DUKE SPECIAL INTERVIEW

By Chris Wills 17/05/07 

On Thursday 17 May 2007, Duke Special played at the Leeds Irish Centre. Earlier that evening, I caught up with him in the plush (if bijou) surroundings of his tour bus and asked him a few questions about his music, his life – and bears…

Do you enjoy playing Leeds?

Yeah, I’ve played here a number of times, I think the last time was in the Faversham, and before that it’s been the Cockpit a number of times. Before that I think it’s mainly been Joseph’s Well, that was one of the first places I’ve played. Leeds Varieties is probably my favourite place to play in Leeds. This is my first time at the Irish Centre, which is an unusual vibe, but I kind of like it!

Why is the City Varieties the favourite place that you’ve played in Leeds?

I love that kind of theatre venue – I’ve just played the Shepherds Bush Empire and I’ve played the Olympia in Dublin a number of times and the Olympia in Paris, and I’d love to play the Opera House in Belfast. That kind of theatre setting really appeals to me, both as a venue to sit in and watch other things happening, but also as somewhere to play, because I guess what I try to do in a show is to do something which is slightly theatrical. So yeah, I love those kinds of venues for that reason.

Before Christmas, you played a number of gigs where you were supporting Snow Patrol – what was that like?

It was brilliant – you get to play the huge audience. It’s a bit odd as well, because the audience is often a lot of people who maybe bought the singles, or maybe people who wouldn’t listen to a lot of new music, who would just maybe for whatever reason listen to just chart music. So it was unusual to play to that kind of audience, because usually to date we’ve been playing to a lot of people who go to a lot of live shows, so you get people who are open to what I do. But it was really great to play the big audiences and really great of the guys to invite me to their shows.

You’re finishing off this current tour with some dates in Ireland. Is that something you always look forward to, going back to Ireland to play?

Yes. I’ve played equally in Ireland and the UK, so I feel that I’ve got feet in both camps, and in Ireland the audiences have been absolutely brilliant. There, everything seems to have come together really well, and radio, TV and live shows have all really converged tangibly and I’ve noticed a big difference in the last year in terms of people’s reaction to my music and stuff. So I’m very excited about these shows, but I toured there really not that long ago – in March – so it seems very soon to go back. But the shows seem to be selling well and I’m looking forward to them!

Looking back through your tour history, you have done a lot of touring in the last few years. Do you feel now that it’s really paying off and you are getting that recognition?

I think part of the reason I got any recognition to begin with was just through playing a lot live, initially on my own and just driving in a car and turning up for the money playing to twenty people as a support, and then just gradually building up a following. The Temperance Society (aka Chip Bailey) was the next person I kind of hooked up with and we did a lot of shows together, him playing drums and me on the piano and gramophone and cymbals. We gradually added other musicians who we were keen to work with, so there’s probably about ten other musicians who I would work with; so it feels like a bit of a collective, but always a different line-up each tour and different kinds of songs.

So there’s always quite an entourage when you’re going on tour?

It can be, or even now I still do shows on my own, or just with Chip or one other person or something. There’s no kind of definite thing set in stone.

Where does that music hall influence in your musical approach come from?

I think any musician probably begins by trying to sound like someone else or emulating your heroes – with Dylan it was Woody Guthrie, with the Darkness it was metal bands from the 80s. Wherever you are, I think people have musical heroes and you begin by trying to sound like them. It was weird growing up playing piano in the 80s, when all the music around was guitar bands or electronic music, so it was hard to feel like I fitted in with anything like that and the piano was just not really a cool instrument back then. Of course now it’s come around again, and I remember first hearing Ben Folds and thinking “my goodness, this is incredible, he’s doing something really interesting with the piano”. Obviously also people like Elton John and Billy Joel in the 70s, but that didn’t seem so cool. After a while, I think I tried to make it fit in with what was happening in the late 90s and early 2000s. I was playing in indie bands and it wasn’t really feeling right.

My good friend Paul Pilot, who’s on this tour playing both guitar and bass with me, and who produced previous records as well, really encouraged me by saying “what you can do is sing and play piano really well, and why don’t you just go for that and try and don’t be pigeonholed, but do what you think really natural and comfortable with”; and so I began to think about that and what way I could present the piano and sing in a way that wasn’t perceived as a singer-songwriter kind of vibe, so I just thought about presenting it in a slightly more theatrical way. My dad used to have these old 78s that just sounded like a whole other world that wasn’t around any more, and I watched a film about the life of Andy Kaufman, called Man in the Moon, and he used to have a little record player beside him when he was performing, and I thought that as a solo act that was really cool, so I got myself a gramophone. I went to an auction in Belfast and eventually tracked one down and the guy met me in a lay-by near Belfast in a white van, and I bought a gramophone from him for £80, paid him and took the gramophone and it looked really shit, it was all battered up, but I began to use that in live shows as interludes between songs and as texture within a song. And the piano just kind of lends itself really well to that kind of melody. The guitar is very rhythmic and chord-based, whereas the piano just really lends itself to pulling a melody out of it. So it’s like the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Cole Porter and Gershwin.

So that classic early 20th-century era of song-writing?

Yes, so it just felt very natural to explore that further. Then I was really taken by the old music hall variety acts: both by the incredible diversity there was in a show – you’d have everything from dancing animals (which obviously isn’t very nice!) to acrobats, novelty singers, people who could do things with hoops, or contort, things like that. So it was real variety, but also some of it was incredibly throwaway as well, and it was almost like opera for common people, in the sense of say the slapstick comedy of Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy who came out of vaudeville and music hall, so there was something very immediate about it. So I really liked the idea of juxtaposing something that was very immediate with hopefully songs that were a bit more timeless than that and had some depth to them. So as a result I’ve written songs that are maybe quite jaunty in their sound, but have something maybe quite melancholic or dark about the lyric.

Something like Last Night I Nearly Died would be a good example of that – an upbeat tune but quite unsettling lyrics. Do you think perhaps some people underestimate the ability of a lot of what’s pejoratively termed “disposable pop music” to smuggle in serious lyrics under what seems like a sunny upbeat pop tune; perhaps more than music that sets out to be more “issue-led”, if you like?

I don’t know, I just know that when I see a film or piece of theatre and I’m laughing, and then something more serious comes along, then I’m much more wide open to it hitting me; whereas I think if you’re over-saturated with serious things, it just bypasses you because you’re almost immune to it in some ways. I think it’s a great trick to smuggle in something serious within a much more palatable thing that people can accept. I just know that I really respond to that kind of thing, and I also think that life’s kind of that as well – people laugh at funerals sometimes and cry at weddings. Life’s kind of weird in that respect and doesn’t come all neatly packaged and I like the idea of never dwelling too long on one particular mood. I like nothing better than chewing the fat over a pipe or a cigar and a whiskey at night, and talking about life, but just having a laugh as well – but in the midst of that you can talk about really deep things. I think most of us can’t hack too much frivolity or shallowness, nor being too overly serious, because I think we’re made to flow through the whole gamut and that appeals to me in music as well.

The album has been very well-received. What plans have you got in terms of the next album, if any?

Well this one is probably going to run to the end of the year. Critically it’s been received very well, but it needs to translate into sales a bit more! [Laughs] I’m beginning to play a lot in places like France and I’m going to be touring out there. Ireland is going really well. I kind of need to talk to the label actually, because as well as winning new fans I want to do right by people who are already on board and to bring something out for them, but I’m just beginning to write. To be honest, the past six years have been like a never-ending tour for me, I’ve been doing over a hundred shows a year, and the first three or four years I’ve also been playing cover gigs in Belfast to pay my bills, playing Tom Waits and Sam Cooke and all that kind of stuff, in bars. So it’s been incredibly never-ending, so for the first time I’d love to actually dedicate a couple of months to writing and really seeing what I can do, because everything I’ve done to date has been on the run, and I’d really want to collaborate with some people and really push myself and learn how to craft better songs and grow in that respect. I’ve never really had the chance to do that, so I’m looking forward to doing that and seeing where that goes. I’ve no idea where it will go, but I’m excited about it.

Where did the idea for the bears in the CD artwork and the videos come from?

It came out of a collaboration with a friend, Tim Millen, who’s a great painter. He approached me about doing some illustrative work, and he’d be interested about doing illustrations for me. I said great and have a go. One of the first ones he did was what’s now the front cover of the album, and I really loved it – this was over a year ago – and I said “this is really great and whatever happens I want to use it for an album cover”. At that stage I wasn’t even signed by V2, but I decided I would call the album Songs From the Deep Forest based on that drawing. The drawing’s about a theatre in the wood with no roof and all these branches encroaching on top of it, a conductor on the stage, you don’t know what’s going to come on stage and the whole audience is made up of bears. So after I decided that was going to be the case, and I started recording the album, he then listened to the songs and did illustrations based on the songs. So it kind of came from that, and then out of that we decided to do some videos, and he worked together with another friend who’s an animator and they put together those videos.

The combination of that and the contrast between the sound of the album and some of the lyrics almost gives it in place a fairy-tale quality – but in the proper sense of what I’d call a fairy tale, where you have those slightly dark, unsettling elements. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

Yeah, I agree. I mean for me fairy tale has a childlike quality to it, but always this dark underbelly, so you think of Hansel and Gretel for instance and my goodness, that’s just grim! I was reading something recently and Tom Waits was saying that the environment that you hear music in really changes what the music is. For example he was talking about how he loves music coming from two doors away, muffled, with the sound of traffic going past as well and you can kind of make it out. He much prefers listening to AM radio through his car stereo than a clean CD or something. If you bring a gramophone into a forest and play music there, it sounds very different than if you were listening to a CD playing through all the right leads and a hi-fi in a listening room in a house. So I think how the songs are placed, even within the packaging of the artwork and the name and everything, affects how people hear it and that’s exactly the same live. How I dress the stage live impacts the listener in that they listen to it in a certain way – in the same way if you walk into the theatre and there’s this world and scenery on the stage, you buy into it and you believe “okay, for this time I’m going to pretend that this is whatever”, and I think it’s the same with music. If you contextualise it in whatever way, if you deliberately do that, or even if you don’t, it still affects how people hear it. Which is for me why a keyboard and an axe stand is just grim-looking because it’s technical, it’s this modern thing; whereas if you have a wooden piano, you hear what’s been played in a completely different way, I think.

That sense of theatre that you bring to your gigs – there aren’t really many other acts that do that. Do you think it’s something that more people should do?

Well I think big bands like U2 or Pink Floyd have always attempted to do something on a really big scale, as a way of increasing the impact of a live show by using props or big screens or whatever. I think Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips is incredibly theatrical – everything from walking across the audience’s head in a large human hamster ball to inviting members of the audience to come on stage dressed as animals. David Bowie obviously is incredibly theatrical. I think people like Mika and the Scissor Sisters are tapping into something very 70s in a really glam kind of way. Then there are other bands like I’m From Barcelona, a Swedish band, where there’s ten or fifteen of them in beards and sweaters.

I suppose I was thinking in terms of the current wave of British guitar bands, who generally speaking have a very no-frills approach in terms of their music and their stage presentation. Possibly there’s a sense that maybe that phase is coming to an end, and there are people like you, Mika, Scissor Sisters and Patrick Wolf who are taking perhaps a more colourful, theatrical approach to their performances. So perhaps audiences want that extra something.

I think that’s exactly right, that it’s a phase. You had all this 80s glam metal which was very theatrical – albeit not always knowingly! – and then out of that shot Nirvana, who just completely brought it back to no-frills and it was about something that was real, that was just like you’d walked in off the street, arrived on stage and you were singing your lungs out. It was something that was honest, and I think that you just saw a lot of stuff for what it was. I think that the key is just doing something that feels really honest. I think part of it is, your time comes around if you stick at something that you’re really happy with and you’re really true to yourself. So I think people probably have an appetite at the minute for something that’s a bit more visual, and they’re maybe tired of going to see three or four singer-songwriters with guitars and earnest, heartfelt songs. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in the same way with any type of art you make progress by understanding and taking on what’s gone before, but then twisting it or combining things as well.

And like you say, there’s that element of remaining true to yourself, no matter how you present the music – if you mean it, then that’s the most important thing.

Yeah, in the same way that I think there’s no point in me trying to be an indie band, because there’s so many better people doing that really well, so I think you need to find a niche for yourself.

And the indie market’s become rather saturated in the last few years, so you’re offering something that’s what I would call genuinely alternative, because it’s something that no-one else is really doing – certainly not with that same sort of approach.

Yeah, I mean it’s like people often make comparisons with Rufus Wainwright, who is definitely someone I really admire, and 6-7 years ago when I first heard him, someone that I was like, “oh thank goodness, there’s somebody that’s doing something in a similar way to what I’m imagining”, and he was approaching stuff very orchestrally and he played piano and he sang and he wasn’t afraid of that. So people like him and Ed Harcourt I feel I’m in a similar ballpark to, so yeah it’s good to know there are people like that.

Just picking up on the subject of theatricality again, obviously Eurovision this year wasn’t a particularly good night for either the United Kingdom or Ireland!! If you were asked to represent either country in the contest, is it something you would consider?

Only if Neil Hannon wrote the song and I could duet with Morrissey!! I think Neil Hannon should write it and Morrissey should sing it.

Funnily enough, Neil Hannon was on TV recently with his perfect formula for a Eurovision song!

Yeah I didn’t see it but I heard about it – “Trafalgar, woo-oo-oh”! I’ve toured a lot with Neil recently and he’s a great songwriter, but I think he’d have the right amount of tongue-in-cheekness to write for Eurovision. I think you have to now, I mean how could you not!! But I think there’s an appetite for irony and stuff in music as well, so I think you could probably get a career in music if you went into Eurovision knowing that’s what you were going to get out of it – a career based on Eurovision – but you just really went for it and embraced it. But if you think you’re going to be some sort of credible, earnest songwriter, then it might be a struggle!!

Obviously as well as the touring and performing, you’re a family man. How do you deal with being on tour for long stretches and not seeing your wife and children for a long period of time?

It’s something I’m currently trying to address, because for years it was like these two completely different worlds. I’ve only been recently been travelling in the tour bus – before then I was sleeping in dressing rooms and strangers’ houses and floors, and it was like a million miles away from dropping your child off to the nursery school or something like that. So I think that before maybe I thought you needed to be a bit fucked up to be any good at song-writing, and to feel like you had something to say. I think most people are trying to find poetry and make magic out of ordinary things, and I think for me what I want to write about, what I’m interested in, is trying to keep a sense of wonder in normal life, and I like the idea of bringing some of the craziness into a stage show, as opposed to living it. But I still think that what I’m trying to do is make my touring world and my normal home life one and the same. So I’m trying to get home on days off and bring my wife out on tour as well. It’s not always possible and it would probably mess with your head having the kids here as well – but I’m trying to bring music into the home more, having a piano in the house and working from home a lot more, stuff like that. But I think early on it feels like it’s really cool and really interesting to be a bit fucked up, but then it’s not really conducive for family life or being a nice person or a good friend even. So I don’t believe that any more.

When you yourself were young, did you have any dreams of what you might do, so if you hadn’t become a musician you might have done something else instead?

Well I did an interview with The Times recently, and I was saying in that I used to have to walk about a mile-and-a-half home from school in Downpatrick, and I used to dream of two things. One was that there would be a moving walkway that would take me – every city would have pavements that moved at a really slow pace that you’d just get on and stand and get off wherever you wanted – what a great invention that would be! The other thing was that someone from Hollywood would drive past and say “That’s the boy we want for the next film!” and suddenly I would be incredibly famous as a film star. I subsequently learnt that I couldn’t really act very well! So I think I’ve always just dreamed of singing, and living in Northern Ireland it didn’t ever seem that likely. There wasn’t record label space there, it was a real backwater, there were the Troubles going on. So it didn’t really seem that possible and I didn’t know many people who were full-time musicians apart from the people who sang covers in bars, but I think I always just wanted to imagine that I’d be involved in music.

How much do you think growing up in Northern Ireland has influenced you musically and in general?

I think it’s made me really determined and you realise it doesn’t come easy. It’s not like you bump into people who can do you a lot of good a lot, like maybe if you lived in London or something like that. But even in London I don’t think it’s easy, because there’s so much competition and it must just be a nightmare. I’ve been to Nashville and every waiter and waitress you meet is an aspiring musician, and that must be grim to have to lose your dream for a while and just be there, and be so close and yet so far from what’s happening. But I think it’s made me determined and sure of what I want to do. Musically it’s really hard to say, so much music you hear anyway comes from other countries – America, the UK and Europe. I think within Ireland there’s a love of the song, and I think I’ve got that – and certainly in a micro way, living in Northern Ireland with the family I had, and music was just so encouraged, but I think it’s really difficult to say when you’re that close to it. Sigur Ros were asked recently if they thought living in Iceland has influenced what they’ve made, and they said they reckoned they’d probably have made a different record if they’d lived in Brazil! So I think probably maybe the song, melody and a bizarre love of melancholy is maybe an Irish thing.

In the song Brixton Leaves on the album, Belfast is in there as well as Brixton, so what was the inspiration behind the lyrics in that song?

It was just a mixture of homesickness and the equal love and repulsion of Belfast, all the stuff that’s ever happened there. But I think also just the idea that there’s something or someone outside of yourself that can make you feel complete, whether it’s just the dream of having a record deal, or meeting someone that’s going to make everything inside you okay and realising then that it’s not the case – that the dream is often just that, and going to London for me was the Holy Grail and trying to get a name for myself, and then you turn up and then it’s just like a bar back home, except there are less people there and it’s harder to get to and more expensive! And learning to be content I think. For me, the themes I suppose on the album are what I mentioned about trying to find beauty in ordinary things, and then also confronting the shit that’s inside yourself, and not looking for something outside that to make it all better, but obviously facing up to the crap that isn’t so nice.

You’ve said that the world of showbusiness isn’t glamorous – in fact it’s very unglamorous and very hard work. I saw in the recent interview in The Times that when you went to South By Southwest in the States last year that, in reality it’s very hard work because you’re likely to be playing to very small venues and very small numbers of people.

There’s over a thousand acts in a city that’s