I Never Thought This Day Would Come
I Never Thought This Day Would Come is a confident, big-hearted and ebullient record, which sees Peter Wilson tell his truths from behind the mask of Duke Special.
Colin Carberry, 13 Oct 2008
It’s an especially heroic lineage – the one that views Jekyll and Hyde rather than Lennon and McCartney as the most inspiring double-act in pop history – so when, after years of unacknowledged slog at the coal-face, Peter Wilson unveiled his Duke Special alter-ego, not only was he freeing up aspects of his personality that indie-dom could never hope to accommodate, he was also claiming kinship with the kind of acts who devote as much imagination dividing themselves like Russian dolls, as they do dreaming up killer choruses and hooks.
It’s a move that both commercially and creatively has paid out impressive dividends. Wilson’s gift for old school balladry was evident back in his Booley days, but the pantomime eccentricities of the Duke Special project saw him flourish in unexpected ways.
On record (meaning the mini-LP Adventures In Gramophone and his debut album proper, Songs From The Deep Forest) this liberation has resulted in a strange kind of gin-soaked Victoriana, with loveliness and disquiet mixing in equal measure. Live, it’s proven even more profitable - placing him in a unique position in Irish music: somewhere around the mid-point between P.T. Barnum and Randy Newman. There are few other performers, after all, who you can imagine being invited to collaborate with the Ulster Orchestra, and also write the theme tune to a Northern Irish version of Sesame Street.
The press release that accompanies I Never Thought This Day Would Come is keen to trumpet the record’s racheting up of the other worldly quota. It claims that “Duke Special is the fucked up ringmaster of a broken down circus, the lead singer in a forgotten ballroom of ghosts, the loudest singer in a midnight choir and the first on his knees in an old time revival tent.”
And, sure enough, throughout the record there are plentiful examples of him pushing his stage(y) persona as far as it will go.
On the Kurt Weill pastiche, ‘Digging An Early Grave’, for example, the woozy piano and cackled laughter conjure up the course of a fairground ghost-train; ‘By The Skin Of My Teeth’ veers terrifyingly close to cutesy Annie territory; ‘Flesh And Blood Dance’ is so cloyingly theatrical you half expect Graham Norton and Andrew Lloyd Webber to put it forward for a phone vote.
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