UKE ‘EM ALL (The return of Tenzing Scott Brown)

23 April 2006

And so to the Cumberland Arms. Our – that is John Hirst, Gimpo and my – digs for the time we are in Newcastle is a house in the Sandyford region of the city. It is a Victorian terraced house. Our landlord, David Fry, is a potter. It was him who took us up to the Cumberland for a drink. The pub was fine, the beer was good, the location fantastic. And it seemed to feature live music of some variety every night of the week.

The Cumberland has two rooms on the ground floor, one for drinking and debating and the other for music-making. We were drinking and debating. We could hear strains of music from the room next door. After my second pint of Rapper (the guest ale) I went to investigate. The room was no bigger than a moderate-size front room, a bench around two-and-a-half walls and a scatter of tables and stools. The place was comfortably full of drinkers. From a dapper man in his late 70s to a lass in her early 20s with every age, sexual persuasion and physical type inbetween. What they all had in common was what they held lovingly to their chests: each was holding a small but perfectly formed ukulele.

The ukulele is an instrument that has never troubled my imagination even though ‘Leaning On The Lamppost’ by George Formby was the first song I ever heard on the radio. I was aware of something called the Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain but never heard them. As far as I was concerned the ukulele was a joke. And an old one at that. This lot were singing and playing ‘Harvest Moon’ as written and originally performed by Neil Young.
We found stools, supped our pints and spent the next hour or so listening to what we learnt were the Ukulele Allstars. When the playing finished no one clapped apart from me and my comrades. There was no audience other than us. They then chatted and supped their pints, cups of tea and tumblers of orange and then with not even a nod to each other broke into ‘King Of The Road’. This too came to an end and more chat about this and that, and then another one of them, a large man with a walrus moustache, broke into a version of ‘Flowers In The Rain’.

If, like me, you were lying in bed on 30 September 1967 with your radio tuned to 247 on the medium waveband you would know that ‘Flowers In The Rain’, written by Roy Wood and performed by The Move, was the first record broadcast on Radio 1. On that particular Saturday morning the idea of Radio 1 seemed so incredibly exciting. The radio side of the BBC had finally entered the 1960s.

Hearing this ukulele-driven version of the same song 38 years and 205 days later had an equally powerful emotional impact on me. Back then when it was Tony Blackburn spinning it for the first time as a Radio 1 disc jockey, it was upbeat, sunny, full of promise. London was still swinging and now we had Radio 1 the rest of the country could swing along with it. The version played by this lot and sung by the large man with the walrus moustache was full of pathos and loss reminding the listener of a long-gone golden era.

Walking back up the Ouseburn valley to our digs I was forced to admit that I was smitten with this ukulele thing.  I wanted to possess one of my very own. I wanted to be in a ukulele orchestra. I wanted to fit in and sing songs and strum along and sup my pint. I wanted to go along every week to rehearsals, week in and week out for the rest of my life. By the time we got back to the digs it was all settled in my mind. I could have a parallel life to the one where all this ‘All known music is rubbish …’and The17 stuff exists. In this parallel life I could have a ukulele, be a regular down at the local ukulele orchestra practise nights, where they would know me only as Tenzing Scott Brown. Tenzing is a nom de plume that I have used in the past and have been looking for an excuse to use again.  Maybe it would be good for me, like porn is supposed to keep a man’s wayward and wandering desires sated, thus help him keep faithful to the woman he loves. The ukulele would be my porn, enabling me to stay faithful to the higher aims of what The17 is all about. Nobody would ever need know, the ukulele could stay hidden under my bed and once a week I could sneak out and down to the pub where we practise and all my fellow strummers would only ever know me as Tenzing.  And if anybody ever asked how I got such a strange name, I would tell them that I was named after the family cat who would climb up the ivy and into a bedroom window every night. The cat in turn was named after the Sherpa who conquered Everest.