David Bowie with love and harmony

The Thin White Ukes.

I like to think we gave David Bowie one good chuckle. I know he was paying close attention to the rollout of the David Bowie Is… exhibition in Melbourne in 2015. He would have read the programme for the opening academic symposium, and seen the band booked to play it: The Thin White Ukes.

Not that rearranging the great man’s songs for three precision ukuleles and harmony vocals is a laughing matter. It better not be, when the world’s most besotted Bowie fans are watching. The punning name — the Thin White Duke was his 1976 alter ego — was meant as a whimsical welcome to a careful and heartfelt homage.

Hayseed Dixie planted the idea with their brilliant bluegrass versions of AC/DC songs. Then there was Dread Zeppelin, the dub reggae tribute act, and Mac Sabbath, Ozzy fans who dressed (no really) as McDonald’s characters.

The Thin White Ukes.

Further research unearthed Banjovi, a country Bon Jovi tribute. ABBAtoir was ABBA gone metal. I also heard about a Star Wars-themed band called Aerosith, and Koi Division: Joy Division in fish costumes. Too far? The market decides.

Right now, Elvana is the UK’s hottest “hybrid tribute”. That’s singer Paul Kell’s term for the phenomenon. When he first runs on stage dressed as Elvis Presley, “people are laughing, smiling”, he told me.

But Elvana’s take on Nirvana is so good “they’re soon singing along and enjoying the music in a way that they haven’t done in 25 years”.

The key, he reckons, is that there’s nobody on stage dressed up as Kurt Cobain: no impersonator invariably judged as lacking, even tasteless compared to the lamented original. “There’s no mourning that comes with it. It’s just entirely celebration.”

I always feel for performers aiming to replicate David Bowie’s act. They may be great singers, commanding actors. But they’ll never have Bowie’s look, his voice, his poise, his charisma, his otherworldly aura — certainly not his hair.

The Thin White Ukes.

For Bowie, too, repetition was anathema. When I met him in New York in 2002, he was laughing — not in a good way — about “some nerd in a red wig” playing Ziggy Stardust in a proposed movie. But he had enjoyed Seu Jorge’s flamenco remakes of Ziggy’s songs in Wes Anderson’s film, The Life Aquatic - another seed I saved for later.

David Bowie is dead now. But his brilliant songs are made of far more enduring and malleable stuff. As I’ve learned, they’ll even stand up to the apparent indignity of three ukuleles, three voices and the occasional Stylophone flourish, and still make people laugh, cry and dance every night.

Way back in 2015, after he saw our daft name in that symposium programme, maybe he clicked on a YouTube link to see what the Thin White Ukes had done to his work. Maybe he didn’t. If he did, I hope he glimpsed a tiny spark of the remake-and-remodel spirit of reckless adventure that made the world love him.

The Thin White Ukes.

Oh, and I hope he admired our wardrobe.

The Thin White Ukes perform at the Regent Theatre, Te Awamutu on Friday, October 18. Tickets from theregent.nz