‘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 that 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 is that he does not try to sound as if he was born and raised in America. 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 no longer the case.

“That is part of the reason why I wrote the line “I could go to London” in the song ‘Salvation Tambourine’. I 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 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. God bless Easyjet, is all I can say.”

Despite hailing from this humble backwater we call home, it was not that long before Duke Special bagged support slots with the likes of Aqualung and, um, 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. As ever, Peter is unassuming about his growing popularity.

“Of course I am stoked to have signed to V2, but I know it’s not the be-all and end-all. It’s all about having the right team around you, and fortunately I have great people around me, people I trust 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 it definitely feels as if it’s snowballing now. I 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 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 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 play 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. Despite 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 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 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.

This feature first appeared in AU Issue 30

Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing Duke Special play live, especially those who were present at The Empire not so long ago, should know that the eccentricities of the performances are one of his most unique selling points.

“People had been telling me 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 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 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 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 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 personal, 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, 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.

“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 people with different influences and expectations. It took me a long time to realise 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 - 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 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.”

Continue to page 3

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.

Manic Dublin quartet Fight Like Apes have quickly gained a considerable following throughout the country thanks to a mix of infectious, catchy, quirky synth-led noise-pop. Having recently released their new EP ‘How Am I Supposed To Kill You If You Have All The Guns?’, Mark (aka Pockets) talks to AU about onstage punch-ups, rubbish horror movies and being sick to death of guitarists.

Cut from the same gorgeously dark cloth as their debut, Editors’ second album, ‘An End Has A Start’, is a close-fitting and daring little black number. Produced by Garrett Lee at Grouse Lodge, the sepulchral sounds that so distinguished ‘The Back Room’ are here writ large. Utilising a choir on opening track, ’Smokers In The Hospital’ immediately signals their determination to up the ante. What once was skeletal and sparse is fleshed out. This is Editors with muscle. The titular ‘An End Has A Start’ provides the emotional core of the album, it is also one of the finest songs they’ve written to date. Tom Smith’s mournful vocal combining with helter-skelter guitar and end-of-the-world rhythms to create a monochrome spectacular. The message is simple; don’t fear the reaper. Already an established live favourite, ‘Bones’, is a veritable rocket from the crypt, all lacerating guitar and pummeling percussion. Throughout the contribution of Chris Urbanowicz is immense, just listen to the jerking, puppet-on-a-string guitar of ‘Escape The Nest’. Elsewhere, on ’Push Your Head Towards The Air’ and, the closing, ’Well Worn Hand’, Editors exhibit a simplicity and emotional directness that will surprise fans of their more contrived melancholia. For a prolonged meditation on death, ‘An End Has A Start’ sounds thrillingly alive.

Words_Francis Jones

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

DOWNLOAD: ‘An End Has A Start’, ‘Bones’, ‘Escape The Nest’
FOR FANS OF: Joy Division, Gang Of Four, Echo & The Bunnymen

Cut from the same gorgeously dark cloth as their debut, Editors’ second album, ‘An End Has A Start’, is a close-fitting and daring little black number. Produced by Garrett Lee at Grouse Lodge, the sepulchral sounds that so distinguished ‘The Back Room’ are here writ large. Utilising a choir on opening track, ’Smokers In The Hospital’ immediately signals their determination to up the ante. What once was skeletal and sparse is fleshed out. This is Editors with muscle. The titular ‘An End Has A Start’ provides the emotional core of the album, it is also one of the finest songs they’ve written to date. Tom Smith’s mournful vocal combining with helter-skelter guitar and end-of-the-world rhythms to create a monochrome spectacular. The message is simple; don’t fear the reaper. Already an established live favourite, ‘Bones’, is a veritable rocket from the crypt, all lacerating guitar and pummeling percussion. Throughout the contribution of Chris Urbanowicz is immense, just listen to the jerking, puppet-on-a-string guitar of ‘Escape The Nest’. Elsewhere, on ’Push Your Head Towards The Air’ and, the closing, ’Well Worn Hand’, Editors exhibit a simplicity and emotional directness that will surprise fans of their more contrived melancholia. For a prolonged meditation on death, ‘An End Has A Start’ sounds thrillingly alive.

Words_Francis Jones

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

DOWNLOAD: ‘An End Has A Start’, ‘Bones’, ‘Escape The Nest’
FOR FANS OF: Joy Division, Gang Of Four, Echo & The Bunnymen

Auntie Annies, Belfast

As the kids get testy, a hapless bouncer scurries over to divide the dangerously out-of-control mosh-pit from snarling carrot-top leadsinger Frank Carter. The crowd surge forward. Someone loses an eye.

As Carter gets to work with the deeply menacing ‘Just Because You Sleep Next To Me Doesn’t Mean You Are Safe’ it feels like Year Zero, the stroke of midnight, 1976 and shit is about to go down. Screaming of the lost and the dead of British youth Gallows are a toxic evacuation of a set-up, we have only to take the medicine.

Through ‘Abandonship’, ‘Rolling With The Punches’, ‘Kill The Rhythm’ and ‘Stay Cold’ the band are nothing short of world-ending and it is tangable. Carter is the real deal - the smell of grassroots lawlessness and bitter disillusionment dripping from him. Gallows operate beyond the marketable, the pleasant, the unthreatening and it’s empowering.

They close with two of the most combustible punk songs to come out of Britian in over a decade. ‘In The Belly Of A Shark’ is a nasty slice of revenge-fantasy punk that describes “when you really hate a girl and you start goin out with her again just to fuck her up�. ‘Orchestra Of Wolves’ ends the set with four minutes of macabre, vinegar-soaked violence. Something ugly and rotten has being growing right under our noses. Gallows will kill us all to save us. Let them.

Words_John Calvert

Auntie Annies, Belfast

As the kids get testy, a hapless bouncer scurries over to divide the dangerously out-of-control mosh-pit from snarling carrot-top leadsinger Frank Carter. The crowd surge forward. Someone loses an eye.

As Carter gets to work with the deeply menacing ‘Just Because You Sleep Next To Me Doesn’t Mean You Are Safe’ it feels like Year Zero, the stroke of midnight, 1976 and shit is about to go down. Screaming of the lost and the dead of British youth Gallows are a toxic evacuation of a set-up, we have only to take the medicine.

Through ‘Abandonship’, ‘Rolling With The Punches’, ‘Kill The Rhythm’ and ‘Stay Cold’ the band are nothing short of world-ending and it is tangable. Carter is the real deal - the smell of grassroots lawlessness and bitter disillusionment dripping from him. Gallows operate beyond the marketable, the pleasant, the unthreatening and it’s empowering.

They close with two of the most combustible punk songs to come out of Britian in over a decade. ‘In The Belly Of A Shark’ is a nasty slice of revenge-fantasy punk that describes “when you really hate a girl and you start goin out with her again just to fuck her up�. ‘Orchestra Of Wolves’ ends the set with four minutes of macabre, vinegar-soaked violence. Something ugly and rotten has being growing right under our noses. Gallows will kill us all to save us. Let them.

Words_John Calvert