Interview with Duke Special at the Exeter Phoenix- "the most important thing is finding your own voice”

Belfast based singer-songwriter Duke Special (Peter Wilson) performed a spectacular and nuanced show at the Exeter Phoenix on his tour promoting his upcoming new album Look Out Machines!

The evening began with solo support act Paul Cook Chronicles, whose sound falls pleasantly somewhere between Paolo Nutini and Damien Rice. I liked his awkward humour between songs, although his dead pan sarcasm didn’t seem to the taste of some, he warmed the crowd up well and performed a good set of well written songs.

After a brief intermission Duke Special took to the stage. Wilson possesses a unique and beautifully refined singing voice, which can be dulcet and melodic or powerful and playful. He is also a talented musician and his piano playing was really impressive. The set contained a mixture of old and new material which flowed well together, and he also performed wonderful covers of Magnetic Field’s ‘Andrew in Drag’ and Harry Nilsson’s powerful ballad ‘One’. Duke Special’s music stands out from the usual indie-folk-rockers because of its poetic lyricism and confidence in experimenting with unusual percussion and melodies, which imbues it with an edge that ensnares your attention and imagination.

One of the best parts of Duke’s set was his clear enthusiasm for both his and other’s music; he introduced songs giving context to how he wrote them and charmed the audience with anecdotes and witticisms. For example he explained how one track used sample noises he recorded of his surroundings as he walked through a city constructing the song in his mind.

Overall it was a fun evening filled with good music and I’d recommend getting tickets to see him perform live if you can. You can also check out his latest single ‘Elephant Graveyard’ above, from his upcoming album ‘Look Out Machines!’ which is out April 5th.

Interview

 

So how’s the tour going so far- you’ve got a lot of dates all over the UK? Have you enjoyed promoting the new record?

Yeah it’s good, initially I was thinking with the new material how am I going to do this, cause this has been a solo tour and with the new tracks there’s a lot of different things going on. So I actually went down and recorded a lot of the tracks just piano and vocal, so that was a really good exercise just to know how to present them. I’ve got a couple of different pianos with me and some tape recorders, so it’s fun to introduce the new songs to the audience.

You can feel very protective over new songs, you want people to like them, so it’s how you introduce people to the new songs, but mixing it up with older stuff cause you don’t want it to be too overwhelming, you don’t just want to play all new material.

So is this your 5th solo album?

Actually it’s my tenth, well, there’s been four studio albums, but I’ve done other solo stuff, like I did a whole album with an orchestra which was all songs about old photographs, and a triple record I did which was music for a play I’d written, so the kinda traditional music press probably won’t have seen those cause they weren’t big releases, but yeah I’ve done quite a few records now.

Are those projects on your site, so if people wanted to find them could they?

Oh, yeah definitely it’s all on there, and you know it’s performed at gigs and stuff still too.

Because one of the things I found out when I was researching how you compose is that you use a lot of older equipment to create a more distinct sound?

Yeah, I’m lucky to work with really good friends who are really creative. And there’s something that feels more honest about partly creating your own sounds, particularly percussion- I mean you can hit anything and it makes a noise- so that’s been a lot of fun. On this record we used a lot of Moog keyboards, and other keyboards from the sixties and seventies, real drums, synthetic drums, real strings and synthetic strings, and then when you mix them together they sound really unusual.

You have this amazing blend of kind of past sounds and aesthetics and present or modern sounds and styles, do you find yourself looking to early cinema and music and kind of trying to match them up with things from the present?

Oh yeah, I mean I DJ with gramophones, I started collecting 78”s, old records ya know, jazz, blues, gospel, early rockabilly, early rock ‘n’ roll. They just sound amazing, the atmosphere on them, everything from the crackle of the record to the fact they were playing live, so there is something I do love about that kind of pre-rock ‘n’ roll music but then of course I’ve heard a lot of modern music as well inevitably when you internalise all of that it comes out as a blend.

Your music videos are all kind of surrealist or dream-like, both the live action which have this sort of Cabaret feel to them and the animated ones which are quite surreal as well, I was wondering do you enjoy producing the videos?

Yeah, I love it, the funny thing with video is it’s the one thing I don’t feel I have a complete handle on yet, my friends who do all the art work did a couple of videos for ‘Last Night I Nearly Died’ and ‘Freewheel’ which is really beautiful. But yeah I love the kinda surreal; I love just weird stuff I suppose! I don’t like to take myself too seriously; I take the music seriously but not myself. So yeah I’m always happy to make a fool of myself in the video.

I was going to say I loved your collaboration with Romeo Stodart (of The Magic Numbers) on “Our Love Goes Deeper than This”, the video is so dark but funny. Is there anyone living or dead you dream of collaborating with?

Yeah Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy played the other character in that one, that was really fun. But yeah unfortunately, no longer with us, a Scottish guy called Ivor Cutler, I mean this guy was very eccentric and wrote a lot of poems and songs, so yeah if I could have collaborated with him that would have been pretty ace.

Are there any musicians or artists you want to recommend to our readers or think we should be paying attention to?

Yeah there’s a young song-writer- a girl from Derry- called Soak, she’s actually listed in the BBC sounds of 2015, but really she’s a really great writer. There’s another guy from home, called David C Clements, he’s about to bring out a new record he’s great. My friend Foy Vance is fantastic, but yeah I love all those guys. The Villagers, if people don’t already know them they should check them out.

Your lyrics can be quite complex and poetic, do you have a writing process, is it observational, autobiographical or a blend of both?

Usually I start writing a song with just a bunch of lines written down on a page. And then often it starts from an experience or a feeling or a maybe just like a title, and it was interesting when I was writing the stuff based on old photographs, or even when I’ve written for plays where the lyrics is already there, you kind of find yourself in the song anyway, no matter who the character in the song is, I have to believe it myself and mean it. But they’re not all autobiographical, some definitely are, but a song is kind of its own thing as well it can tell its own story- you just have to mean it. It’s like when Tom Waits sings some made crazy song for those minutes he is that character.

What advice would you give to any aspiring musician or artist?

For me the most important thing is finding you own voice, what is it that you do that really expresses who you are? Not chasing what’s cool or current not chasing money or anything like that. Listen to lots and lots and lots of really good music and be honest in terms of what you’re doing or how you’re expressing it. Get out of the city that you are from, go and get support gigs with other bands, you won’t get any money for it initially but that was how I kind of apprenticed I suppose.

What’s the craziest or weirdest thing that’s happened to you on tour?

I had a very strange experience in America, I was playing a house concert and I realised quite quickly, during there was about a four hour journey from when they picked me up from the airport to us getting there that I was not who they thought I was…I was the right artist but someone had been pretending to be me for two years online and had been communicating with them every day, and they were expecting a 5”1 multi-millionaire who was bipolar, that’s what this person had lead them to believe, and so I was the guest of honour at the Lord Mayor’s parade at this town with this cavalcade of cars beeping their horns standing beside the Lord Mayor…and yeah it was definitely a strange experience like something out of a Coen Brothers movie or something!

So the new album’s out April 5th, you’re gonna be touring a lot, is there anything else we need to keep an eye out for that you’re doing?

Yeah there’s the new single ‘Nail in the Head’, and I’m writing for a new play which is gonna be based on Gulliver’s Travels, that’s going to be in Belfast in July for an organisation called Youth Music Theatre.