Melbourne Ukulele Kollective
Governor Hindmarsh Hotel
Sat 1 March
Season closed


Do you have a wacky uncle or a fruity aunt? Have they ever wrapped paper around a comb and busted out a homemade-kazoo rendition of Highway To Hell at Christmas dinner when everyone's a bit jolly? Spare a thought for kids in Melbourne who'll never get to feel that piquant mixture of pride, affection, amusement and mortified embarrassment. Kids in Melbourne, you see, don't have those kinds of relatives anymore, because a few years ago the city council issued a decree compelling every single family to round up every last Loud Uncle Albert and Rude Aunt Cheryl and donate them all to a project for the greater good - to an initiative designed to bring joy, musical ingenuity and inimitable fashion daring to the masses - to the Melbourne Ukulele Kollective.

That's my hypothesis, anyway. The Kollective filled the stage with colour and character: an eccentric army singing their hearts out in pork-pie hats and ill-fitting tuxedos, cocktail dresses and feather boas; delighting the sizeable audience for a marathon two and a half hours with the twinkling lilt of thirty-odd lovingly-plucked ukuleles (adorned with plastic hibiscuses, of course). The sweet, surprising and often hilarious set of originals and covers was served up with a side order of groan-worthy Dad jokes, affectionate teasing and banter, and audience participation. The impression of being at a fabulous family reunion hit its peak when grandmothers, trendy twenty-somethings, and skinny, enthusiastic six-year-olds boogied together to a ukulelicised Nutbush City Limits. This was a fantastic, fun low-fi triumph of a show; whose finale will linger in my mind for months (it's almost like the guitar solo of Long Way To The Top was written for the kazoo...).

Robin Tatlow-Lord