Peter Wilson: Never mind monarchs

Peter Wilson has laid the karaoke king in him to rest and been reborn as Duke Special. And the change has been paying off royally, he tells Nick Duerden

Half a decade ago, Peter Wilson was Northern Ireland's unofficial karaoke king. Not the low-rent version - the kind of person who attempts to transform your average pub floor into the arena of their dreams on drunken Saturday nights - but rather one who got paid for it, albeit poorly, at all manner of social functions.

"Oh, I played everywhere," he says over a vegetarian lunch in a central London restaurant. "Blood and sawdust bars, dodgy clubs and proper fancy members lounges; the kind of place that attracts the cream of Belfast's B-list." He grins. "I'm talking local TV weather girls and everything."

Sometimes, if he was particularly strapped for cash (and he most often was), he'd play pensioners' clubs: "But I had a rule: no cheese. I had standards, see? I couldn't do things like [Billy Joel's] 'Piano Man' or [Don McLean's] 'American Pie'. Great songs, I'm sure, but not for me, I'm afraid."

And so, instead, he'd opt for what he considered classier material by the likes of Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, even indie rockers Placebo. "In the pensioners' clubs, I used to like to adapt modern songs to all kinds of different styles," he says. "I remember one time doing Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' in this really chilled, laid-back way. The pensioners loved it. They thought I'd been singing Sinatra..."

Wilson doesn't do professional karaoke anymore, and the sense of relief this brings him lights up his face like electricity. These days, he performs under the pseudonym Duke Special ("because I like invented names, and I thought that Duke sounded good with Special"), and released in October his first major label record, on V2. Songs from the Deep Forest is a richly melodic record that swells with a Rufus Wainwright flourish for pomp and ceremony, along with the straw-in-teeth charm of Badly Drawn Boy at his most pastoral. When he plays live now, he manages to attract a markedly younger audience. The pay is better, too.

"I've been at this for years now, and so it's about time," jokes the man who refuses to reveal his real age. "How old am I? Well, Duke Special is 28." And Peter Wilson? In the pause that follows, blood rushes to the man's cheeks in a crimson blush. "Peter Wilson," he mumbles, "is an altogether different story. Let's just say I'm a little older."

He is smiling now, and the smile prompts enough creased definition around the eyes and mouth to suggest he won't be seeing 35 again. In other words, then, he isn't quite the same tender young thing that once so dazzled Belfast's pensioners with grunge dressed up as jazz.

Wilson was born into a prodigiously musical family. With the exception of his tone-deaf father (who would nevertheless introduce him to the records of Johnny Cash, thereby sparking a lifelong obsession), the entire clan were piano players, each happy to lend their talents at any function to which they were invited. By the time he reached his eighth birthday, he understood that family gatherings were an opportunity to show off one's talents, no matter how nascent.

"I remember doing 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' in front of some aunts one summer," he says. "I think they were quite confused by it - probably not big Ian Dury fans - but I had a whale of a time. I knew then that I liked the idea of performing in front of an audience, perhaps more than anything else - certainly more than school."

Never the most disciplined of students, Wilson did briefly toy with the idea of becoming a community worker, but it soon dawned on him that: "I'd be shit at it, because there was no space in my head for anything but music. It was an obsession."

He played in various local bands, but ultimately decided that the ideas he was having - to create vaudeville-style songs full of drama, atmosphere and unscripted sonic quirks - could only ever really flourish if he were his own boss, and so he went solo. Fuelled by a love of Bruce Cockburn, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and the poetry of T S Eliot, he began to write his own material, selling demo tapes from gig to gig in the hope of ultimately being discovered. This was to take some considerable length of time.

"I played Northern Ireland's toilet circuit endlessly," he bemoans. "Mostly, I'd be supporting some or other band, going on at seven o'clock in the evening and performing to already drunk people who really didn't give a shit."

Always confident in his own talents, this pointed lack of attention would make him angry, "and so I used to sing loud, as loud as possible, putting all kinds of attitude into the songs, if only to get myself heard. It was very frustrating, performing to people who ignored you, but my approach did work". He laughs. "Well, sort of. People would come up to me afterwards saying that they were impressed, but all I could think was, 'Then why didn't you applaud me while I was on stage?'"

Wilson plied his trade most week nights, and every weekend. "Saturdays and Sundays," he recalls, "I'd be singing something like five hours a night, cover version gigs first, local bars afterwards, sustaining myself all the while with some very necessary cans of Red Bull and vodka."

Though all this would have been merely par for the course for any struggling young artist, Wilson had the added weight of responsibility on his shoulders: married (to an artist), with three small children who were perennially nursing empty stomachs. "That," he muses, chin in hand, "was difficult. I was making almost no money but I refused to give up. When you have mouths to feed... well, it was hard. I felt selfish, and I felt like a failure, especially when I measured my lack of success with that of my peers, who all had proper jobs and were earning a packet."

He must have seriously tested his wife's patience. "Yes. But then she has been more supportive than I ever could have hoped for, really. I'm amazed. In fact, my entire family has backed me all along, which is why I'm now so glad - so grateful - that something is finally happening. It proves that I haven't been wasting my time all these years."

Last year, Duke Special released two EPs that were later collected together for an album called Adventures in Gramophone. Released in Ireland, it went on to be nominated for a Choice Music Award (the Irish equivalent of the UK's Mercurys), and suddenly Wilson was on his way. The V2 deal followed, and he was given a comparatively big budget - Gramophone was made for less than £2,000 - for what was to become Songs from the Deep Forest.

"I wanted to create an old-world music hall atmosphere with this album," he says, "something that would really transport the listener to somewhere else entirely. I've always loved vaudeville, and I'm very taken with the idea of performance and costume, hence all this."

The "all this" to which he refers are his thick orange dreadlocks, which he has cultivated for the past five years now ("because it's easier than washing, and because it looks interesting"), and the black eyeliner that he refuses to perform without. On stage, he plays an upright piano with all the flamboyance of a Covent Garden busker, while his bandmates attack guitars with violin bows and make an unholy racket with cheese graters.

"When I play live, I'm not Peter Wilson," he says, "but rather this enigmatic creation called Duke Special. Anything can happen with Duke Special, and often does. I strive to be memorable. I've had a lot of practice, after all."

Talk to him about his ambitions, and he says that he would one day like to write a musical, or maybe score a film, but right now Wilson's dreams are a little more down-to-earth. He wants to reward his family for all the patience they have shown him over the years. "I'd love to be able to buy us a wee house with a garden," he muses, eyes sparkling rather touchingly. "That'd be nice, don't you think?"

'Songs from the Deep Forest' is out on V2. Duke Special play the Odyssey Arena, Belfast (028-9073 9074) tonight; the UK tour begins on 6 February ( www.dukespecial.com)