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A ukulele band walks into Windsor Castle to play for the queen … It’s not the set-up for a joke, but rather just one of the storied places that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has performed in its 40-year history.Â
The orchestra, which has a repertoire so wide-ranging that it encompasses, as their bio says, “Abba to ZZ Top, Tchaikovsky to Nirvana,” performed in 2016 by royal request at a private birthday party for Queen Elizabeth II.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain employs the instrument’s many sizes and registers, from a soprano ukulele to a bass one, plus their own voices — but no other instruments — to create some richly textured, full-bodied renditions of just about any song you can think of.
Audiences at Stanford Live will get the opportunity on March 23 to hear from this unique seven-piece ensemble that has performed at renowned venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall and collaborated with artists like Madness and Robbie Williams.
“Everything is on the table,” Laurie Higgins, who plays bass ukulele with the orchestra, said of their repertoire. No genres or songs are off-limits.
Considering that the group has sung a sea shanty-style a cappella rendition of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” — a performance that eschewed even ukuleles — he has a point.
Higgins, who also plays electric bass and double bass, has a diverse musical background in performing, recording and teaching, and has worked with artists such as Robbie McIntosh, Mutter Slater and Steve Jones. He joined the orchestra two years ago.
“I studied jazz, played in lots of rock and pop bands, orchestra, pit theater, pit bands. And what really suits all of that background for this band is that it’s such an eclectic mix of music. And yeah, the ukulele, the bass ukulele, is very transferable from all of that experience that I had before,” he said.
Despite their impressive résumé, it’s clearly the music alone that the orchestra takes seriously, opting for a collective stage persona that’s light-hearted and very much tongue-in-cheek. (The orchestra’s dry humor was well captured in an extensive series of “at-home” Zoom concerts they recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.)
Their grand name or the fact that they all don tuxes to perform, for instance, spoofs on the “seriousness” with which other performers might regard themselves. That reflects the group’s post-punk beginnings. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain was founded in 1985 by musicians Kitty Lux and George Hinchliffe.
Their founding of an orchestra solely made up of ukuleles played on the instrument’s reputation as a charming novelty. A quick listen to the orchestra reveals, though, that the small stringed instrument can actually evoke many sounds.
Over the years, the group’s set list has touched on wide swaths of current and vintage pop and classical compositions alike, including Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and Kraftwerk’s “The Model.”
In choosing repertoire, the orchestra doesn’t seek any particular qualities in the music, but just the unique nature of the group’s instruments guides them to well-written compositions, Higgins said.
“​​I think because the ukulele is such an unusual instrument, it is a really good way of finding out how good a piece of music is. If we can make it work on the ukulele, then it’s probably a good piece of music,” Higgins said.
But arranging songs for this unusual instrument isn’t enough: the ensemble frequently switches up the genre of a song, or blends several songs together. Their version of The Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” transforms the punk anthem into a bouncy, feel-good 1960s-style folk song.
“When you think of playing the ukulele, quite often people think of just strumming some chords. But every one of the several musicians in the band, we all have different roles to play to make up a complex texture for the song. So for instance, the bass and maybe two of the other ukuleles might form kind of a rhythm section, and then you have maybe doing some chords and then some lead lines, and obviously we’ve got all our voices as well. So we can make some really complicated pieces of music just using those quite simple ingredients,” Higgins said of their arranging process.
One of the group’s grandest examples of their penchant for mashups is their “Melange” number, performed for the BBC’s “Proms” concert in 2009, that melds together fragments of easily a dozen songs or more in seamless harmonies. Launching with “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, the piece segues into everything from “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate to Michael Bublé’s “Save the Last Dance for Me” — all with The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” providing a central musical motif.
While Higgins was fairly mysterious about the group’s set list for their tour, so as not to spoil the surprise, he did say that one number audiences will hear mashes up “Motörhead and Roy Rogers.”
The group’s wide-ranging repertoire and signature humor seems also to have inspired an array of album titles with plenty of musical puns, such as “Anarchy in the Ukulele,” “One Plucking Thing After Another” and its followup, 2022’s “And Another Plucking Thing.”
Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performs March 23, 2:30 p.m., at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford. $25-$100. live.stanford.edu.
