People were dancing, drinking, sweating. It was reminiscent of an underground party or a dark club in Berlin. The alcohol was flowing, a Fifties-style rockabilly outfit were playing in a corner and everywhere were burlesque dancers doing their best to make people blush. This cool happening, inside a tiny shop in trendy Spitalfields, East London, was not to mark the latest Tracey Emin opening (though she was briefly there) but the country’s first specialist retailer for the ukulele.

Duke of Uke is the long-harboured dream of the uke enthusiast Matthew Reynolds. “It is sinful to overlook this hidden gem,” he explains. He’s not wrong and, it seems, he’s not mad for thinking that anyone else might share his guilty pleasure.

Opened last month, the shop is testament to a remarkable fact: the ukulele now has a contemporary sound and sensibility. To put it bluntly — it’s fashionable.

Up to now most people considered the ukulele an anachronism at best, at worst a joke. It was the bonsai guitar, the little treble one with four strings. People knew the difference between the baritone ukulele and the soprano ukulele: when you are sitting around the campfire you will find that the baritone ukulele burns for just that little bit longer than the soprano one.

It was only ever one thing — George Formby, Cleaning Windows.

No longer. At last year’s Glastonbury Festival, young people were carrying ukuleles and playing Ace of Spades by Motörhead. Last year, at the Concert For George, Paul McCartney played the ukulele in memory of George Harrison. Jack Johnson, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, David Byrne, Elvis Costello and Johnny Marr are now proudly playing the instrument on stage. Is the ukulele today what the synthesizer was for bands in the 1980s?

I play the ukulele for a living, and have done so for 21 years, most recently with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, which was founded in 1985. I say orchestra — there are seven of us, and our shared belief is that all genres of music are available for reinterpretation, as long as they are playable on the ukulele.

We were tired of the technological bias of the rock gig, and later of those performers who simply stared at a laptop. We yearned for a gig in which people simply play the music. The whole thing could end in chaos, and that’s the point.

Today’s explosion in uke playing is reminiscent of back-to-basics movements such as skiffle, or punk even, and, like those, it’s open to all. The audience goes home and thinks “I could do that”.

Could it be that we’ve all started to reconnect with the joy to be found in a simple, fun-sized, unpretentious musical instrument that doesn’t cost the earth and fits in a supermarket bag? Anyone with sheet music in the attic will remember the tiny ukulele chord windows printed on the page. People also remember the ukulele-banjo of Formby and the 1960s freak-out that was Tiny Tim.

The instrument’s history goes back a bit further. It gets its name from Hawaii (it translates as “jumping flea”), where instrument makers from Madeira arrived in 1879. The Hawaiian royal family took up the instrument, encouraged by King David Kalakana, nicknamed the Merrie Monarch after the equally fun-loving Charles II.

It became popular in the US after the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, which led to a sensational craze for the instrument. Hawaiian records outsold all other forms of music in the US in 1916. The concert at which Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue had its premiere also featured a concerto for ukulele and orchestra.

It can be argued that its origins go even further back. The guitar was once very small and had four strings, but was tuned up and played like the ukulele. Check out the carvings in Lincoln and Exeter cathedrals. Near-as-damn-it ukuleles.

Nine hundred years later we find that young British artists, such as the singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf and the rockers Vincent Vincent and the Villains, both NME favourites, are using the instrument, as are bands such as the New York-based female duo the Ukes of Hazzard.

What was once an underground phenomenon, with the Ukulele Freedom Front and the Uke Till You Puke movements pushing the envelope, is now a global phenomenon. So striking is this current wave of popularity that it is being called Nu-Uke.

The uke is refreshingly ordinary. You can play it to your friends. It’s a bit of a hoot. When we do a gig the local music shop reports a surge in ukulele sales. At our workshops we get people of all ages and abilities playing ukes in all sorts of tunings. They play in their own styles, from country picking to power pop. Maybe it’s the instrument of the people.

Could it be that the simplicity of the thing has made the ukulele the edgiest instrument out there?

Start plucking your own

Cost: Prices range from £20 to £700. Expect to pay about £80 for a good mass-produced one, and from £120 for a hand-made model.

Learn how at the Duke of Uke, 22 Hanbury Street, E1 (020-7247 7924).

Workshops are run in London, 10am-5pm, £80 (020-7485 2206), www.ukuleleorchestra.com. The next ones are tomorrow and Sunday.