The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain vows it’s ‘a covers, not a copies band’

What Dudley Moore was to the piano and Salut Salon is to strings, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is to, as its name plainly states, the ukulele. Which is to say, the seven-member ensemble of four-string virtuosos brims with musical brilliance, often comedy-infused — the kind that, over the group’s four-decade existence, has earned invitations to play at many of the world’s most vaunted venues. 

This year, on April 15, in an SCP Featured Concert, the group willl make its first-ever appearance at Symphony Center.

Describing her dazzlingly talented crew as “a covers band, not a copies band,” creative producer and self-described “ringmistress” Leisa Rea spoke about their repertoire, arrangements and comedic vibe.

The repertoire

From Motörhead to the Muppets, from Paul Simon to Tchaikovsky, from Nirvana to Shirley Bassey, the Beach Boys to Johnny Cash — almost every song by these disparate artists can be played on the ukulele, a four-stringed member of the lute family. First produced in Portugal in the 1880s, the instrument is a good detector of whether a song has legs. "If we can’t make it work on a ukulele, then usually, it’s not a good enough song.

"Sometimes there might be a genre that we’re missing, so we say, ’we need a punk rock song here’ or ’we’d like some classical’ or ’we haven’t got anything that has a big band feel.’ We’re an orchestra, so somebody is leading the choices, and that either falls to [musical director] George Hinchliffe or me as his deputy. We recently had a creative lab where we spent several days unpacking ideas and seeing what we could do with them. The ones that landed were developed for the show. If you just bring your favorite songs that you want to do, it doesn’t always work."

The arrangements

Rea emphasizes that the band is trying to interpret a song, not copy it. So there’s no point in going, “I’m going to do this version of the Beatles exactly as the Beatles did it.” And by the way, we’re not doing any Beatles. I love the Beatles, but it’s a bit too obvious for us. What we try to do is take a song that’s possibly been neglected and find something in that that we really love, and then offer that to the world. Or we will take a song that’s been overly covered and do something slightly different with it.

Because the band is on the road all the time, and "we do it so often, we get excited by anything new. A new-ish one is Motörhead meets the black-and-white cowboy Western. I don’t want to give too much away, but it started one way and sort of morphed. You might have an idea for a tune, but it usually [solidifies] after several performances or even a month. They’re organic.

"First, you have to listen to a song and ask, What are the bones of this tune? Is it about the rhythm and the beat and the drum element of it, or is it something else? And we each have a role in the orchestra. So somebody will just do finger-picking and plucking. Somebody else might be doing offbeats and a strum. Somebody else might be doing some chord inversions up the neck. None of us are really ukulele enthusiasts, we’re entertainers. And we’re in an orchestra where we all play the same instrument, but that instrument has to become a flute, a drum, a synthesizer — whatever we need for the song. So we might play them in a different way. But we’re all vocalists as well, so then we start thinking about what we can add sound-wise — what we can put underneath."

Their humor

Because the band is British, "we’re really quite self-depreciating, which I think the Americans find amusing. We celebrate the power of the four-string wonder, but we also go, ’This is kindling for a great fire at the end of the show.’ We want to remind ourselves that if we were cold, we could burn all the ukuleles and have a nice bonfire. So we’re entertainers and we’re musicians and we know what makes a show, but we’re not too stuffy. We want the music to be great, so we’re never mocking anything. If anything, we’re mocking ourselves. I always think our orchestra is like some kids pulled their dad’s black suit out of the wardrobe and put it on. And then the clowns are in charge of the big top now. But musically, we’re really on it. And it should feel a bit like we may leave our seats. We may do something you’re not expecting. We might rock out with our ukuleles, we might do things that a normal orchestra wouldn’t. And we like to be playful with the audience. So in many ways, it’s a subversion of what an orchestra usually is."