Yes, in under an hour actually. In 55 minutes with us you will have learned five chords and you will have played four songs, and you will be on your way to becoming a professional ukulele musician.
Wow. So presumably everyone in the audience gets a ukulele to practise on? We have 150 ukuleles and everyone gets one when they come in. If you want one at the end of the show we're selling them for £15 each, which is cheaper than anywhere else in town. When we arrived, we went round all the shops selling ukuleles in Edinburgh and they were all £20 or more.
The subtitle of your show is How George Formby Saved My Life. Did he really? That's to do with how my partner-in-uke Donal Coonan and I first discovered the ukulele. For a while I thought I was being haunted by the ghost of George Formby. I was having nightmares about him almost every night. I didn't know who he was, but I found out when I was going through my late father's things. There was a book there with his picture on and I recognised him from my dreams. So from then on I became completely obsessed with George Formby and thought that my dad had been somehow been sending him to me. I read all about him, listened to all his songs and watched all his films and basically decided I must go out and buy a ukulele, learn it and learn to play all these George Formby songs. And then Donal got involved with that because we were living together at the time, and we discovered that playing the ukulele made us feel a lot happier. It was an amazing discovery and we decided to try to spread it around.
So this is like a music therapy show in a way? It kind of is, actually, and you'd be amazed if you come along how happy people look during and after playing the ukulele.
Which songs do you teach them? We teach a range of songs from traditional folk, almost nursery rhyme-type songs up to a pop song right at the end. It's very easy to play.
Have you sold a lot of ukuleles? We've managed to sell about 45 and we've had about 15 stolen, but in both cases I think we've made some converts.
• Learn to Play the Ukulele in an Hour is at Gilded Balloon Teviot until 25 August, 5:45pm
The full article contains 444 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
