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Duke Special in Belfast; the boy is loved.  And here he is in the Waterfront Hall with 1500 people jammed in, and an audience that almost knows each other from following this funny headed man (my daughter named him that, some 7 years ago!) around every wee bar and club in Belfast for the past ten years. The thought of him fronting an 80 piece Ulster Orchestra and getting to see it for free, as it was broadcast live on BBC Radio Ulster as an opener for Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter Festival, meant that no one who had touched the hem of his dread locked parade to fame could resist the invitation. He was cheered ecstatically from the get go and had it not been a radio broadcast would not have had enough songs to quell the demands for encores.

It is a challenge for any artist to perform with 80 new band members with little or no rehearsal and though there were moments when timings were not perfect the experiment worked more than well. V2 could get cracking on the live orchestra album for 2011 immediately.  Duke’s songs fit perfectly the orchestral arrangements.  Scored by Divine Comedy musical director Andrew Skeet there was even a Songs From The Forest Overture which set the scene for the drama, crescendo and sensitive strings of the rest of Duke’s set. Wake Up Scarlet, Last Night I Nearly Died and Freewheel particularly enjoyed the augmentation and it was another sign of Duke’s special musical talent that the music stood up to such an interrogation. Even the band’s mad cap Music Hall humor didn't get lost in the seriousness of David Brophy’s conductor’s shapes, though they were pretty zany too at times. No, percussionist Chip had the glory of his own invention the recycled Stomp Fiddle being backed by an orchestra though his attention grabbing work on a cheese grater with an egg whisk was phenomenal in various senses of the word! 

In the end though the crowd stood to their feet to greet their favorite son and it was his songs that rose above the spectacle; an event that you could tell Duke was milking like a dream come true. Says he, “I used to sing alone in my room into a hair brush and now this.” So that is what he used the hair brush for!
  
 Steve Stockman

Steve Stockman is the Presbyterian Chaplain at Queens University, Belfast, Ireland, where he lives in community with 88 students. He has written two books Walk On; The Spiritual Journey of U2 which he is currently updating and The Rock Cries Out; Discovering Eternal Truth in Unlikely Music. He dabbles in poetry and songwriting and he has a weekly radio show on BBC Radio Ulster (listen anytime of day or night @ www.bbc.co.uk/ni/religion/rhythmandsoul). He has his own web page--Rhythms of Redemption at http://stocki.ni.org . He also tries to spend some time with his wife Janice and daughters Caitlin and Jasmine.