Depending on your age and the state of your psychological well-being, they are cuddly monsters, caricatures of over-bearing adults, or fragments of the shattered Ego and Id. But, after a half-hour documentary on the subject, we were still no closer to discovering Who the Wild Things Are (Tuesday of last week, Radio 4).
It is 45 years since Maurice Sendak’s picture book broke into the imaginations of children traditionally weaned on the squeaky-clean world of Peter and Jane. The hero of Where the Wild Things Are is not the beautiful, all-American child, but a solitary, bad-tempered boy, with more than a hint of middle-European descent, reflecting Sendak’s own Jewish background in Brooklyn.
Max has a tantrum — like every little child, except those in storybooks — and his subsequent punishment entails a journey into a sub-conscious, where complex emotions such as anger and love are processed and reconciled. At the end, Max is not judged. There is a distinct lack of moralising in this book, which is perhaps why it received such an ambivalent reception at its launch, garnering hostile reviews and plaudits in equal measure.
It appears that Sendak got it just right. In the most revealing section of the documentary, five- and six-year-old children from an Oxfordshire primary school were asked what the wild things were, or what they reminded them of. The universal opinion was that they were like Mum or Dad when she or he got angry.
As parents, we roar our terrible roars and gnash our terrible teeth, but Sendak’s book reassures our children that we can be silenced with a stare; and that, when it is all over, they can return home and their supper is still hot.
You might say that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is in the business of monster-taming. I have had the pleasure of witnessing their version of the Troggs’ classic “Wild Thing”, played by their ensemble of eight eccentric strummers, and you have never encountered a more comic and cuddly version of heavy rock.
In the Radio 4 profile of the Orchestra on Tuesday of last week, we learned of their philosophy of music-making, and some of their technical secrets. But, to be frank, they were best served by extracts from their repertoire, which encompasses rock anthems, sultry ballads, and much in between — but forced through the harmonic and timbral sieve of the ukulele.
The most daring songs are reduced to inanity, the most complex to a series of simple chords, which you could learn (at one of the band’s workshops) in 20 minutes. In their hands, Kate Bush’s absurdly pretentious “Wuthering Heights” sounds like something you might hear at a knees-up in a working-men’s club, while George Formby’s ukulele classic “Leaning on a Lamp Post” undergoes the opposite transformation, into a sophisticated eastern-European art song.
It seems that the orchestra is in harmony with the Zeitgeist. I am told by a music-publisher friend that the ukulele is taking over from the recorder as the schoolchild’s instrument of choice. Parents be warned: the ukulele, over long periods of time, is no less irritating.
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