Disco Club 1

River Sounds is the place where the old people go. It’s a couple of hundred yards off Sukhbaatar Square and the band plays jazzy Russo-Mongolian violin numbers and lounge favourites. “Mongolians love music, they just love music for its own sake,” said a British mining expert who took me there. The singer in his tuxedo sang Volare and the crowd of paunches, Mongolian suits, Western chinos surged for the floor. An American with a belly and awful pointing dancefingers wallowed around two Mongolian women while someone else pointed out two Mongolian generals surrounded by twenty girls. At one point two Americans from a visiting air force band got up on stage and joined in with a harmonica and a trombone. The microphone came alive and the harmonica nearly blew the roof off.