of nudity, swearing, piss taking of geriatrics and good times.

Some of the better karaoke nights I have been to follow (not including the one that ended up with The Twits being banned from this venue):

Shonkytonk @ The Espy & Karaoke
If you have the stamina/a day off the next day it is good to go from the Esplanade Hotel to the Greyhound on the same day.

It was fairly crowded upstairs in the lounge bar as there were some other bands playing and they had a comedy show on. Shonkytonk hadn't started playing when I got there (they were in the public bar downstairs, the main difference between this bar and the lounge bar is that you can actually see the original colour of the carpet.) There's also a wall that has Fred Negro's cartoons all over it which are quite amusing.

The motto for this band is Country Rock And Proud (CRAP) and their lead singer is Fred Negro, who also plays in a band called 'The Twits' that I saw on New Years Eve at the same place.

Their style of music is not just straight country so it is more enjoyable and there are some novelty songs in the set too: 'Tonight the bottle let me down', 'She took a lot of pills and died' and a couple that I can't remember. My favourite songs in the set were: 'Shonkytonk' and 'Aint never written a song that radio would flog'.

A bit after 7PM I went upstairs to get some dinner (wedges & sour cream) then went back down to the bar. Some bloke in the audience got a wedge and Fred did too, but the woman sitting next to me on the couch didn't want one. That woman was pretty hot too, she had long blonde hair, which was all done up in curls and put up on top of her head and she was wearing a too-short leopard-print dress with a black slip underneath.

After she left I talked to a nice English woman called Jemma who was out working in Australia for a year with her boyfriend, Tim. If you hang around long enough anywhere someone is bound to talk to you, especially if there is beer involved.

The show was meant to finish at 8pm, but as they were having such a good time they kept going until about quarter to nine, even though Fred was meant to be doing karaoke at the Greyhound hotel at 8.30pm. I left as soon as they finished and walked down to the Greyhound.

It was a quiet night at the karaoke tonight (everyone must be on holidays), but there were some good singers up including some old bloke that took about 5 minutes to get up on stage (Fred poking him with the toy horse head on a stick didn't help), the old bloke seemed to be having such a good time he wouldn't leave the stage and Fred kept talking to him, which annoyed Steve somewhat. Next up was a blonde woman singing a Brittney Spears song, which was OK if you like that sort of thing (her friend kept standing in front of me so I couldn't see the stage), she won the bottle of champagne.

Due to there being a lack of singers, which Steve put down to the presenters being intimidating (Fred replied, "Why's that Cunt?), they decided to have a 'sing off' for the next 3 people who hadn't sung before.

Dillon (Fred called him dildo) was up next singing a Ricky Martin song (he changed the lyrics though). Annoyingly some bloke who was friends with the woman who won the champagne, decided to get up and sing the proper lyrics, BOO!

As he was overdue for it tonight, Fred fell of his chair, but this time he managed to avoid knocking over all the microphones on stage. Maria was up next, but I decided to leave then as it was after 10pm. I didn't get to see Georgie B talk his song this week though.

I realise that 'Best' and 'Karaoke' do not often go together, but last night's Karaoke at the Greyhound with Fred & Steve had:

• Margie, the topless go-go dancer
• Ouch-E G Bin-Laden with a cheese sandwhich stuck to his arm (actually a bloke called Dillon who had scratched all the skin off his arm in a motorbike accident that day.)
• Georgie B trying to talk his way through 'Long Way to the Top', but the CD skipped and he had to do Craig McLaughlan's 'Hey Mona'
• Donna, the former queen of karaoke in a frilly black dress and bustier singing a song including 'lalalala!' when she couldn't read the words.
• Sticks a 100 year old cantankerous old fart who gets around with two walking sticks - having his sticks taken off him and Fred using them to have a wank, then Fred and Steve setting them on fire and losing them, which led to them trying to replace them with a horsey on a stick and a retractable light saber. (Sticks comes every week and grabs the girls on the arse, tries to get other people to pay for dope and smokes joints with the band out the back so he wouldn't keep coming back if he didn't enjoy it.)
• When Sticks finally got off the stage, Fred put a can of VB on his head as Sticks stood in the one spot for 5 minutes.

And that was just in the first hour of Karaoke (I usually leave at 10.30pm), I can't imagine what it will be like on the Queens Birthday Weekend when the pub will be open until 3AM.