George Hinchcliffe’s Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain puts "outsider instrument" to everything from Bach to punk to bebop
The plucky project, coming to Vancouver Recital Society, has confounded expectations and toured the world for almost 40 years now
Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Photo by Allison Burke
The Vancouver Recital Society presents George Hinchcliffe’s Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Wednesday, April 19
EVERYONE I KNOW who has ever been in a band, myself included, has complained about their working conditions. Long drives, crap sound, poor pay, internal squabbles, sketchy accommodations, greedy managers: the possibilities for annoyance are endless.
George Hinchliffe decided to do something about it. In 1985 the multi-instrumentalist put away his Hammond organ and his electric mandolin and opted for something completely different. Goodbye, he said, to the world’s worst exercise program. (Ever had to haul a Hammond up a flight of stairs? It’s not easy.) Goodbye to the Asian wedding band where his ability to play Bollywood hits on the aforementioned mandolin had kept him in ready cash.
And hello, ukulele.
Gathering a few like-minded souls together, Hinchliffe formed the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and the rest was… Well, the rest, including massive international acclaim, was a surprise for everyone concerned.
“The various performers who were involved in the early days were, or had been, involved in various groups of other kinds: folk groups, rock groups, classical orchestras, choirs, blah blah blah,” the affable and extremely down-to-earth musician explains in a marvellously rambling Zoom interview from his oceanfront home on the U.K.’s south coast. “We felt like the choice of the ukulele—and having a group of ukuleles, which seemed unusual at the time—was going to enable us to find the antidote to all the snags that we’d hit in our other musical enterprises. Egomania, with the rock ’n’ roll guitarists, or the worship of virtuosity with classical music; stuff like that. So we thought that we’d have a level playing field that wasn’t aligned to any particular convention or genre.
“The ukulele seemed like an outsider instrument to us,” he continues. “But then again, it’s a fully chromatic instrument on which you could, in theory at least, play any sort of music: Bach or bebop or whatever. So it seemed like it might be a bit of fun for us—and it was fairly light-hearted at first, you know.
“It’s still light-hearted,” he adds. “But of course as the business elements of running a group have expanded, we’ve had to take those things more seriously.”
Just how seriously can be seen in the group’s ongoing determination to exist outside of genre and show-biz restrictions. Despite many entreaties from the record industry, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has self-released all but three of its 19 albums, opting for maximum autonomy rather than the lure of a quick buck. And while the group’s upcoming Vancouver appearance is being sponsored by the Vancouver Recital Society, which generally leans more towards chamber music than ukulele-driven covers of punk, grunge, and pop hits, the UOGB is not going to go out of its way to tailor its approach to please the presenters.
“Because we tend not to fit into any of the normal categories, we’re often brought into a series of concerts as the last item on the bill, or the closing item of a festival—a bit of fun and light relief, a bit like having Victor Borge at the end of a piano series or something like that,” Hinchliffe points out. “We’ve been involved in folk festivals, classical-music festivals, comedy festivals, jazz festivals, literary festivals… But we’ve often been regarded as the light relief, after the heavy hitters have been in, doing something worthy.”
This can gall at times.
“When we played the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, some of the diehards were saying ‘Oh, the BBC has sold out, this is dumbing-down of the worst kind,’” Hinchliffe says, referring to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s annual summer concert series. “And because I used to listen to classical music all the time, I could feel some sympathy with that view, but I also thought ‘Well, for heaven’s sake, there’s room for all sorts of music!’ And while it’s possible to get into esoteric or specialist areas, something that’s basic and toe-tapping and easily accessible for a wide range of people always a good thing.”
Granted, the UOGB’s leader isn’t averse to esoterica. The group’s early recordings, which tended to range a little more further afield than its more recent efforts, included ukulele arrangements of solo bagpipe music, German art song, and First World War marches. “And one of our side projects was called Lutes ’n’ Ukes,” Hinchliffe reveals. “It was four of the ukulele players and four lute players. We had ukuleles of different sizes and then a theorbo, a lute, a cittern, and a Renaissance guitar.”
Despite a repertoire that ranged from Robert Johnson (the Tudor lutenist and composer) to Robert Johnson (the Mississippi guitarist and blues innovator), that band wasn’t quite populist enough to catch on with the wider public, Hinchliffe allows, adding wryly that if he had his way the UOGB might have met a similar fate.
“People often assume that the song choices are my own, but sometimes the other musicians in the orchestra say ‘Oh, I don’t like that song. Can we not do that one?’ And my response to that is usually ‘At least 50 percent of the repertoire, perhaps even more, is not my sort of stuff.’ So my own personal taste has nothing to do with it,” he explains. “Otherwise we’re probably be having a lot more [Anton] Webern and Milton Babbitt and Cannonball Adderley and whatnot.
“Things would get much more obscure,” he adds, laughing. “I’d probably start off with Wild Man Fischer. But in terms of the house style and the—what do you call it?—the brand identity that we’ve got, it’s necessary to pick a selection of material that suits it.”
In other words, don’t expect to hear a plucky version of “Which Way Did the Freaks Go?” any time soon. But that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has managed to confound expectation, tour the world, and satisfy its leader’s musical curiosity for almost 40 years is remarkable nonetheless.
“It’s so easy to get serious about stuff, and there’s such a lot of misery in the world these days,” Hinchliffe notes, reasonably enough. “So if we can have a good time on-stage, the audience might be able to have a good time with us—and if they leave the auditorium feeling happier and more positive than they were, that’s a good thing.
“Touch wood, as they say!” he adds. “I don’t like to tempt fate by saying we always achieve that, but it’s one of the objects of the exercise, really.”
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