"Anarchy In The UK" - fantastic

if anything you are underselling it ... the version of Teenage Dirtbag was really haunting, for one ...

They played near me a couple of times this summer-I should have gone to see them

Well, I didn't want to praise it to the heavens, in case everybody else thought it was rubbish.

I thought it might have got a bit more response, given the number of times ukeleles have cropped up on the podcasts.

but seriously I could have phrased that better-thanks for the prompt, I might not have tried it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00c67jq/Music_Feature_Ukulele_Orch...

includes snatches of Macarthur Park among others ...

which they will be selling.

http://www.ukuleleorchestra.com/main/home.aspx

has the signup info.

Also enjoyed Howard Jacobson's column (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard...) yesterday in the Indy which caught something about them quite well:

As a small object sent on a large errand, the ukulele is itself the quintessence of mock-heroic. This was understood by George Formby, for whom the Ukes have little time (though their version of "I'm Leaning on a Lamppost" played as Russian folk song lingers long in the mind). Formby's crude northern sexualising of the metaphor in songs such as "With my little Ukulele in my Hand" might have appalled Lord Reith but, in fairness, it only released a discrepancy between an epic ideal and the impossibility of realising it which is already inherent in the instrument.

The Ukulele Orchestra pulled off a more refined version by inviting a thousand people to bring their ukuleles along and combine in a mass four-stringed rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". I am no student of the German mock-heroic but I'd be surprised if Beethoven would have been much amused had he walked in. How far we'd have got explaining that the ukulele is in fact the ideal means of expressing the work's essentially grandiose preposterousness – and we mean that as a compliment, Ludwig - I have no idea.

But those thousand ukuleles revealed an unexpectedly wistful melancholy in the work. It was like listening to distant angels singing to themselves. And thus we discovered a capacity for wistful melancholy in the ukulele too, which surprised us into a strange quiet.

I had indeed found the faint sound in the Ode to Joy on the radio to be rather like voices, and had wondered at the time if it was people humming along, to be honest, but whatever it was it was a haunting experience.