Peter Wilson, the artist otherwise known as Duke Special, is not your average crooner. Certainly, the Belfast singer looks an unlikely candidate for membership of the Brill Building brotherhood.
Crouched over his piano, thick knots of deadlock framing his face, Wilson could pass for a new age traveler en route to a cider festival. Clearly, those who speak of him in the same breath of Rufus Wainwright aren’t talking about his wardrobe.
For another thing, Wilson’s has been a rather robust musical education. Far from being classically trained, he’s earned his chops bashing the ivories in down-at-heel working men’s clubs in North Belfast. How down-at-heel? Put it this way – he’s played through his share of bar brawls.
“There was one occasion where it really kicked off, it was like something from a wild west movie,” recalls Wilson, enjoying a little downtime at his Laganside flat. “It was after a christening, and literally one half of the pub was getting stuck into the other half. I was thinking: ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m the piano guy.’“
Wilson’s work ethic – not to say his instinct for self preservation – would appear to be paying off. His first album, Adventures In Gramophone, made the Choice Music prize shortlist; the imminent sequel, Music From The Deep Forest, marks his major label debut and promises to be a sumptuous big, budget affair. Those Rufus comparisons are, perhaps, not so shy of the mark after all.
“I see myself as part of a movement that places emphasis on both the theatrical and song-writing aspects of being a musician,” he says. “For me, singer-songwriters like James Blunt and David Gray are operating in an entirely different milieu. You might say the same for Damien Rice. What I’m doing is very different from that. Solo singers tend to be very worthy, whereas I am, I hope, bringing some showmanship back.”
As to the dreadlocks, Wilson says the bedraggled sartorial sense wrong-foots audience – something he enjoys: “I like it that I’m not what they are expecting. You listen to the records and then you get an idea of how I should sound. Then I come on stage looking like I do and it’s a curve ball. People aren’t able to immediately figure out what I’m about. That’s got to be a good thing, because so much music in Ireland is predictable.”
Duke Special’s debut was appropriately named. Touring Adventures In Gramophone, Wilson would perform accompanied by a battered gramophone record player, which he employed as a vintage beat-box.
“I got the idea from watching the movie Man In The Moon, about the comedian Andy Kaufman,” he explains. “In the film, he would perform along to a wind-up record player. I took the idea and ran with it. I thought a gramophone would evoke the sort of sensibility I was trying to capture with the music.”
Despite the heat building around Duke Special n – a high profile berth at Electric Picnic is followed by a support slot on the Divine Comedy’s Europe tour – Wilson does not yet enjoy the fruits of a rock’ n roll lifestyle. He received a sharp reminder of this en route to the South By South West Festival in Texas last spring.
“The customs guys at Houston basically got our documentation mixed up. They also were suspicious because we didn’t have that much money with us – we’re musicians for god sake! The upshot was that we got detained and nearly missed the show.”
Ironically – in view of his tirade against singer songwriters – Wilson appears at Electric Picnic as part of the Damien Rice curated Friday night bill. “And I’ve just been going on about singer-songwriters!,” says the singer, laughing. “Still, I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be me and my drummer Peter and we’re going to put on a really special performance.”