Duke Special & Friends: It Was Only A Dream
The MAC, Belfast
THE astonishing, rather wonderful thing about Duke Special's show mainly dedicated to Victorian and Edwardian songs circulated on sheet music was how the material crossed the century.
It was the opposite of dated. Take the love songs, for example. During Thursday night's impressive show at The MAC, we heard a touching plea from a fisherman's wife for her man to come home.
And the feeling of love gone wrong came across very strongly in a couple of numbers. A Lover's Soliloquy, full of the fall-out from a soured tender emotion, was followed by Retaliation.
The concert, which had the informality of a gig without the bar, was billed as Duke Special & Friends: It Was Only A Dream.
What friends, what dreams. Pianist Ruth McGinley, artist in residence at The MAC, plays with eloquence. Her account of John Field's melancholy E minor Nocturne with its descending arpeggios was beautiful.
Singer-songwriter Rachel McCarthy's smoky vocals delivered a moving account of a man's drowning in a shipwreck. She apparently found inspiration for the song on a tombstone in Bangor churchyard.
Niamh Dunne's glorious Irish slice of sensual folk-rock showed women liberated by love.
What's different about the period these now sometimes forgotten songwriters wrote in was the ever-presence of death. Young soldiers went off to war, not realising their probable fate, as Duke Special sang affectingly in one number.
Vocally, he is distinctive with a great ability to deliver bittersweet material.
Birds were also a bit of a theme, with a Duke Special song based on the Venerable Bede's sparrows and the meaning of existence. The songwriter noted that theologian and historian Bede of Co Durham emphasised a sense of hope, imagining life as the birds' flight into a warm, light space, then out, which might or might not be true. The song was moving, graceful, now jazzy, now rock.
If I Was A Blackbird was powerful too, with a dainty homage to Tubular Bells in one passage. Spirituality flew through the set, anyhow.
The band and singers also rocked the human safety valve, humour. There was a sentimental song about a dead, missed pet dog, Fido. And there was a version of By the Light of the Silvery Moon with bits of barber shop quartet in the chorus. "That's a single." said the front man.
Towards the end, things got serious again. McGinley, an ace accompanist who amusingly missed a cue earlier in the evening, was given the chance to choose the music to end with.
She chose a Duke Special classic, This Could Be My Last Day. It is a tough listen, about not being able to save somebody, but the grief is leavened by the lines about the missed friend or lover being "full of living colours".
