Duke Special arrives onstage bearing an uncanny resemblance, in terms of eyeliner and dreadlocks to one side, to the front man of eighties pop band Dead or Alive. Remember? “You spin me right round baby right round like a record baby…”. This resemblance is somewhat fitting however, given the fact that the Duke is touring on the back of a wonderful release entitled “Adventures in Gramophone” and is the only performer your reviewer has ever come across who actively incorporates a gramophone into his onstage act.
The set opens with the strains of strings from said gramophone leading into a sparse, twinkling piano led ballad entitled “Some Things Make Your Soul Feel Clean”, which suggests that twin supplies of sadness and hope are this man’s stock in trade.
For the next song Duke Special is joined onstage by a character with a dress sense positioned somewhere between Vladimir and Estragon from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (thanks to Emily Munro for pointing that one out by the way). He actually trades under the name of Chip Bailey and is one of the most consistently inventive drummer/percussionists your reviewer has seen in a long while.
Chip adds some idiosyncratic muscle to both “Brixton” and “Wake Up Scarlett” two further slices of heartfelt balladry which never descend into sentimental mush, or come even close to doing so to be fair.
The tempo picks up with “Don’t Breathe”, introduced by the Duke as a tale of a bank robbery gone wrong. This one comes on in fashion sneakily similar to The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”, but transcends the resemblance to take on a charming life of its own, with the Duke admitting that its his fault that he didn’t try to warn us and now they’ve got us in a corner, as Chip demonstrates about fifty different ways in which one can hit a cymbal.
Mind you, he really begins to pulls out the stops on “I Let You Down (Like A Tonne Weight)”. He walks out from behind his kit and takes position front of stage with…an egg whisk and a cheese grater. I kid you not. With these unlikely percussion ‘instruments’ does he keep the beat for the verse of this loping pop wonder of admission and guilt, punctuating the chorus with cymbal smashes (courtesy of the egg whisk of course).
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Non-album track “John Lennon Love”, which also manages the neat trick of being loaded with genuine sentiment without being overly sentimental, is augmented by the oddest percussion contraption this side of Tom Waits’ chicken coop (or wherever it is he makes his records these days). Said apparatus consists of a battered frying pan, a kind of cow bell, a bicycle horn, and some other rattling metallic objects all attached to a central pole. Unlikely as it may sound, Chip manages to manipulate the whole ensemble to produce some sweet (and rhythmic) sounds.
Chip’s back behind the drums for holler and stomp of “Salvation Tambourine”, a performance which allows Duke Special to summon his inner fire-and-brimstone preacher and in his own words “go off on one” near the end.
Just like that though he switches back to sensitive troubadour mode for the tender gramophone-assisted waltz-time “You Don’t Slow Me Down”. And then it’s all over two soon with the anthemic “Last Night I Nearly Died (But I Woke Up Just In Time)”, Chip banging out the beat on what looks for all the world like an upturned beer crate.
In closing, I’m going to recommend that you catch this man in person as soon as humanly possible, and take what may soon become the easy three word tag line for the lazy reviewer. Duke Special indeed.
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