The Portland Pub Sing at Novare Res Bier Café
In this town filled with breweries, there’s one spot that cuts through the cacophony and stands as the definitive beer destination for tourists and locals alike: Novare Res Bier Café. Tucked into Canal Plaza in Portland’s Old Port, Novare Res (Latin for “to start a revolution”) was inspired by the beer gardens and drinking culture of Europe. Since it opened its cellar door in 2008, the bar has been offering an eclectic, extensive and praiseworthy selection of local brews and beers from around the world to aficionados and the merely thirsty.
On the first Monday of every month, Novare hosts a musical event that perfectly matches the convivial and communal atmosphere of the space. In the bar’s back room, patrons can join the Portland Pub Sing, a relaxed get-together also inspired by European culture.
“People definitely look forward to it,” said Laurel, a Novare bartender. “It’s so wholesome and cute. We’ll have new customers ask us what is going on in that back room, and then the next thing we know, they’ve become regulars.”
We spoke with John North Radway, organizer of the Portland Pub Sing and fan of whatever English bitter Novare Res has on tap.
How did the Portland Pub Sing come to be?
It started in 2018. Portland has hosted so many events like this over the decades, way before my time, and a lot of them have sort of come and gone as the years go by. I’m from Maine originally, but I’d been away for a long time, so when I moved back, I was like, “Where’s the Pub Sing?” I was informed there have been things in the past, but there isn’t one now. I talked to the good people at Novare Res. I was like, “Hey, if we crouch in your back room once a month and sing old songs loudly and promise to buy beverages, would you be down with that?” They were so receptive to it, I was frankly shocked. I thought this would involve shopping around and begging various bars, but no, they were just like, “Yes, this sounds good.”
It’s been an awesome spot for eight years now. I organize it, but for the event itself, there’s no leader, there’s no set list, there’s no order. We try to manage the room and to make it just the best experience it can be for everybody there.
What can people expect when they come to the Pub Sing?
I think you walk in and you get hit by this feeling of, Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? What’s probably going on when you walk through to the back room is somebody’s over in a corner by themselves, sort of singing a song you’ve never heard, apparently to themselves. For a hot second, it’s very disorienting, and then suddenly we hit the chorus and everybody else in the room is singing along.
Part of the fear of walking through there for the first time is you’re like, Oh my God, how do all these people know these songs? And the secret is, they don’t! I find that there are people in that room who have way deeper folk repertoires than I’m ever gonna find the time to have, and there are people who don’t even know any songs well enough to lead them, but they’re there to sing along. I think the environment cultivates this sense of, It doesn’t matter if I get the words right. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know the tune. I’m gonna add my voice to this and see what happens.
At some point in the night, it’s standing-room only. I feel like the more people that are in the room, the greater the percentage of people singing — people who are willing to sing songs they don’t know. There’s some magic that happens. Once we hit about forty voices, you’ll realize, Oh my God, they’re all singing!
What type of songs do people sing?
It’s whatever people bring. So, you get some of the old British Isles drinking songs. You get a lot of maritime stuff, just because here we are in Maine, and that’s inevitable. Honestly, we’ve really been trying to push the message in the last year or two that it’s anything with a chorus. We had some Gotye the other day. Somebody showed up with a glockenspiel and played “Somebody I Used to Know.” We have a regular who is from Glasgow who has an enormous repertoire of old Scottish songs. Last session, he stood up and said, “I’m going to sing a song from my home country.” It was “500 Miles,” by The Proclaimers. It’s full of surprises. We’ve got some old country hits. We’ve had some attempted show tunes. It’s anything. We try to expand the meaning of folk repertoire, to bust out of any kind of stereotype.
Besides the occasional glockenspiel, does anyone else play instruments?
The style of singing really lends itself to being unaccompanied. The unaccompanied song is able to take liberties with rhythm and with time and with pitch. On the other hand, we have some regular singers whose art is to accompany themselves on banjo or something like that, and they add so much. We’ve got a couple of accordion and concertina players who accompany themselves or even quietly jump in to accompany others. We’ve got a bodhrán player who, if you give them a nod, will gladly add a little Irish backbeat to whatever you’re doing. But instrumentalists are really respectful. I think they’re kind of feeling out whether a singer wants to be accompanied, and when they themselves are leading songs and like rocking it out on banjo or guitar or accordion. It’s just subjective. I think it just adds to the variety.
Do you feel like the atmosphere in Novare Res lends itself to that type of music?
It definitely lends itself to the vibe, and at the Portland Pub Sing, the vibe is more important than the music. It’s a relaxed space. It’s a casual space. The acoustics are not perfect. There’s an HVAC system that is very near and dear to our hearts, and you never know when it’s gonna jump in with a chorus of its own, and that’s all part of the charm. The servers and the employees there are so welcoming. We’ve even had bartenders sometimes come in and sing a song, which is so utterly charming when it happens.
How do you join the Portland Pub Sing?
You just show up! It happens every month on the first Monday, from seven to nine p.m. I’m not, by nature, an event organizer. I don’t know how you promote an event in this town. When I started this, it was word of mouth in the Facebook group. I don’t use Facebook, and honestly, I don’t know many people who do, but somehow, between the word of mouth and just that one little online presence, I think we had like seventy people there last month. I would be so sad to live in a town with this and not know it existed.
What do you think keeps people coming back?
This is such a cliché, but we all long for community. We all long for public spaces that are not aggressively curated. There are no bars or coffee shops where I would be comfortable as a stranger just going in and starting to sing, right? And I know that in a lot of the world, throughout a lot of history, that’s been the way it works. That’s where music has happened. It’s not because it’s like jam night. It’s because, “Oh, there’s a banjo player here tonight,” or, ‘There’s the hottest bouzouki player in the county.”
I do think that Portland Pub Sing, at its best, tries really hard to give people a glimpse of what life would be like in a culture where you just walk into the pub and there’s singing going on. There’s this “yes, and…” in folk music that, I think, if you’re not steeped in it already, it’s hard to find permission to just have your own untrained voice doing its thing. I think that’s really liberating to people.
Know an interesting bar regular? Send them our way at theregularsmaine@gmail.com.
