Duke Special - Part 2
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.”
I Heart AU | Design by goodonpaper.org | AU is supported by Lottery funding
