Words With: The Duke Spirit

The world of London based rock quintet The Duke Spirit is an exciting place to be at the moment, and as their UK headline tour gets underway, Gigwise catches up with Leila and the boys.

G: Your tour’s just kicked off at London’s ICA, and what with a new single, ‘Cuts Across the Land’, being released at the end of the month, things are getting busy. How’s it all going?

Leila: We feel like we get these spurts of being busy, and then suddenly there’s a week where we’re not, and we feel a bit lost without the band, then a week comes when we’re rehearsing and gigging again, or playing a session on the radio, so it oscillates between being totally manic and just writing a few songs at home again.

G: Considering that about 18 months ago you were recording songs from home, and now you are supporting the likes Hope of the States and The Vines etc, (and doing shoots for French Vogue!), it all seems like a rapid rise to success. Has it all been plain sailing?

Leila: I do think that some things have happened quickly, it’s been amazing to  go out on tour with great bands such as British Sea Power and The Rapture, and recently Mark Logan, all people that we really like. We have occasions of thinking, ‘My God, are we out of our depth?’, but in the midst of all this, we did go off to make an album in the new year, and we all had crappy part time jobs that we had to leave when we went to Wales to record it, and suddenly there’s no money coming in, and we were on a record label, The City Rockers, that was going tits-up, so although some things were coming on quickly, there was chaos in the springtime when we didn’t know what we were doing or how we would live.

G: But you’ve thankfully clearly come through that, and recently you’ve been very much in demand, playing festivals such as Carling, Isle of Wight…

Leila: …and Glastonbury. Yeah, we all loved them!

Luke: We’d all been going to these places for years as fans, and to get to go to there as a band was just brilliant. Glastonbury was amazing…and a bit wet!

G: All part of that Glastonbury tradition, though! You have an intriguing blend of influences going on, who would you count amongst them?

Leila: We all have really broad tastes that meet somewhere in between dirty rock & roll and beautiful soul music, so anything from Tamla Motown, to the obvious connections that people constantly make, such as Velvet Underground, lots of soul music, punk, such as The Clash and The Slits, and we also listen to The Specials and Dexy’s Midnight Runners a hell of a lot. I’m not sure if that’s an influence that you would necessarily hear, but they’re bands that we feel have that spirit, like a gang. There’s a real energy there, that perhaps we have when we record.

G: And we are anticipating a spanking new album from you guys, are we not?

Leila: The album is coming out a bit later now, it’ll be around winter or the New Year, but the single, ‘Cuts Across the Land’ is out on the 27th of September.

G: What sort of sound can we expect from the forthcoming album?

Leila: The sound of the album will be as raw and soulful as the things you’ll have heard before, but there are a few more interesting things happening soundwise as well. We’re using a saxophone on a few tracks, and we’ve got an old organ that we used on a few of the earlier demos that we’ve incorporated. There’s a depth there, and we try to maintain as much connection as we would when we play live gigs. We constantly try to make eye contact and feel one another’s feelings. It’s exhausting, but that’s the whole point of maintaining the spirit. If we all went in and did a more conservative way of recording, lay down the bass and drums and one by one you go and do your thing, but we feel too  much like a family to do that.