The man from the North with the dreadlocks and the eclectic record collection doesn't lack for inspiration. Duke Special has a musical resume that speaks of constant reinvention, and a perpetual desire to push himself into something new. We sat down for a chat with Mr Special - real name Peter Wilson - just prior to the release of his latest album 'Look Out Machines' (released April 3 April on Stranger Records, check out our review here).
Over the past few years Wilson has been involved in projects as diverse as writing the theme tune for the Irish Sesame Street to writing the music for and appearing in Deborah Warner’s critically acclaimed 2009 production of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ at London’s National Theatre.
He’s also presented a documentary on the life and times of ‘50s megastar Ruby Murray and been commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to write a series of original songs based on photographs for their exhibition of the photographers Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand. After his current tour he’ll be scoring a musical adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels for a Belfast based organisation called Youth Music Theatre.
“Jonathan Swift was from Dublin,” we’re told, “and he was inspired by seeing Cavehill in Belfast, which looks like the head of a sleeping giant. And he wrote Gulliver’s Travels in Cookstown, so there’s a big connection with Northern Ireland.”
“It’s all art,” he explains, and this high variety diet of project is something that feeds his muse, as he describes it, shaping his own, more personal songwriting.
More recently, Wilson has taken a break from these eclectic side projects to put out his fourth studio album, ‘Look Out Machines’. Stripped of a conceptual framework to build the album around, Wilson returned to a more organic songwriting process – something informed by his other previous work, but equally its own unique thing.
What was exciting, Wilson explains, was the freedom that came from the fact “that these songs could just be about anything. I mean, inevitably every record is like a photograph of a certain time, so there will always be over-arching themes I suppose, but this is the first time in a while I wrote the songs first then came up with a title afterwards, whereas previously I had a title [and a concept] to start with, and the songs came out of that.”
‘Look Out Machines’ was recorded over twenty days in a studio in Eastbourne, with regular Duke Special collaborator Phil Wilkinson doing production. On notable novelty about the new record – compared to the previous albums – is much more electronic dimension. Wilson explains how “before approaching [any album I do] I have to have a conversation about it beforehand, to nail down what the parameters are, in terms of instruments and the feel of it and stuff. And I had some ideas, but as I was demoing some of the songs a lot of kind of synthetic drums sounds and strings came out, which I really loved.”
What emerged was a distinct ‘80s flavour that “kind of reminded me of someone like Blue Nile, you know, in terms of the production on those kind of records.”
Always a fan of improvisation and adaptation, Wilson embraced this sound and built the material he’d written around it. “It reminded me a bit of a Depeche Mode record, with the beats and everything, so we kind of just embraced that and decided that would be the direction.” Keeping things simple and minimal, “we did overdubs – you know some of the drums and a couple of the string parts… and that was it. Whereas normally there’d be a whole string of musicians coming in and playing, [this time around] Phil played drums and Dave [Lynch] played moog and the board and stuff, and we covered most of it between the three of us. Then we just got the strings, and a bass player, and a little bit of guitar, and that was pretty much it.”
Wilson isn’t afraid to embrace a freewheeling, inspiration driven approach to both writing and recording “I mean, I usually have an idea of what I want to write about, but sometimes that’s not what the song really is. You know, it wants to go somewhere else, and it ends up being not quite the thing you started writing about.”
This free flowing, uninhibited approach also carries over to live performances, with Wilson being a fan of reworking his songs in different ways for different gigs. He first road-tested the new material earlier this year in a series of small venue gigs all across Ireland, with the focus being placed on experimenting with different permutations of the new material, putting it through its paces in order to get to know it a little better. “Sometimes when I write songs I’m not even sure myself what it means. It takes you to sing it for you to really get what it is about… once they’re recorded you have to stand back and say, ‘Okay, who are you, and what kind of character are you?’”
“I’ve been collaborating with a guest on each show,” Wilson explains, “so I had Verse Chorus Verse with me in Portstewart, SOAK in Derry, so we take on a flavour of whoever the guest is on the night.” Each show has yielded something slightly different. “Every time you play you have to reinterpret it. I’ll be coming back to Dublin in May with a different band, so it’ll be a different version of the songs that I play then. We took some ideas from the record, but I like to play to the strengths of whoever I play with. I don’t feel the need to stick with a plan exactly.”
He goes on to explain how he likes to “dress the song in different clothes,” each time he plays. “Sometimes it’s casual clothes, sometimes I dress them for dinner.”
As part of a crowdfunding campaign to get ‘Look Out Machines’ off the ground, Wilson promised a number of rewards, from handwritten lyric sheets to house concerts for the top subscribers. Wilson mock complains that he’s “created a clatter of work,” for himself but it’s clear that this intimate, personalised touch is something that’s close to his heart.
“Every year for the last number of years I’ve done maybe six house concerts, and it’s a really lovely thing cos you’re actually playing right in the heart of somebody’s living room and it’s just like all their close circle of family and friends have come to it, and it’s just like a really, really intimate gig.”
He’s not stopping there either. “I was going to try and do was break the record for the most gigs in 24 hours, and I was going for 70. And unfortunately I had to park that idea, because it was very hard to get licencing for anything between 3 o’clock in the morning and 8 o’clock. So instead I’m doing a night of 101 songs, so that’ll be forty people in a little venue in Belfast, and I’m going to play 101 songs.”
Wilson maintains this commitment to smaller, more intimate gigs, because “That’s how it started. My first tour was with a guy from Dundalk called Stuart Agnew, and we played everywhere from Portstewart to Ballyferriter in Co Kerry, to Ballycotton in south east Cork.
What he loves about these small venues is that “you can afford to tell stories, and engage with the audience, and get right up close, as we are now. And that’s very different to if there’s a big crash barrier in front of you and your audience is away behind that.”
And the list of places Wilson has gigged is about as eclectic as his musical resume: “I’ve played on boats, in cinemas, churches, castles… I’ve played Fossett’s Circus a couple of times, in the middle of the circus ring.”
His upcoming Irish dates may be a little more conventional – full band shows in Vicar Street in Dublin (Friday 15 May) and Mandela Hall in Belfast (Saturday 16 May) – but that doesn’t mean they’ll lack vitality. Wilson likes the bigger shows too, with a full band in tow, because they are the ones which allow him to “rock out a little more.”