In Conversation: The Duke Spirit

“I’d like to think I would like us” says front woman Liela Moss imagining how she would react to seeing The Duke Spirit in 2004 before turning to guitarist Toby Butler with a smirk, “We were noisy fuckers, really. It would also depend how moody you were looking that year.”

“That was before the beard,” he replies with a chuckle “probably looked quite approachable then.”

“Pre-beard Duke Spirit, that’s a whole other era!” laughs Liela.

This is very much the Kusma EP era of the ‘Spirit, and while watching the band sound check at Southampton’s Talking Heads it becomes glaringly obvious just how brilliant The Duke Spirit are. The venue may not be whispered about with as much wonder and awe as its metaphorical neighbour The Joiners Arms, but it is rather rustic in its charm, which seems appropriate for tonight’s headliner. Even performing recent release Northbound at 75% capacity, Liela Moss’ voice is simply stunning, but that was taken as a given many moons ago. What is more note-worthy is how wholesome and tight a complete task force they sound, with Olly Betts pounding on the drums, the screeching guitars of Toby Butler and Luke Ford and the fluid bass of Marc Sallis.

Progression in a band’s sound is an easy target for discussion, just as one makes small talk by pointing how depressing British weather can be. The Duke Spirit, however, have had a certain progression from the very indie sounding Cuts Across The Land, to the wonderful collage of sounds on Neptune to the simply huge sounding Kusma EP-the build up to third album Bruiser.

After pleasantries are exchanged, it’s upstairs to what appears to have previously been a living room, for a chat. A plug in heater blares a red-hot glow onto the room while Moss sets up the seating arrangements. Tonight is the band’s second date of a short UK tour because: “it’s been two years since we’ve done anything comprehensive around here, we don’t wanna come out and over estimate and feel like a bunch of tits onstage”.

“We wanted to come back to towns,” she explains, “and places that have always been sweaty and exciting and loyal and fun. Just sort of rekindle that to start with.”

The Duke Spirit certainly have been absent from the British gig register for a lengthy spell, but that’s not to say they have been wasting their time. Pick up any preview of the Dukes’ current tour and it is angled toward this being their UK comeback after years away in America. Arguably, there was a trend in previous decades for bands to come across the Atlantic to London to “make it” On paper at least, these guys have done it the other way around.

“The UK is very scene based,” begins Butler sporting that wondrous black beard, making him appear much more authoritative than in the band’s early days: “it’s a small country and that’s what we do really well. We’re great at creating small whirlwinds of exciting bands that come out all at once, and we make a lot of scenes, which a lot of countries don’t do. America don’t do that very much, they kinda stick to what they like, there’s not really any of these small interesting scenes that pop up. So the UK is great at doing that, however that does mean that if you’re around for a while you tend to pop in and out of scenes, which is kind of what we’ve done.”

“America was fun but it wasn’t like we went there and moved in our anything,” says Liela, “we’d actually be there for like seven or eight weeks, then we’d come home for two months then we’d go back, but this was happening over the course of two years. We hadn’t semi-permanently moved there or anything, just going back to towns and cities that were feeling exciting and where the energy was magnetically drawing us back. We’d play and the promoter really thought it was awesome and would ask us to come back and we could put together another tour that worked out financially and people would be glad to have you back. That’s a super-cool feeling. That’s why we stayed and did more tours than usual. The demand was there.”

The demand will surely be here too. Kusama, although only a teasing three-track EP (“the appetiser before the entrée”), is desperate to flex it’s muscles. It definitely is The Duke Spirit, yet seriously cranked up in comparison to previous records. Everybody’s Under Your Spell has screeching guitars in it’s riotous verses and then it gets even louder in the chorus. Northbound meanwhile, builds upon the foundations of their already grounded ability to produce a stadium sized alternative rock anthem. It is the stadium size stages that the band are aiming for, but not because of any inflated egos.

“We’ve got quite a lot of equipment these days so we’re gonna need the bigger stages to fit it all on!” Toby proclaims.

“We’ve just got a few more things going on,” admits Liela excitedly, already one to utilise an assortment of percussion instruments, “we’ve got more sounds, got a couple of tracks on piano and then we got a few more bits of sampling going and some beautiful droney keyboards. And all of that has gotta go somewhere, small stages can’t accommodate it all so it’s gonna have to be big, basically. Otherwise the stage will collapse from being too small!”

That said, it was also decided to strip back some of the guitars rather than spilling onto their already occupied canvas. A slight change in line up resulted in Toby switching to guitar and Marc being drafted in on bass, and had a slight influence upon the song-writing process. Both EP and upcoming album were demoed as a four-piece meaning that the fifth instrument, one that didn’t have to be a guitar, could be utilised according to their own judgment.

“Nothing to do with personalities,” Liela begins assuringly, “but five people are trying to sort of cloud a decision. You take one personality out of that and you tend to get somewhere quicker.”

“The thing is, I used to write all these amazing bass lines but you’d never hear them under all the guitars,” Toby jokes with a wry smile, “we’ve been listening to stuff like Depeche Mode, bits of Nine Inch Nails and Roxy Music and bands that are super heavy, super dark, but have a sparse kind of spacey sound. I think you can create quite a lot of power and weight by actually using less instrumentation.”

With their diary pretty much full (Bruiser is set for an early May release) between now and June at least, The Duke Spirit are rolling on with what they do best, touring.

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Liela says “we’re not work-shy we’ll tour. We’ll tour the arse off this record.”

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