“It’s been four years now since we first met up” says Phil Doleman, half of ukulele duo The Re-entrants, “and it’s been life changing.” Phil and his musical partner Ian Emmerson met up through an internet ukulele forum, and realising they lived near to each other, decided to get together for a jam. “We both made a list of twenty songs we’d like to have a go at,” says Ian, “and when we met and put our lists down on the table, something like thirteen of the songs matched.
As well as our musical tastes, we also noticed that we had a similar look and were of almost the same age. After a few minutes of jamming, we realised that we seemed to lock into each other’s playing instinctively, and that our voices worked well together. We just had a feeling that we could make something more out of the situation.” And The Re-entrants was born, their name coming from the ‘re-entrant’ tuning of the instrument, which means that the strings are not in pitch order (the string you would expect to be the lowest is actually the second highest note). Since then they have performed all over the UK at pubs, clubs, theatres and festivals, released 3 CDs, and there are Re-entrants signature model ukuleles in production.
Phil and Ian both had 20 odd years previous experience in a variety of bands - mainly rock for Ian and folk for Phil - most often playing guitar, and (despite Phil’s bizarre and short lived pop star status in 2004 when he was the banjo player in a band with a number two hit single!) they had pretty much given up on the idea of playing music professionally. Phil asserts: “People assume that because we were guitarists, we simply picked up these dinky little instruments in an attempt to be novel, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. We were already completely taken in by the charm of ukulele by the time we met”. Ian adds: “I got a uke as a joke present one Christmas, and it wasn’t long before I’d sold all my guitars”.
The plan, if you can call it that, was to try and do a few gigs. After a little garden party and a local street festival, however, more requests for bookings started coming in and then work, according to Phil, had to start. “We had half an hour of material and suddenly people wanted to book us for whole evenings. We had to decide what we wanted to ‘be’. We decided that we would stick to cover versions, but only of very popular recognisable songs, and that our ‘thing’ would
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