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be accuracy. The ukulele is a simple instrument, ideally suited providing a strummed accompaniment to any song, but we thought it’d be so much more fun if we essentially tried to recreate a record in its entirety with just two voices and two ukes. That decision meant that we had to immediately start to work very hard, not just to extend the set to fill a whole night (and memorise it all), but to fill it with quite intricate arrangements with all the vocal harmonies, riffs and solos that the audience would expect to hear if they listened to the song on the radio”. For Ian, “That is actually one of the best bits when performing. You start a song, the audience recognise it and then, as the guitar solo approaches, you can see on their faces they are thinking ‘they’re not going try and pull that off, are they?’ I love the reaction when they realise that we are, and that we do.” “The bookings kept on coming,” says Phil, “and we thought that if we always had at least one gig to look forward to, that would be a nice position to be in. As it turns out we’ve gigged pretty much constantly since we started, totting up hundreds of gigs, with future bookings right into 2012. We’ve been professional now for almost as long as we’ve been


together, and because we’re that bit older we’re very appreciative of that. We thought we’d had our time of being in a band, then as 40-year olds we find that we’re gigging more than ever.”


Their other decision was that there would be no egos. “We’d both been in bands where people put their own role above others, and had seen how it not only destroyed bands but meant that the effort wasn’t put into serving the music. The song is always the thing. We try and split the workload and not waste ‘resources’ by duplicating each other’s parts, but ultimately the person who can sing a song the best gets the lead vocal, and then the person not singing lead will tend to do the more fiddly parts. On some songs we split the vocal or the more complex musical parts. It is entirely driven by the song. We are very definitely a team. The division of labour is the defining characteristic that makes the band work the way it does.


“Despite both being singing uke players our styles are very different and we have particular strengths that we always try to play to when we’re


arranging a song.” One of those strengths is Ian’s ability to mimic other singers, but he insists he isn’t ‘doing impressions’:


”Sometimes a distinctive vocal sound is as much a part of the song as a riff or a solo. Ace of Spades really has to be sung in Lemmy’s voice, and the Vincent Price ‘rap’ at the end of Thriller just doesn’t work in any other voice”.


There is very definitely a lot of laughter and smiling at a Re-entrants gig, but they are keen to point out that that isn’t necessarily to do with the choice of instrument. “The uke has comedy/music hall associations, at least in the UK, and yes there’s something funny about two big bald blokes walking onto a huge stage holding tiny little instruments. Launching into something like ‘Ace of Spades’ on them is also funny, but the joke would wear thin very quickly if that was it. In order to make it work you have to play the music well. We take the music itself seriously, and treat it with respect, but also have a huge amount of fun with it, and the audience taps into both sides of that.


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