It’s nice to know that no matter how much you’re letting the human race down yourself, whether you look like Pete Doherty before a bath and communicate like lotto lout Michael Carroll with a mouthful of cabbage, there is always going to be somebody out there with the bona fide style to cancel you right out put the universe back in balance. And take heart that for all the Keanes of the world who think after 2 choruses ‘no, wait, things don’t yet feel wet enough, let’s remove the hook entirely for the bridge and secure our featured slot on This Morning’, or the James Bl*nts who clearly consider themselves overworked (how else does one account for the comatose autopilot of his repertoire?), there is somebody, somewhere, out there in a recording studio saying ‘no, give me MORE strings, damnit!’ and ‘hmm, can we make that any more 1940s cabaret?’ and ‘yes, I absolutely insist that we pack all of this into mere 3 minute songs’.
Duke Special (aka Peter Wilson) is carrying style for an awful lot of us judging by the evidence on offer here. He makes you wonder why we settle for less so often. And he’s a genuine oxymoron considering he is, on first look, the dready bassist from The Levellers. You’re not going to get in and entertain tea diners at The Ritz looking like that. But as we’ve mentioned he’s carrying the style in his back pocket to take care of it. So he’s got the smoky club piano vaudeville flair most recently recognisable in Ed Harcourt (see ‘Salivation Tambourine’), the air of Badly Drawn Boy before he fast-forwarded to middle age (‘Everybody Wants A Little Something’), straight-up Rufus Wainwright (‘Portrait’), and a downright Victorian Beatles outtake (the brilliant ‘Last Night I Nearly Died’). It all skirts so damn close to the mainstream – Robbie thinks he puts out pop like this – but aside from not including anything as obvious as a hit, it’s just too textured to stick. Bathe in it.
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