As lots of people have been doing something faintly embarrassing in the past 24 hours in aid of Red Nose Day, here is my contribution, a version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah I did on my new Makala ukulele, inspired by George Formby.

This was incidentally something I thought of doing ages ago but it took me this long to (a) buy the uke, (b) teach myself to play it, (c) have the guts to do it, (d) get all the way through a version without cocking it up and (e) get YouTube to play it properly. The first version I uploaded, which was the native .asf file format which my Samsung netbook’s webcam produced, had the audio/video 10 seconds out of sync, making me look like I was miming for a bit and then lipsynching badly for the rest of the ‘performance’. After casting for suggestions on YakYak I was advised to convert the file to a more YouTube-friendly format before uploading. I messed around with MediaCoder for a while but was bamboozled by its myriad settings, and then someone suggested I tried iPodme, which worked a treat.

Another funny thing is that I thought this would be a fairly original thing to do, but when I finally uploaded it to YT and looked at the related videos I found there was a whole Leonard-Cohen-ukulele-covers subculture on there. The other versions of Hallelujah I watched though do mostly take the song quite seriously, so maybe mine is unusual in that respect…