Duke Special interview with Herald Scotland

Duke Special is here to enlighten you. Since 2002, Duke Special has been the alter ego of Peter Wilson, a 39-year-old Belfast-based musician who has brought a dash of drama and vaudeville flair to the singer-songwriter’s art.

His latest release, The Stage, A Book And The Silver Screen, is his most ambitious project to date, a triple threat combining two albums and an EP, each a separate strand inspired by the world of words.

One album, The Silent World of Hector Mann, takes its cue from Paul Auster’s 2002 novel A Book of Illusions; the other features songs Wilson wrote for a new stage adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, while the EP features the first ever recording of five songs written in 1950 by Kurt Weill for an abandoned musical version of Huckleberry Finn.

Witty, eclectic and often dazzling, The Stage, A Book And The Silver Screen acts as an elegant rebuttal to anyone who would argue that the trend for consuming music in bite-sized chunks has dulled the ambition of songwriters.

It anthologises almost three years of intense work. The making of The Silent World of Hector Mann began “a couple of summers ago”, says Wilson, at the end of the sessions for the last Duke Special album, I Never Thought This Day Would Come. Keen for his producer Paul Pilot to “throw him some curveballs”, Wilson agreed to spend three days recording in Chicago with the uncompromising musician and engineer Steve Albini.

“I started wracking my brains to see what I could realistically do in those three days,” says Wilson. “I thought about recording songs from a particular year, like 1911, then I read this book by Paul Auster describing the life of this lesser known silent movie star called Hector Mann. He only made 12 films before he disappeared. Over a few pages there was a synopsis of one of the films, Mr Nobody, and I wrote a song about it.”

From there, Wilson developed a plan to write and record songs inspired by the book’s description of each of Mann’s 12 films. Keen to collaborate, he sent A Book of Illusions to 11 other writers – among them Neil Hannon and Ed Harcourt – designating a film title to each and asking them to write a song in a pre-rock and roll style. “They all went for it,” he says. “A few months later I recorded the songs over three days with Steve, pretty much live. It was incredibly quick.”

While he pondered what to do with those songs, Wilson put the finishing touches to another unusual project. A fan of the

“simplicity and innocence” of Kurt Weill’s writing, he was intrigued when he heard a friend playing Catfish Blues, one of five Weill songs once intended for a musical version of Huckleberry Finn.

Only available as musical notation, none of the songs had ever been recorded. “It seemed like an incredible opportunity to go ahead and record them,” says Wilson. “I started over two years ago during gaps in my diary, and did it gradually. It was just bubbling away as I was doing other things.”

Born in Lisburn and a veteran of numerous Belfast bands, Wilson adopted the moniker Duke Special to sidestep being characterised as just another solo artist “shackled to the piano”. Instead, he looked to vaudeville and music hall, indulging a fondness for red velvet and sometimes using as backing an old gramophone playing crackly 78s.

With his tangle of dreads, distressed suits and kohl-lined eyes, Wilson is a study in hobo-chic and his live shows are suitably dramatic, emotional affairs.

“Vaudeville was about variety, it always recognised that people wanted to be entertained as well as moved,” he says. “Anyone on stage – politician, minister, public speaker – is an actor. There’s an element of manipulation, and I wanted to embrace that by having a stage name, having props, having an arc to the performance.”

At the end of last year Wilson had a chance to further develop his theatrical instincts when he was asked to write the music for the National Theatre’s new production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Director Deborah Warner and lead actress Fiona Shaw were fans who recognised “a Weimar quality” in Duke Special’s music which fitted the play.

During rehearsals, they decided to weave Wilson and his band into the show itself. “They worked out a way for me to be present on stage, almost like a spirit guide to the characters, an embodiment of their emotions,” he says. It was a thrilling, if gruelling, experience.

Halfway through the 65 performances, which ran in London from September to December last year, Wilson was recording the songs during the day and in the evenings running to the theatre to perform them in the play. “My adrenaline was all over the place,” he laughs. “It took a while getting used to the rhythms.”

During this period he realised it made sense to gather up his three literary projects and release them together. The process has altered fundamentally his ambitions for future work. “It has made me really excited about the fact that there are no rules to what you can do,” he says. “These three projects have really opened my mind.

“I’d always suspected that where the arts overlap is where it gets interesting and you can do something original. I want to branch out and be touched by other art forms.”

Signed previously to major label Universal, nowadays Duke Special is happily independent with a fiercely loyal fanbase. To finance the promotion of The Stage, A Book And The Silver Screen, Wilson raised £40,000 in pledges via his website. In return, he’s writing bespoke poems for donors, recording requested cover versions of songs by artists as diverse as R.E.M., Deacon Blue and Hank Williams, and playing seven gigs in fans’ houses.

“Working with a major was brilliant, until you become a low priority,” he says, adding: “Anyway, I’m not sure which label would have been happy putting put a three-album box of literary songs.”

Their loss is our gain.

The Stage, a Book and the Silver Screen is out now on Reel to Reel. Duke Special plays Pleasance