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Having performed at the Vatican, drawn swords with Neil Hannon and penned the theme tune to Sesame Tree (Northern Ireland’s Sesame Street, that is) Peter Wilson, aka Duke Special, has, over the course of a career spanning fifteen years achieved many things, and with four long-players released in the past twelve months alone, there is of course the all important near endless outpouring of music.
With this in mind it doesn’t take a genius to see that Duke Special is a busy man, but luckily for us the dreadlocked purveyor of hobo-chic and vagabond romanticism did have time for a quick chinwag over a non-alcoholic beer with Gigwise in good old London town.
Gigwise: The music industry is experiencing an interesting transition period at the moment and you’ve recently been using a business model called Pledge Music. What’s Pledge all about?
Duke Special: “It was set up for artists to work with their existing fan base to make a record. For me, I needed to raise finances to market the recordings I’d already paid for and let people know about them. You offer a range of experiences, everything from writing a number of one off poems for people on a subject of their choice right up to the most expensive thing which is doing a gig at your house. We raised over £40,000 by doing that in one month.”
Gigwise: Have you had a positive reaction from your fans in response to Pledge?
Duke Special: “Most have been really supportive but I got an email from a guy who was quite vitriolic and said ‘I never thought you’d whore yourself around like this.’ The thing he had a big umbrage with was dinner at a fans house. I charged £300, I’ll bring dessert and it’ll probably turn into a house gig anyway. Ultimately if you create something you have to let people know about it but I had some concerns going into it as well as I’m sure many people did.”
Gigwise: Being without a label is Pledge a model you’d revisit in the future?
Duke Special: “For me it was an experiment to see what can you do in this climate and to keep creating and to keep releasing things at a high level. I don’t know if I would do it again because it’s a huge amount of work and I’m not getting off lightly rubbing my hands saying hey look at all the suckers. We wont make anything like £40,000 from it, it’ll be around half of that by the time we’ve paid for everything.”
Gigwise: More ambitious was your recent foray into theatre working with Deborah Warner on Tony Kushner’s interpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage And Her Children’. How scary was it writing the music to what many consider as the greatest play of the 20th Century?
Duke Special: “It was one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life. I always try and use theatrical devices in my concerts, props or even to an extent taking on a persona but I’m not an actor and I’ve never really done theatre before. They created a role in the play for me as a guide to the characters or narrator if you like and we did all sixty five performances at the National Theatre.”
Gigwise: I enjoyed reading some of the reviews, especially the Daily Mail’s who described you as “a new age minstrel whose sound mixes Elton John with old Irish crooners The Chieftains, plus a bit of White Stripes thrash thrown in for good measure.”
Duke Special: “The critics were coming at it from a theatre point of view so their points of reference were a little bit skewed sometimes” explains the Duke “Some people didn’t like it because the original was angular and bleak and the original music really perpetuated that feeling, whereas mine at times is incredibly nostalgic.”
Gigwise: And the theatre ties in with your two other recent releases ‘Five Songs From Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘The Silent World of Hector Mann’ which is inspired by Paul Auster’s Novel ‘The Book of Illusions’. Is this a musical direction that you’d like to explore further?
Duke Special: “Well suddenly I had these three literary themed recordings and it just seemed appropriate to release them all together but I don’t want to do West End and I don’t want to be an actor. I’d like to see where I can take my own music along with what I’ve learned in theatre and continue.”
