Pioneering Duke Special to air new album in Galway

Date Published: 02-May-2012

The inimitable Duke Special will be in concert in Galway on Friday, May 4. The Belfast based singer will be showcasing songs from his new album, Oh Pioneer at the Róisín Dubh.

Duke is a songwriter who takes inspiration from many different sources – Punch of a Friend, the first single from Oh Pioneer draws from a classic of American literature.

“It’s inspired by East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s novel,” he says.

“This man [in the book] was totally depressed and dejected after his wife had run off – she’d actually shot him as well. And left him with their two newborn twins. And he was so down in the dumps and lifeless that he hadn’t even given them names.

“So a good friend called by, and determined to shake him out of his stupor, made him stand up and then punched him in the jaw. He fell over and he couldn’t believe his friend had done this to him, but a spark of life came back into his eyes. And he stood up, and then his friend hit him again and knocked him down. His friend helped him up and said ‘let’s give names to your children’.”

Last year, Duke Special released Under the Dark Cloth, which was inspired by early 20th century photography. In 2010, he released two records – one inspired by the work of playwright Bertholt Brecht and the other by American writer Paul Auster. Yet these albums still have that Duke Special sound and his turn of phrase.

“Inevitably anything I write, whether it’s based on old photographs or from a play, you can’t help but have your own experiences be a filter through which the story has to go,” he says. “Yeah, I think my first few records there was a lot from personal experience. It’s actually really exhausting to constantly trawl up your own feelings! I found it a really helpful way to write in recent years to look at something else and then respond.”

Under the Dark Cloth was commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Duke explains how he came to compose an hour-long suite about the founding fathers of art photography.

“I was playing some small shows in New York and some people from the Met Museum came to one,” he recalls. “They asked me to come to the museum the next day, they had a proposal. They told me about this amazing exhibition, featuring the photographs of Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. The idea was that I would somehow collaborate with these photographs.”

This presented a huge challenge for the songwriter, but it’s one that Duke Special is ultimately glad to have taken on.

“I felt the enormity of the task; I had to completely immerse myself in their world,” he says. “One of the songs was like a requiem to the old photographic process, so I was reading books and watching films and documentaries and all kinds of stuff.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.