When the UK went into lockdown in early 2020, people kept themselves busy (and sane) in all sorts of different ways. Some people took the opportunity to work on their fitness, some started making sourdough and banana bread, and others got really into plants. Like, maybe a little too into plants.

For Huddersfield-based music producer Piper Dawes, the enforced lockdown presented the opportunity to take on possibly the most ambitious project of her career – a group of musicians banding together to create ska renditions of famous songs, all recording their audio and video remotely (some of them oceans apart from each other), with Dawes taking on the task of editing and mixing it all to coherency. This group would come to be known as The Housebound Ska Collective, and to date have recorded ten singles, covering everyone from Gorillaz to Rage Against The Machine, in the process racking up hundreds of thousands of plays and video views in the process.

Following the release of their latest cover, an astonishingly faithful seven-minute ska version of ‘Through The Fire & The Flames’ by power metal poster boys Dragonforce – we caught up with Dawes to talk about the project’s origins, the challenges faced so far, and what might become of THSC once the world has returned to normal.

“I do have to own up and say that I had the idea to do something like this about six months before COVID hit. I put some feelers out on a Facebook ska group and got a few musicians together in a group chat. We decided on covering ‘High Hopes’ by Panic! At The Disco way in advance of the pandemic, but it was hard to get any traction going, everyone was busy and I wasn’t really getting any submissions from the musicians, but then lockdown hit and I had a captive audience – once everyone got furloughed they didn’t really have a choice! Three weeks from that point, we had the first single done.”

It was clear from the day the ‘High Hopes’ cover video dropped that The Housebound Ska Collective were onto something special. The mix is fantastic, and the ska-ification (?) of the arrangement gives an already fun song an extra level of joy, but it’s seeing the musicians holed up in their rooms and giving it their all despite the external circumstances that really makes it a joy to witness.

After the success of ‘High Hopes’, the group released an excellent rendition of ‘Backstreet’s Back’ as a follow up, but it was their third single, a ska’d up version of Paramore’s ultimate dancefloor-filler ‘Misery Business’, that really caused the project to blow up. At the time of writing this, that particular video has been viewed 374,000 times on Facebook alone.

“It’s a generational thing, I think. The people who find their music online are the people who got into music in the late 2000s, and we covered a huge song from that period. I’m not 100% sure that’s the reason why that one has had so much more reach than any of the others, but either way it’s still really cool to see.”

THSC’s latest cover is undoubtedly their most ambitious – anyone who has ever played Guitar Hero knows that ‘Through The Fire & The Flames’ is a completely ridiculous song, played at unfathomable speeds with inhuman technical ability. It might seem like an odd choice for a ska cover, but Dragonforce is metal at it’s most silly and most over the top. Ska is basically just that, but with punk instead of metal, so maybe it isn’t such a mad idea after all.

“We did it for no good reason, really. It started as a joke idea in the group, but then I wrote an arrangement just for a laugh and then several split lips later, the horn section had recorded their parts! Really, we’re just baiting Herman Li; he has a Twitch channel where he reviews covers of Dragonforce songs, well pretty much just this one song to be fair, and no one has ever done a ska cover of it so I’m hoping he sees it! I sort of hope he hates it.”

The Housebound Ska Collective is a joyous thing built out of a horrible situation. Dawes has stated that this project has really helped sustain her own mental health and that of her collaborators during this difficult time, and there’s no doubt that the people watching and listening at home also got at least a small burst of serotonin each time a new cover surfaced. Now that the world is starting to return to normal, what’s next for this project that might never have existed if the world hadn’t unexpectedly changed overnight?

“Someone asked me recently how we plan to one-up ourselves after the Dragonforce cover, and the honest answer is we can’t. If we’re talking about notes-per-second, we’ve peaked. We’re going to do ‘Africa’ by Toto next. It should be a bit more lilting, with more of an ’80s two-tone vibe. We have no plans to stop just because the lockdowns are ending. We’ve formed some really strong friendships despite us being spread all over the world, and whilst it might slow down a bit once everyone is back at work, we’re going to keep going for as long as we can. We’ve started a Patreon so we can try and keep this project going, and maybe one day we will raise enough to tour the project. We’ve got pretty much a full band on both sides of the pond so we could always do a UK wing and a US wing or something like that. Who knows, but I’m sure we’ll have a great time either way!”

You can find The Housebound Ska Collective on all the usual social media platforms, or you can subscribe to their YouTube channel.