Club Dread

Wrapped in a cardigan, trademark ginger dreads in place, the Belfast-born Peter Wilson wears a weary look beneath the mascara. Touring life is tiring, and now the promotional cogs are grinding for his new album, Oh Pioneer. He’s just touched down at Dublin airport and made a mad dash across the city. Luckily, he had some interesting company.

“The taxi driver was great,” smiles the Duke, not letting lack of sleep sour his chipper mood. “He used to roadie for showbands. He was telling me that disco killed live music. You had hundreds of bands touring everywhere, thousands of people coming out to see live music. Those touring bands were like a jukebox, they’d learn all the hits of the day. But then DJs came along.”
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Duke Special, Wilson’s artistic alter-ego.
“I remember just being absolutely hungry when I started. Not for fame, I wasn’t waiting for a record label to come along. It was very much a case of, ‘Let’s go out and play... everywhere’. I’m not a massive selling artist, I’m definitely not well-off, but I feel really lucky to still be doing this ten years later. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
It’s creative necessity. A yearning to express himself, to understand himself, to explore. A thread that runs throughout Oh Pioneer.
“It was the first collection of personal songs for a while and I wanted to go somewhere different,” he says. “The loose theme concerns an explorer or adventurer on the edge of something new. Wondering what’s on the other side of the mountain, in the other country that’s up ahead. A metaphor for personal renewal. I felt like I wanted to acknowledge personal growth. You can either stay in the same place or grow. And I really want to grow.”
To do so, he’s recently taken the road less travelled. He concedes that many will see 2008’s I Never Thought This Day Would Come as his last “studio record” but he’s kept busy. Added strings to his artistic bow. Writing songs for, and performing in, a production of Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage & Her Children, writing songs inspired by Paul Auster’s novel The Book Of Illusions and, with 2011’s Under The Dark Cloth, songs based on the photographs of Stieglitz, Steichen & Strand.
All of which informs Oh Pioneer. As does the Wooden Fingers Puppet Theatre Company, a banned Iranian children’s book about a fish and The Bank Of Ideas, opened in an abandoned office block by Occupy London protestors late last year. What does he make of the Occupy Movement?
“It’s a mixed bag, a very wide banner that people gathered under. I think what I respected about it was a) the fact that people were saying, ‘Are there not more important things than just making loads of money? Than buying and selling shares? Trading in property?’. And b) I think if we were in Syria or Afghanistan, these are the people that would be on the frontline. I have kids myself so I’m not knocking the idea of just working quietly away and looking after your family. But it inspired me that there are actually people around who are questioning the system and aren’t going to lie down. It felt like a very human thing.”

Oh Pioneer is out now on Adventures In Gramophone.