There is a song on my 1997 album, King of the Ukulele, which always seemed a slightly unusual fit: while the style of Taking My Oyster for Walkies Listen on youtube sits well with the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s songs on the rest of the album, the lyrics on this track are,...

My video: The Complete Ukulele Course is now on YouTube. It's a one-hour tutorial that I shot twenty-five years ago.   Nowadays short-form video is king. Everyone with something to say or show, from knitters to naturalists and accountants to astronauts, is now...

Make your Playing More Interesting by Doing It Your Way.   When I asked David Megarrity, aka Tyrone in the duo Tyrone & Lesley (read the interview here) about his ukulele playing style he said he’d  never been asked that question and promised to get back to...

My first impression of Tyrone, as he stood backstage at the 2012 Melbourne Ukulele Festival, was of a “geeky” fellow with a substantial overbite in a suit, wearing tortoiseshell glasses and holding a ukulele. It was the red fez on his head which gave me pause: a staid...

Recorded music used to have value and, while people continue to enjoy recorded music as much as they ever did, they no longer want to pay for it. How times have changed. When I was seventeen, and many of my peers were making car-related purchases, I put my money into...

Songs have always travelled. I recently came across one that has versions across the English speaking world. It has been passed on by word of mouth for close to five-hundred years. I started wondering how this song came to be written and what qualities it could have...

To coincide with my partner, Catherine, and I being featured in the latest HF Holiday Magazine (read online here pages 22-23) I’m going to use this newsletter to tell you what that is all about.   I regularly mention HF Holidays in my Performance Dates and,...

I was eight when my dad handed me a recorder: my first musical instrument. Along with others in my class I used a fingering chart to read the music to popular songs of the time. Our descant (C soprano) recorders pierced the air with faltering versions of The Wombles,...

Recently I went to see the remarkable Peggy Seeger, wife of Ewan MacColl, step-mother to Kirsty MacColl and half-sister to Pete Seeger, who is currently doing her final tour at the age of ninety. I saw her perform just down the road from where I grew up,   Seeing...

When Oasis and Taylor Swift announce their shows the news media go berserk. Tickets sell out as soon as they go on sale and prices for second-hand tickets go through the roof. This isn’t how it works for smaller/less well-known performers.   As I re-discovered...

The release of the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, and the recent death of Gene Hackman has stirred memories of my early time in Vancouver when I was a young man with dreams of being an entertainer.   Landing there in June of 1988 I found a burgeoning...

I love putting on the Big 60s, 70s, 80s Singalongs at our local heritage theatre, Penistone Paramount. The Singalongs remind me of some of the epic Vancouver Ukulele Circle meetings when I led 200-plus strummers from the stage of the St. James Hall. The event itself...

Early December in the 1970s, a small town in Yorkshire sees a 9-year-old boy gazing with wonder at a toy in J.T. Smith’s shop window.  The object of my desire was a tabletop football game called Casdon Soccer: a 2-player game consisting of a plastic green dimpled tray...

Making the video Your Car’s Too Big was McShane & Shaw's first foray into video making and neither of us had much of a clue how to proceed. But our flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants process showed us that the most important part of any creation is not the end point...

On the day of writing this Google went to the trouble of showing me one of my own photos and thereby let me know that it’s exactly 4 years since Chris McShane and I began filming our video for the McShane & Shaw song Your Car’s Too Big.   The following tale...

I'm delighted to report that my new book: Wings Are Handy Things is now ready to order in paperback from Amazon. If you're looking for a gift for yourself or the uke playing musician and performer in your life then this could be the answer. Here's the spiel:  ...

It is the fall, or as we say in England, autumn. Whatever you call it this is a time for transition and renewal. When change comes some of us embrace the change and some of us fight tooth and nail to make things stay the same. Ultimately, we have to accept the new...

Possibly the coolest thing about playing ukulele is what it can do rhythmically. We all want to strum really well. But what is good strumming and how do we achieve it?   Once you have learned a few songs you might want to make your playing sound more exciting....

Here is the final part of my interview with ukulele blues maestro Hal Brolund. Even though I have known Hal for years I was struck by his clear eyed perceptions of the musical life and the honesty and eloquence with which he spoke. If you missed the first two parts...

Hal Brolund and I first met in 2000. He was at home in Winnipeg, Manitoba when he heard me on CBC radio as Ralph Shaw – King of the Ukulele. At the time he was fronting a band called King Ukulele and, on that basis, we combined our kingly forces to do a brief winter...