What's On / Programme Notes

From Anarchy in the UK
to Life on Mars

Tonight’s programme should perhaps come with a health warning. These performances may be harmful to your musical prejudices. Those who would normally have to be dragged kicking and screaming to hear Wagner might warm to tonight’s rendition of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’; likewise, classical music fans may have had little contact with the oeuvres of The Who and the Sex Pistols. To be sure, there can be few ensembles who would dare to throw Hawkwind’s ‘Silver Machine’ and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from the Ninth Symphony into the same melting-pot. And that’s before you consider that all this is passed through the unconventional filter of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. All one can do as a note-writer is give some account of the music from the perspective of where it began. Only once you’ve heard the UOGB’s unique (it’s safe to say) arrangements and derangements, their musical what-ifs and why-nots, will you actually be able to hear where it all ends up.

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As if to prove from the start that no type of music is off limits, the first two numbers present the unlikeliest of bedfellows. Edward White’s sometime light music classic Puffin’ Billy, named after a locomotive train, blows gentle wisps of smoke as it pootles along its track. To some, this will be familiar as the signature tune of the BBC Light Programme’s radio request show Children’s Favourites from 1952 to 1966. Twenty years – and a huge musical chasm – separate it from Silver Machine, released in 1972 by space rock band Hawkwind, one of the earliest groups to be influenced by science fiction. The track is a send-up of a (serious) essay entitled ‘How to Build a Time Machine’. As with many odd couples, these two pieces are so seemingly incompatible that it’s hard at first to see their common bond, in fantasy and journeying.

Which brings us neatly to Life on Mars. David Bowie wrote this hypnotically spiralling 1973 song as a parody of Paul Anka’s ‘My Way’ (a hit for Sinatra): like Anka, Bowie had made an English version of the existing French song ‘Comme d’habitude’, but Bowie’s version failed while Anka’s skyrocketed to success. The family resemblances between Bowie’s and Anka’s versions got the UOGBs juices flowing, and tonight’s medley weaves in an additional handful of titles from the mid-to-late 1960s with typical guile and humour.

Around a decade after most of the Mars-medley’s tunes, in 1976, came the Sex Pistols’ first release, Anarchy in the UK. The group was soon dropped by its record company, following a notorious live television interview full of choice language. If, four decades earlier, the BBC’s Director-General Lord Reith had banned George Formby’s ‘When I’m cleaning windows’ from the airwaves, owing to its smutty lyrics, what would have been his reaction to this thrash-rock track, which began with the announcement,‘I am an antichrist’?

Next we turn from annihilation to the merely diabolical, as the UOGB grapples with Saint-Saëns’s devilish Danse macabre (or is it the other way round?) – rearing its head for the first time in the group’s immorally eclectic repertoire. It began life as a song, setting words by Henry Cazalis that describe lusty adventures in a graveyard along with the sound of death’s violin and the cock’s crow at dawn, and there were several arrangements before the best-known arrived in 1874 – complete with xylophone and a solo violin. Nobody quite understood what the composer was getting at when the piece was premiered in Paris in 1875, and a decade later, in private, Saint-Saëns lampooned it in ‘Fossils’ from The Carnival of the Animals, which was published only after his death.

In 2000 American pop/rock group Wheatus released its debut album, featuring Teenage Dirtbag – which, as a single, made it to No. 2 in the UK Charts, and has more recently been covered by Girls Aloud. As used in the rom-com Loser, the song centres on a high-school dweeb fighting to get noticed by the pretty object of his hormone-induced attentions (and it also contains a line about being abandoned on Prom night, which appealed to the UOGB’s peculiar sense of humour). Ultimately the love interest abandons her trophy boyfriend and not only starts to notice said dweeb, but also asks him to an Iron Maiden concert. Like, how awesome is that?

A guy who you can more reliably bet on getting the girl is British Secret Service agent 007. In Thunderball (1965), the honours went to Sean Connery (who also got a classy Aston Martin and a jet pack into the bargain). John Barry and Don Black’s title song was memorably sung by Tom Jones, to an opening-credits sequence that featured underwater swimmers in characteristally alluring naked silhouette. ‘He looks at the world and wants it all,’ go the lyrics, ‘so he strikes like Thunderball’. Oozing 1960s glamour and sex appeal, and boasting screaming trumpets, you can see why this was a natural choice for tonight’s line-up of ukulele players.

Blofeld’s henchmen in the film may have proved formidable opponents to 007, but Richard Wagner also had high drama in mind when he introduced some of the most striking characters of his vast operatic tetralogy The Ring in The Ride of the Valkyries. This comes at the opening of the third act in the cycle’s second instalment, Die Walküre, first staged in 1870. The Valkyries, sisters of the heroine Brünnhilde, are ‘meeting and greeting’ one another as they prepare to carry a batch of slain heroes up to Valhalla, the realm of the Gods. They utter their somewhat terrifying battle-cries as the orchestra thunders on with the famous main theme. It’s a brilliant, thoroughly rousing piece, which, like other parts of The Ring, is fraught with practical difficulties and theatrical demands that can seem to encourage satire: the winged helmets, the ability to fly and the enormous orchestral sound that needs huge soprano voices that in turn, in 19th-century Germany, tended to be housed in outsized bodies.

From the ridiculous to the sublime … well, we can hope! Following that Wagnerian flight of fancy, the UOGB now rest their fingers and instead exercise their vocal cords in a novel a cappella version of The Who’s Pinball Wizard. It was written by the group’s guitarist Pete Townshend for its 1969 rock opera Tommy, in which context it’s sung by an unnamed pinball champion who has just seen his skills surpassed by one Tommy Walker. The track was taken up by an extraordinary range of singers – from Rod Stewart to Elton John, who performed it in Ken Russell’s 1975 film, before Tommy became a Broadway musical in the 1990s. Our uke-playing friends have in the past been known to de-subvert rock songs by comically overlaying a folk-music idiom, but they have promised not to do anything so destructive tonight, such as to perform the song in the style of a sea shanty, for example …

As with ‘Anarchy in the UK’, the UOGB may apply a soothing musical balm to the 1977 Talking Heads track Psycho Killer, which, despite its insistent rhythms, is rather more tame than its title tries to suggest. (Much more terrifying is what tonight’s players might do to it.) But there’s no mixed message in the famous Ode to Joy, from the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which aimed at nothing less than to draw together all of humankind into a single, universal embrace. The annual Proms performance of the complete ‘Choral’ Symphony took place last Saturday and a contrasting approach is here guaranteed, especially since this is the audience-participation piece (see opposite), or at least the planned audience-participation piece. Not so much a repeat performance, then, more edited highlights, beginning some way into the finale and focusing on various approaches to the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme. It could just catch the ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’ (‘All men are brothers’) sentiment better than some more conventional attempts. For the record, the ‘An die Freude’ poem was written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785, and Beethoven made it the basis of his ground-breaking choral symphonic finale in 1824.

Next, looking forward to the Last Night of the Proms, we hear Hubert Parry’s Jerusalem, whose complexity isn’t always fully clocked by many who sing along with simple pride. A setting by Parry from 1916 of part of Blake’s Milton, everybody’s favourite candidate for an alternative English national anthem is actually a scathing piece of environmental protest: we wanted the new Jerusalem, but we, also, built those dark satanic mills. Any under-reading is probably down to the warm glow created by Elgar’s rich orchestration – often heard at the Last Night of the Proms – though it’s also well known as a rousing hymn. This is one of the few extended melodies that large crowds can phrase and shape with real feeling. Proms seasons rarely feature Jerusalem twice, but tonight’s version is unlikely to be confused with Parry’s own orchestration to be heard on 12 September at this year’s Last Night of the Proms.

Tonight’s rather more obviously bombastic finale brings on the heroic Dambusters – the name given to pilots of the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron for their bouncing-bomb raids on Nazi targets during the Second World War. They were the subject of the 1955 film starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd. Most of music was by Leighton Lucas, but the main theme was the work of the English light music composer Eric Coates, famed for marches such as Knightsbridge and character-pieces such as By the Sleepy Lagoon (aka the signature tune for Desert Island Discs). Coates hated writing film music, but the producers played the patriot card and got him to oblige – albeit with a piece he had just completed, apparently as an exercise in the style of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Regardless, ‘The Dambusters’ March certainly glows with the spirit that made Britain great, or at least that was the idea.

Programme notes © Robert Maycock, freely expanded and adapted, in the spirit of the UOGB

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