This is a paragraph of text that could go in the sidebar.
It’s the classic story of slow and steady winning the race, but that shouldn’t make us any less proud of how this very talented local artist made good. In this exclusive interview, the Duke tells AU all about how it feels to have finally made it.
By Ross Thompson
Rewind a few years.
AU is sitting in a local pub, a not entirely salubrious location that might have the feel of a juke joint where punters enter through the door and exit through the window, if it were not for the fact that there is not enough people here to instigate a bar brawl. A clutch of doleful-looking individuals sit around nursing pints, while another bunch of sad sacks stand at the back, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes and playing the puggies. A group of jokers wearing denim that Status Quo would reject for being too rare comprise the support act that has just finished their set of tediously average mid-paced rock.
Things do not look hopeful. In fact, things could only get worse if the rest of the evening’s entertainment was made up of a back-to-back screening of all seven Police Academy films. Particularly the later ones that don’t star Steve Guttenberg.
Then, without fanfare, a curious-looking fellow shuffles across the beer-sticky floor to what passes for a stage in these parts. Head down, hands buried deep in the pockets of his military jacket, he appears shy and self-conscious. Not what you want when your evening is rapidly spiralling downward into mind-numbing boredom.
And then he sits down at his piano, quietly says “hello” into the microphone, and starts playing. If you’ve heard Duke Special before, you will already know how that feels.
Fast forward a bit, and AU is mingling with the audience in The Empire.
The people around us push forward, camera phones aloft, as they try to catch a glimpse of what is happening at the front. Duke Special has just finished the second night of a two-gig residency, and is performing his encore in the middle of the room. As he runs through an impromptu version of ‘John Lennon Love’, un-miked and un-amped, everyone, AU included, joins in with the chorus.
Up above, the mirrorballs hanging down from the ceiling sparkle in agreement, like stars perhaps.
Jump cut to the present, and The Duke, or Peter Wilson to his chums, is belting down the motorway with Chip Bailey, the talented multi-percussionist that bears more than a passing resemblance to Rowlph the piano-playing dog from The Muppets. They are heading for the airport, where they will jet off to Brussels.
It’s an appropriate metaphor, for in recent months Duke Special has seen his music career leap skyward. Having signed to V2 records, he is readying his first major release, ‘Songs From The Deep Forest’, a wonderful melange of heady orchestral pop and wry, poetic lyrics rare in modern music.
But getting from there to here hasn’t been easy, and Duke Special has played in dozens more dirty little grips than the aforementioned dive in Belfast.
Over the next hour, he chats to AU over a phone line that keeps cutting out each time his transport passes underneath a bridge. This, as it turns out, is pretty often…
“Music has always been in my family. It was always around, and was a huge part of growing up.
I have three older sisters who all play piano and guitar, and we would all play together every Christmas. Everybody had their own party piece. When I was eleven or twelve, I played in shows in the clubs, and I remember people really liking it, and being quite chuffed at that.
Then, from about thirteen, I just knew that I wanted to do music, in the same way that other kids like playing sports. It allowed me to escape into my own private world, and I did everything that I could to get there. I went to piano lessons, and I even followed those guitar charts that tell you where to put your fingers on the fret-board.
”
Like every awkward teenager worth their salt, the Duke started jamming along with records in his bedroom. AU tries to imagine a young buck with dreadlocks-in-waiting miming into a can of Lynx deodorant, but the image is a little too surreal.
“I listened to The Beatles a lot, particularly their song ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’.
I also had an album by a guitarist called Phil Keaggy that my sister gave to me as a present, which, and I’m kind of embarrassed to say this, made me cry. But then I’ve always been emotional about music. It has that power to get under your skin and right into your soul.
”
It’s an apt description. Lou Barlow, of Sebadoh (sort of) fame, once sang that it’s all a matter of soul and fire, and Duke Special has each of these in spades.
“At the same time, I didn’t want my writing to become maudlin and stodgy.
I wanted it to be fun and entertaining. Particularly live. There are so many things that you can do during a concert setting that you can’t do on a record.
It is a live event, and it has to be visually arresting. That can be anything: what you wear, or where the drums are placed, or the piano or whatever.”
Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing Duke Special play live, especially those who were present at The Empire not that long ago, should know that the eccentricities of these performances are one of his most unique selling points.
“People had been telling me that they could imagine my songs being part of a play or a musical. After my initial alarm I began exploring the worlds of Music Hall and Vaudeville, along with early Chaplin, Laurel And Hardy, and Bob Hope among others.”
Sure enough, going to a Duke Special concert is like transporting into a bygone era.
With the stage resembling an explosion in a bric-a-brac shop, replete with piano, theremin, crushed velvet throws and those beloved gramophones, you almost feel as if you are flicking through the pages of an old, dusty photo album, so the sepia-tinged pictures blur into a jerky reel of film.
With this emphasis on showmanship, Duke Special is unlike any other artist currently on the scene, within Northern Ireland or without it. But the persona wasn’t easily won.
The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the path to a successful music career is littered with unsold demo tapes. For Peter, bands came, and, such is the fickle nature of the music business, they went.
AU mentions an early incarnation, Booley House, and then, with a click and a buzz, the phone cuts out.
AU hits redial, slightly worried that Peter has hung up on us for rattling a skeleton in his closet.
“Hi,” says Peter when he picks up again, and starts laughing, but this is not him scorning what has come before, or thinking that his newfound renown pegs him above the folks he has left behind. As it turns out, he is charmingly self-effacing about those tentative forays into the world of songwriting.
“In a way, I wish that Duke Special was the first thing that I’d done, but that’s the unnerving thing about releasing music outside of your garage. My first songs were crap, to be honest. Basically, I was in a hurry to get each one finished: there was the first verse, then the chorus, and anything that rhymed went in.
I tried to wrap everything up in a Disney way. In the first verse you’re feeling rubbish, but by the end everything is resolved.”
This is not false modesty, the kind feigned by other folk when they are fishing for a compliment.
It’s just Peter being honest.
“I mean, it was only five years ago that I discovered the likes of Aimee Mann, Nick Cave and Tom Waits, all of whom have become landmark artists for me. I also started listening to Bruce Cockburn, who was inspired by T.
S. Eliot, and I realised that there are new ways of looking at something that open up new ways of looking at the world. It forced me to work really hard on the lyrics.
It made me up my game.”
By bringing the piano to the fore, and by writing wry, witty lyrics, Peter also invites comparisons with other artists such as Randy Newman.
“I’m really pleased with that.
The interesting thing about Newman is that he often writes from the perspective of another character. He mixes things up to the point that you cannot separate fiction from fact. I use Duke Special as a character from a play or a book.
Some of my songs are really, really personal to me, but I also take liberties. Others are a mouthpiece for other people or friends of mine. I guess that’s the difference between therapy and art.
If it was purely for my own therapy, then it wouldn’t be very good, and I don’t think people can relate to that. Anyway, what the songs are actually about is less important. Frank Sinatra sang other people’s songs, but he always said that what matters is that people believed them.
”
Along the way there was another band, the short–lived Benzine Headset.
“What happened there was a group of us sat in the studio with a dictionary, looking for two words that we could put together. As a result, we came up with a really crap name.
Seriously though, it was a good experience playing with the other guys but in the end we were different people with different influences and different expectations, to a certain extent. It took me a long time to realise that I wasn’t trying to be a musician and a songwriter; I was a musician and a songwriter. I explained to the others that I had to go for it, that I needed to go on my own for a while.
”
As abortive as those flirtations with the group format may have been, they each acted as a vital stepping stone to the creation of the identity of Duke Special. First of all, the Benzine Headset album, ‘Garçon Pamplemousse’, featured a handful of songs that still feature in Peter’s repertoire: ‘As Good As It Gets’, ‘Freewheel’ and ‘Kill Me Quickly Please’.
“I was doing the first Duke Special EP, ‘Lucky Me’, with Paul Wilkinson of The Amazing Pilots.
He said that there was a different side to those songs, that they could be made much bigger. I wanted them to be orchestral-sounding and old, as if they were from another world.”
‘Freewheel’ is one of the songs that caused V2 to see Duke Special’s potential, hence its inclusion on ‘Songs From The Deep Forest’.
Radiohead have frequently said that ‘Creep’, the song that made them but one that they rarely perform live, has become their albatross. Can the same be said for ‘Freewheel’?
“Lyrically, I still get so much of it, but it feels a little strange playing a song that was written so long ago.
But I don’t want to be colloquial about it either. There’s a big, wide world out there who still hasn’t heard it. I tell you what though, it won’t be on the next album.
”
The second lesson that Peter learnt was that it was okay to sing in his own accent. Unlike other artists from these shores, one of the joys of listening to his music that he does not try to sound as if he was born and raised either in The Bronx or on America’s East Coast. A few years ago, the idea of the dulcet Norn Iron tones being pleasant on the ear seemed more than a little far-fetched, but it’s time to make an exception.
Northern Ireland is not only noticeable in the lilt of Peter’s voice; it is at the heart of his music. There has always been the myth that in order to make it bands must leave behind the province and head for the big smoke. Duke Special’s ascension has proved that this is not the case.
“Yeah, and that is part of the reason why I wrote the line “I could go to London” in the song ‘Salvation Tambourine’. I really cannot emphasise the importance of local music. It’s such a great time for Northern Irish acts at the moment.
There’s Brian Houston, whom I played with for a couple of years, and he is a fantastic songwriter. Or Oppenheimer, who are doing so well right now, Iain Archer, The Amazing Pilots, Snow Patrol and Red Sirius. It’s great to be part of that scene, to represent Northern Ireland in that way.
I think that I’m the only one who lives in Belfast though. We’re a disparate community, but it still feels like a community. And no, I’m not moving away either.
God bless Easyjet, is all I can say.”
Despite hailing from this humble backwater that we call home, it was not that long before Duke Special bagged support slots with the likes of Aqualung and, umm, Maroon 5.
“I played with them in Whelan’s in Dublin.
There were lots of teenage girls there who were mad about Maroon 5 and not mad about seeing me.”
As Peter’s reputation as a thrilling live performer began to spread via both word of mouth, his website garnered thousands of hits, and the crowd at his own headlining gigs began to increase in number. To the annoyance of local promoters, a recent last-minute “secret” show in The Limelight attracted so many people that the clubs in the surrounding area were pretty much deserted.
Added to that is his appearance at the Vitalic festival and upcoming tours with The Beautiful South and The Divine Comedy. As ever, Peter is unassuming about his growing popularity.
“Of course I am stoked to have signed to V2, but I know that it’s not the be-all and end-all.
It’s all about having the right team around you, and I’m fortunate in that I have great people around me, people that I trust and being around. I deliberately play with people whom I like, and who aren’t idiots.”
That said, after so many years of kicking against the pricks, it must feel pretty good to finally be paid some well-earned recognition.
“It’s pretty surreal. On one hand, it has been easy in the sense that I’ve never really had a big disposable income. I worked in an office once making blank cassettes, which I wouldn’t recommend as a career choice, but otherwise I’ve just been playing music.
But then it definitely feels as if it’s snowballing now. I do feel vindicated and relieved, and of course I’m totally stoked. I mean, I’m flying to Brussels today to do interviews.
How the hell did that happen?”
At this point, the phone line threatens to go silent again. It buzzes like a fridge, and for a moment Peter sounds like a Dalek, albeit a very friendly and passive one.
AU can hear the sound of the car engine cutting out, and Peter announces that he has arrived at the airport and has to go.
AU has one final question though: reflecting upon the hullabaloo of signing to a major label and recording his debut album proper, what does Peter Wilson, or Duke Special, envision for the future?
“I’m very grateful for all of that, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to get better just because I have a contract.
It’s still all about me and my art. More than anything, I just want to be a good songwriter and do really good gigs.”
On recent evidence, this seems like a safe bet.
The good things, as Peter sings in ‘Everybody Wants A Little Something’, might take a little longer, but having only just finished ‘Songs From The Deep Forest’ he is already working on the next Duke Special record. Hopefully, it will include a new track that he premiered at the gig in Lisburn Arts Centre last month. Potentially called ‘Quiet Revolution’, the song brought the room to a dead standstill, with the audience fixed to their seats, unblinking and holding their breath for fear that the slightest movement might break the spell.
It started quietly and slowly, but built to a chorus of close harmony so sweet that it left us wondering whether to clap or cry. Music, as Peter pointed out earlier, does that.
From then till now, Duke Special has been staging a quiet revolution of his own.
His story is of particular interest to AU because it sums up everything that we stand for: not just the championing of our burgeoning local music scene, but the belief that Northern Ireland has a special and unique quality unrivalled by anywhere else in the world. We should celebrate that. It’s time to join the revolution.
PUT UP YOUR DUKES!
Peter Wilson isn’t the only vagabond who has taken the name “Duke”. Here are a few more.
Duke Nukem
Wilfully politically incorrect videogame series in which the main objective is to machine gun, bazooka and grenade any alien scum that get in your way. Pretty much like every other videogame then, but this one has the added bonus of scantily-clad ladies telling you what a he-man you are. Amidst all the carnage, much of the fun factor stemmed from spotting the numerous fanboy references to movies like Army Of Darkness and They Live: “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum.
And I’m all out of gum!”
The Thin White Duke
Along with Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, this was another alter ego dreamt up by crackpot genius David Bowie. No doubt a side effect of sniffing one too many lines of Columbian bang bang.
Now one of the most austere and respected figures in British music, he prefers to be addressed as “Mr Bowie,” or if he’s feeling frisky, “David”.
The Dukes Of Hazzard
Popular Saturday teatime televisual entertainment that did not seem quite so outdated when we were kiddies as it does now. The slim plot revolved around a pair of studly Southern Men, Bo Duke and Luke Duke (who drew the short straw in the name stakes), raking about in their 1969 Dodge Charger, ‘The General Lee’.
Basically like Bangor on a Sunday evening, but with banjo music instead of happy hardcore. Most episodes featured the boys outwitting the law, represented by Boss Hogg and Rosco P. Coltrane, by virtue of the fact that their car could jump over rivers and roadblocks and policecars could not.
Worth watching for a glimpse of Daisy Duke in her trademark cut-off denim shorts, but objectionable for its distinctly racist overtones. Plus, it earned this writer the Primary School nickname of “Sheriff Rosco”.
News RSS