Gentry Does It

It’s not difficult to pick Northern Irish musician Peter Wilson – better known as Duke Special – out of a crowd. Having arranged to meet the 38-year-old outside the bookshop at London’s National Theatre, Hot Press spots the dreadlocked, heavily made-up and flamboyantly dressed singer from about fifty yards away.

Five minutes later, the softly spoken Duke is sipping from a bottle of Speckled Hen in an upstairs bar, and considering whether he’ll ever shave his head and drop his ‘hobo-chic’ style.
“I don’t know, if I start to lose it I’ll probably reconsider!” he laughs. “I guess it has become a little bit of a trademark, or something. It’s funny over here in England, often I get people come up to me and go, ‘Did I see you on Never Mind The Buzzcocks?’ They’re thinking of [comedian/musician] Tim Minchin, which is initially annoying, but then I found out that Tim Minchin sometimes gets asked, ‘Excuse me, are you Duke Special?’ On a subway in New York, he got asked that, apparently.
“So, I contacted him and said would he guest with me in a show in Belfast last year. And he came over and we dueted. So there’s actually a bit of a head-fuck because we do… we look different but there is something similar about our faces, or something. It’s really weird. So my wife went up to him and, pretending she thought it was me, said, ‘You were absolutely wonderful, darling,’ and gave him a big hug.”
We’re meeting in mid-December on the eve of Duke’s 57th appearance in Deborah Warner’s stunning translation of Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play Mother Courage And Her Children. The subject of uniformly rave reviews, the production stars Fiona Shaw as Mother Courage, while the music of Duke and his band is also an integral part of the play.
Although his live shows are renowned for their theatricality and elements of vaudeville, this is the first time he’s ever participated in a full-blown professional theatre production.
“Yeah, well, it came about when I was invited to play at The Oscar Wilde’s ceremony in LA in January of 2007,” he explains. “They invited me to play. So they honour three people in the film industry and then have a musician come and play. And the year I was there it was Colm Meaney, James L. Brooks from The Simpsons, and Fiona Shaw.
“So I did a one-man-show with visuals and I had song sheets for the audience and things like that, and there were elements of a musical to it. And then Fiona flew over to see me play in Dublin, and brought her director, and then they invited me to come see a play that there were doing in Dublin, called Happy Days, a Beckett play. And afterwards they asked me would I be interested in writing something for Mother Courage. So, initially, there was a mixture of being blown-away and chuffed, and also a bit nervous.”
He needn’t have been. Most of the play’s reviews have singled out Duke’s music and performance for particular praise.
“They assured me that they wanted me to come out as Duke Special, not trying to be someone else. So then they had the idea of – normally the actors, or the characters, sing each song, but they created this role for me which is almost like a spirit-guide to the characters, so that at times I am singing to them, or standing beside them and reflecting their thoughts or their spirit at that time.”
Does he find it difficult performing to a script?
“Well, I’ve always tried to bring in theatrical elements to when I perform. And I have always kind of wanted people to feel that it almost is a play in some respects. And Deborah [Warner] was saying that she wanted people to be able to come out of this and for it to feel a bit like a concert, so there’s a real synergy in what we explore. So in that sense I feel very comfortable performing within a song. I was nervous about it in case I was getting lines outside of that. I am not an actor, but I can perform a song, you know. It feels really comfortable, actually.
“The weird thing is your adrenaline isn’t in any way the same because, well, you are not the main focus; you’re just one element within it. And also, you do a song and then you’re offstage for twenty minutes, and then you come back on and do another song. So I find that quite strange, just where you’re in the zone, and then you’re backstage reading, and then suddenly, ‘Right, time to go back on again’.”
Is that what you do when you’re backstage? Read?
“Well, I share a dressing room with all the other guys and musicians who are playing with me, so the craic’s ninety. It’s good fun. But, yeah, sometimes I read. I mean, I used to watch every line for the first lot of weeks of rehearsal, and then you just… you couldn’t.”
Do you find it easy to do now?
“Em, yeah, although you can never totally relax, or else you’ll fluff something.”
Have you fluffed at all?
“There’s been a couple of nights where a line has just completely escaped me. And I’ve had to just… it’s not like in my own gig where I could make a joke of it or improvise, I’ve just had to quickly find something to sing. And, you know, just hope that nobody notices. That’s really unnerving. Also, the band is really spread out in different parts of the stage, and we’re all wearing earpieces, and so that was really difficult to begin with because usually in a gig it’s all about a vibe, whereas the vibe was taken away and it’s all about what it looks like. But, yeah, it weirdly feels… I mean, you’ll see things tonight that you’re going, ‘What the hell?’ but it kind of feels very normal now.”
Duke’s music for Mother Courage is featured on his just-released triple CD set A Book, The Stage & The Silver Screen (each CD is also available individually). The Mother Courage soundtrack is obviously The Stage. However, A Book refers to Huckleberry Finn, and features five previously unrecorded tracks written by Kurt Weill based around Mark Twain’s classic novel; while The Silver Screen is the Steve Albini-produced album The Secret World of Hector Mann. Based around Paul Auster’s cult novel The Book of Illusions, it features Duke’s versions of songs written by the likes of Neil Hannon, Ed Harcourt, Thomas Truax and Paul Wilkinson.
Why a triple album, Duke?
“It’s kind of just the way it turned out,” he shrugs. “Like, Huckleberry Finn was recorded over a number of stages. I was actually recording that two years ago, and then the strings were done on a later date in New York, and then it was mixed in Germany at another later date. So it’s just one of those things that I’ve had hanging around, I just haven’t had a window to release it.”
The five songs on Huckleberry Finn were written by Kurt Weill for a musical which was abandoned following his death in 1950.
“Weill for me was a big influence,” he says. “You know the way there’s different points in your life where lights go on, and maybe suddenly you discover an author, and you go, ‘Why have I never heard of this person before?’ And Kurt Weill has been someone like that for me, because a lot of his tunes are really melodic and very accessible and tuneful, but he’s got all these other chords and interesting colours and textures going on underneath.”
These songs have never been recorded before?
“No. He died in 1950 before this was completed, so there are only five tracks on that one, but I haven’t been able to find any recording. So, we sent to music to the Weill Estate and they said it was really in the spirit of Weill, which is fantastic.”
The still-living American author Paul Auster also gave his blessing to the songs on The Silent World of Hector Mann. When he’d completed the album, Duke sent it to him and received the reply: “He (Auster) enjoyed it immensely and was particularly thrilled by ‘Mr. Nobody’, ‘Jockey Club’ and ‘Tango Tangle’. He gives his blessing wholeheartedly to you and the project.”
“Yeah, the Hector Mann songs were originally recorded last summer with Steve Albini in Chicago,” Duke explains. “At the time I was looking for an angle for some B-sides for the album, and then it somehow became this really coherent little collection in itself.”
I wouldn’t have thought of you as a Steve Albini kind of guy...
“Well, that was part of the appeal,” he smiles. “And Paul Pilot – he has produced most other things I’ve done – I set him the task, almost like an old-school A&R on the last record, to just throw ideas at me, and I knew I wanted to do some collaborations, and also to just go somewhere out of Ireland, or London, so we found this amazing studio in Illinois, Champaign, called Pogo Studios. It’s this incredible hot-bed of unusual instruments and interesting musicians who worked around that area.
“And then we had the idea of, ‘Why don’t we contact Steve Albini and see about maybe… whatever we’ll record we’ll do in a short time’. So I was actually writing with Bernard Butler who did one of the songs on the last record [‘Those Proverbs We Made In The Winter Must End’], and while I was there I had been reading in The Book of Illusions about a silent movie-star called Hector Mann. I was playing around on the piano and the song called ‘Mr Nobody’ came out of it, and I realised that this movie-star Hector Mann had only ever made twelve films, so I thought, ‘Well, twelve songs could be an interesting angle’.
“And I knew the trip to Chicago was imminent so I sent the book to eleven other writers that I liked and asked them to write a song based on one film each, in a pre-rock ‘n’ roll style, and so they all sent songs back and we recorded the twelve songs in three days.
“So, ultimately, each of these albums, I hope will be of interest to the more literary minded listeners.”
When pressed to define his sound, Duke says that “it’s like a conversation between the Magnetic Fields, Kurt Weill and Charlie Chaplin.” However, even though he’s just released this ambitious triple CD, he says he hopes his best work is still ahead of him.
“I feel like my best record hasn’t happened yet, and for me it’s the interesting collaborations and with other art-forms as well, whether its theatre or visual arts. Like, I’ve done some work with orchestras which I absolutely love, but then I also love playing with – like the last tour I did of Galway, for example, I did it with a band called Panama Kings who are just finished a tour with Ash, and that brings out something different in me, that more kind of visceral guitar/bass thing. But, yeah, I just love the variety of things, I don’t like being pigeon-holed as just this one thing. And hopefully I won’t be.”