Pianist envy

“The first person I was into, and you really can’t print this, was Chris De Burgh.”

It’s difficult to tell if Duke Special is blushing with shame from behind his dreadlocks, but the way he’s smirking would lead you to believe that he has a defence prepared for this most indefensible of admissions. “He played the piano and he was on TV,” he continues. “I was a kid. I was easily pleased.”

The Belfast-based singer songwriter – Peter Wilson to his friends – has a thing about pianos that can be traced all the way back to childhood lessons at his grandmother’s home. It’s an obsession that was nursed guiltily through a heavy-metal adolescence, and that would make only furtive appearances during a youthful stint as frontman with indie band Booley. Now, though, liberated as a solo artist, Peter has come to terms with his feelings for his instrument, and come out as a pianist, loud and proud.

“I’ve always played piano and sang but maybe suspected that I shouldn’t really be doing it in a rock band,” he says. “I’m a lot happier now on my own. Some guy recently told me that he thought my songs sounded like something out of a musical and, whereas in the past that would have horrified me, now I’m taking it as a kind of compliment. I really love the whole performance aspect of it. You have to be careful with a piano that you don’t get caught up in the whole melancholic, sultry, thing, because it can be too easy. You only have to see Tom Waits to realise how edgy a performance with a piano can be.”

Ol’ Lucifer-voice is cited as a major influence by Peter, as are Elvis Costello and Aimee Mann, but in terms of “general encouragement”, he sees the emergence of Tom McRea, Ed Harcourt, Rufus Wainwright and Ron Sexsmith as crucial in creating the feel-good vitality currently enjoyed amongst the singer-songwriter community.

The most recent Duke Special EP certainly benefits from a healthily left-field take on that most traditional of song-writing staples – the piano ballad. The four songs all swoon and swoop in the right places but they also have an alluring, bleached-out quality that comes courtesy of an ace production job from Amazing Pilot – and long-term Duke Special pal – Paul Wilkinson.

“I really like the way he thinks about the music,” says Peter. “There’s always something orchestral about the things he produces. We chatted loads about how we wanted it to sound. We were referencing the classic Atlantic soul stuff – that really strong sense of rhythm – and we wanted it to sound really old. “

The EP has a genuinely arcane and otherworldly charm. Here and there it even suggests what Van Dyke Parks may have been capable of in an East Belfast music hall.

“Funny, somebody else mentioned him to me. I went out and bought Songbook and it’s mental in places, but brilliant. Randy Newman, as well, he was a big influence. We wanted to give the songs that kind of character. And I think it comes through. There are old gramophones on it, double basses. It’s so unlike anything you’ll hear on the radio, but I really love it.”

You can pick up a copy at any of the gigs Duke Special has planned for the next two months. Despite claiming that “it’s the hope that kills you”, Peter is viewing 2003 as a year to make more friends.

“Last summer I was at a festival in Holland and played on the first night. Usually, I wouldn’t be able to sit around and watch other people, as I’d be dying to get back up on stage. But I started to hang out with some of the other performers and through talking to people and finding out what they were doing, I just felt, for the first time in a really long while, that I was a musician and that I was involved in some kind of community. What I’m doing now is satisfying and interesting, and that’s enough to content me. If it’s not amazingly fashionable, so be it, but hopefully some people out there will see the quality in it.”