Beginnings

Hello. I am Uke Hunts.

That's not the name on my birth certificate, it's just a musical nom de plume.

Don't confuse me with Uke Hunt, the excellent creator of various instructional ukulele videos, or Uke-Hunt, that bloke from the Swingin' Utters and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes who started a ukulele covers side project. Although being confused with either of these gentlemen could drive more traffic my way so I shouldn't complain.

Anyway, I'm not here to teach you how to play or tell you what strings to use or any of that kind of shit. I'm just here to talk about my experience with the ukulele and tell a few anecdotes and the like. You don't even need to be a player to read this blog.

The best place to start is the beginning, I suppose. I'd always thought of the ukulele as a bit of a novelty instrument, a kind of miniature guitar for people who weren't good enough to play a proper one. It's surprising I hadn't gravitated towards it sooner having spent the best part of 25 years wrestling with and failing to master a proper guitar.

My lightbulb moment occurred in the unlikeliest of places in2012. I was at a punk festival in the home of turd-polishing, Blackpool. It was the first day of a mammoth four-day weekend of beer-drinking and eardrum-punishing and I was watching new bands at the poorly-attended and aptly-named New Band Stage.

That's where I first saw a band called The Pukes. The Pukes are a collective of around 20 women and a couple of men who play classic punk songs on ukuleles. It sounds odd, I know. It was one of the best things I'd ever heard and the room was wall-to-wall smiles as they added their own stamp to Dead Kennedys and Peter and the Test Tube Babies numbers.

I felt inspired by The Pukes. When I returned to York I bought myself a ukulele, a tuner, a chord book and a little bag to put it all in from Red Cow Music. The guy in the shop was thrilled when I told him my reason for purchasing an instrument and he played and sang a few bars of Anarchy in the UK before ringing it all through the till, much to the amusement of others in the shop.

I raced home and took my new purchases out of the carrier bag. Tuning was easy and within ten minutes I'd learned how to play C, F and G chords, equalling the music capabilities of Status Quo and the Ramones in record time.

I strummed away for a little bit without playing any recognisable song and then stopped to think about which actual songs I should play. It was going to take me a while before I got around to learning a whole song, a definite hangover from my attempting-to-play-the-guitar days, and even longer still before I'd let anyone hear me doing it, but I was on my way to being able to write “playing the ukulele” in the mostly post-truth-riddled hobbies section on my CV.

Stay tuned, uke hunters.

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