Why Duke really is Special

With eyeliner defining his eyes, his head part-shaven and part-dreadlocked, no one looks like Duke Special. No one sounds like him either. He made his name as a singer-songwriter with a modern vaudeville twist, but he has constantly developed and his latest album Look Out Machines! has taken his melodic style and added an almost symphonic edge in places.

But it is his less mainstream work – often commissioned – that truly sets him apart. He was invited to write new songs for Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children at London’s National Theatre (in which he also performed); to DJ with vintage 78s as part of the Shellac Collective; and to present a documentary about the life of Irish singer Ruby Murray, whose songs he subsequently recorded on a charity EP.

The project that has most impressed me is Under the Dark Cloth, his commission from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to write an album inspired by the work of three pioneering photographers: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand.

George Clooney has said that he makes commercial films to fund the artier ones he really wants to make. Backstage, before a festival set, I asked the genial Peter Wilson (as Duke Special was born) whether that is the way he sees his music, and whether commissions excite him more than his songs that work their way into the charts.

“I love it all, to be honest! But as you say, any success that you have, which is usually not a commission thing, but is something on the radio, definitely opens me up to a bigger audience and helps me to still be doing this ten years down the line. Radio 2 only ever played two songs: Last Night I Nearly Died and Freewheel, but that helps to pay the bills and keeps people interested.” And how does the commission process work? “It’s different every time. For Mother Courage I was paid some money to write the songs, and I took a few months to write those. Then I was also in the play and you get paid for being in the play.

“But Under the Dark Cloth, although I was commissioned, there wasn’t really any money in it, so I applied to the Arts Council to get £150 towards my flight. But going to New York, hiring a string quartet, hiring visual guys who were projecting images up on the screen, flights and all, cost me personally eight grand – and that didn’t even include my time!”

The Irishman’s sacrificial approach to the project in no way compromised the quality of the work, and he is still highly enthusiastic about it.

“I wanted to do a really good job and I actually wrote a lot of the songs with Boo Hewerdine and Paudraig o’Tuoma, who responded to a couple of photographs with poems. I worked with the poems and created songs out of those. It’s probably my favourite batch of writing I’ve ever done.”

He approached the task with no preconceived ideas and had “three lovely strands to choose from”: the photographers themselves, the pictures they took and sometimes a purely impressionistic take on their world.

One song in particular, “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” stands out for its humour. It was written with Neil Hannon, a former Bishop’s son, who contributed most of the music to the Father Ted TV series, from its theme tune to its Eurovision parody show.

“I knew this would be right up Neil’s street,” explained Wilson. “’You press the button, we do the rest’ was Kodak’s slogan.

“I read that Stieglitz hated the Kodak camera initially, and I’d read a lot of other things about him and how cantankerous he was; very opinionated and dismissive of other people’s work. He was very dismissive of the Kodak camera, and then realised, ‘Oh, actually, if I break the rules, what you’re meant to do with it, and use it in different ways...’ It became very useful for him. It was portable, for example. So he changed his mind.

“But I love the idea of this man ranting about the Kodak,” he added, laughing.

Earlier in his career, Wilson apprenticed under gospel singer Brian Houston, added backing vocals to the New Irish Hymns album, and even released an album (under the name Booley) distributed through the Christian ICC label.

When I interviewed him a couple of years earlier, the topic came up and he said, “My faith is something that I’m not ashamed of, of course. There’s definitely some praise and worship albums that I’m a bit embarrassed about, because I don’t think they were well produced – in the same way as I’m embarrassed about other albums that I’ve played on that I wouldn’t want to see the light of day. No, I don’t care if anyone knows about my faith.”

When I asked him this time about whether his faith boosted his creativity, his body language changed.

“There’s always a tension in my relationship with my faith, just because, I suppose like everybody, I’m on a journey,” he replied.

“I grew up in a Christian home, and all the rest of it, but...,” he paused for some while, searching for the right words. “It’s something that sits uneasily with me.

“I’ve struggled for a lot of years with the established church and all that kind of stuff; partly through growing up in Northern Ireland and just being so frustrated – there are so many things that I don’t agree with, you know?

“I’ve seen people say, ‘Use religion as hard, cold fact’ and faith as hard, cold fact, which is unbending and so aggressive to other people and I really struggle with that. I trust people who have a belief or a faith, who recognise that they could be wrong, or they don’t have the whole picture.”

But he seems not to have given up entirely on faith. “I think ultimately, I feel something comes alive in me and things like grace and hope really, really resonate with me and I can’t shake them. So I’m enjoying exploring some of that at the minute.”

He considers Look Out Machines! to be a snapshot of where he is at the moment, and the new song “In a Dive” (named after places he has sensed God outside of churches) could be a summary of our conversation:

“Jesus and his blood don’t mean so much anymore / Something must have died in this rotten apple core/ Don’t get me wrong: it isn’t that I don’t believe / Maybe it’s this place I grew that burns in my throat / Fundamental shoes who carry souls to the boat... / Don’t shrink it down to the size of your head / You know that some things are more than can ever be said... / Certainty’s a city I decided I should leave.”

The title track gives a further clue to the way that he is thinking. It is about machines and systems that try to squeeze people into boxes and conformity; a cry from humans that we will, as he told the Irish Independent earlier this year, lift ourselves above “machines or systems in any form, whether it’s religion or politics or anything that makes us a number or tries to make us all the same.”

Including religion in that quote suggests that, ironically, aggressive rules-based believers have pushed him away from faith in Jesus, who stood so strongly against those who turned faith into a heartless, rules-based system.

Other tracks on the album sometimes employ religious phrases, but are in a different context. Songs have been inspired by topics as distantly removed from each other as love of friends and community, feeling like being on shaky ground, the poet Seamus Heaney, and old views of left-handed people.

It is an album to be proud of and I suspect that he is very pleased with it. He spoke very paternally about the creative process, whether in art or any other part of life, being something that he can recommend, “Before there was nothing and suddenly there’s this. It’s been born and it’s such a thrill!”

Duke Special is performing Under the Dark Cloth at the Greenbelt Festival on Friday 28th August.