Music > Interviews
Interview with The Duke Spirit
07/09/11
The Duke Spirit - Everybody's Under Your Spell from Shangri-La Music on Vimeo.
We may import Karen O onto our computers, borrow from Canada Metric’s Emily Haines, and look far for Australia’s Juanita Stein of Howling Bells, but for a female fronted rock band, we shouldn’t look further than our own fertile soil. The Duke Spirit remain criminally underrated by the UK, even though America gets them and the industry gets them – Alexander McQueen got frontwoman Liela Moss so much he put her on a T-shirt. The UK waking up has to be a tide that’s coming in, and 3rd album ‘Bruiser’ might be the one to open their eyes. We talk to the charming Liela Moss ahead of their date in Norwich…
Where are you at the moment? We’re just in East London in our little rehearsal studio, just yeah, rehearsing!
Are you very disciplined in rehearsals? Erm, well we’re getting that way. We’re still a bit last minute about it ‘cause we’ve realised there’s still stuff off the new album that we don’t know yet, so we better get to it.
Absolutely, you need to be polishing that stuff up because we’ve got you in Norwich at the beginning of this month. We’re one of only a few UK dates – are you just trying to fit in a few warm-up dates? Yeah, exactly, we’ve got a few warm-up shows and a couple of in-stores based in London, then a couple of regional shows to warm you up before you end up getting on a coach touring around a very cold Northern Europe.
Those few regional dates, are people more forgiving as you’re breaking in the new material if there are a couple of loose ends here and there? You know what, we’ll hopefully catch people who won’t have bought the album yet, so we can still muddle through and no-one can compare it to the album! Hopefully by the time they pick up the album they’ll have forgotten and no-one will know whether we did the right number of bars in the chorus or whatever.
We’ll hope that no really anally retentive fans will be in attendance. There’ll be no-one giving us the post-match run down… Tweeting every missed beat, haha. The way you got together as a band was quite pertinent to Norwich. You came out of Art School, which is so often a hotbed of musical talent. What do you think it is about that atmosphere? I don’t know, I suppose the one thing that draws people to an arts environment is a searching need to express the inexpressible. I think people are drawn to something a little bit abstract and when people like that join together, you tend to try and express your experiences thus far. I imagine that’s why – it’s been quite historical that way. That being said, three of us were at Art College when we met, but one of us was studying Australian Road movies, another was doing mixed media and I was only doing a foundation course! Where I grew up though, everyone was really into the Rave scene and Fantasia, so when you spotted someone at a little Indie Rock gig, you kind of gravitated towards them. Saying that, I’ve spent a lot of time – I mean, we’ve played the UEA a lot and I’ve spent a lot of time visiting the area and I was there last weekend, ‘cause I’ve got a lot of family who live in Norwich and Wymondham, so I’m down with your East Anglian vibes! I’ve spent many Christmasses and holidays there, me and my cousins.
Where is the best place for you to write? Your favourite environment, or the most conducive place for creativity? It must be really hard to find when you’re constantly on the road… Yeah, I really admire those people who say ‘yeah, we wrote this on tour’, because I can’t do that, I just don’t know how to access that part of my brain when I’m… when I’m just tired. The physical reality of touring is quite brutal, you know. It’s not often I bounce out of my tour bunk and go ‘hmm, I really want to write some music’. I find touring is about something completely physical and uniting with the crowd and meeting the people who like your music and talking with them and the whole thing is like expending energy. The privacy of my own little kitchen is where most of my ideas have been written. I used to think, ‘oh, if only we had a bigger space, we could all do this together’, but I’ve realised that actually, you need this little nest. So it’s still, to this day, a very private, hibernating thing to do.
The Duke Spirit - Everybody's Under Your Spell from Shangri-La Music on Vimeo.
The Duke Spirit - Everybody's Under Your Spell from Shangri-La Music on Vimeo.
I was really interested in the retreat you took to Vipassana in Herefordshire, where you were silent for a couple of weeks. I often find that to access the very cerebral part of me, I have to be alone, so I really admire what you did there… Yeah, on the surface it was quite a superficial reason that I went. But actually, that’s not true because I find any way that you access your brain – whether you see that as spiritual, or just a physical reality – I find that whole world totally fascinating. This particular course was a silent retreat, and it came after nearly two years of being on tour, and put it this way, it was a rollercoaster of sometimes playing in quite luxurious venues, then two weeks later playing in an absolute shit pit! Given that on and off for two years, I just felt completely fucked, haha, completely spent. I’d read about doing stuff like that before, but this one really appealed because I could just shut the fuck up for 10 days! I thought, ‘this is gonna be magic’, physically, for my voice and secondly for my mind because I’d been in total noise for two years. I feel different now; it’s allowed me to be massively physical when I perform, while knowing there’s this space, this new void that I’ve discovered by doing that.
Now enough of you Liela, haha – I want to talk about all four of you as a band! You wrote the new songs from ‘Bruiser’ initially with a lot more production, then took the brave step to start stripping them back to their bare essentials, which I think takes confidence – where does this come from? Well I think there’s a confidence that comes with lasting as a band for seven years; you reach a point where there’s a stability that finally cements, even without us having huge commercial success or mass appeal, or being very wealthy. We’re none of those things but at the same time what we’ve managed to do is maintain a touring and recording thing; we’ve been consistent and we’ve never given up on what we’re doing. Eventually you become galvanised against your ups and downs and you realise that after two records, you’re getting closer to what you want to express. You get an appetite for something, and you really hone in on what you’re after. You finally hit that sweet spot, and on this record, I think we’ve got that; it’s got the grandeur I’ve hoped for over the years and yet it has some real simplicity that lacks pretention, but at the same time has some moments of glory and sweetness.
I read a quote where you said that ‘Bruiser’ reflects you personally more than any other album, but it’s not necessarily auto-biographical – you seem to be acting as a story-teller. Where do you get these tales from? I was laughing with someone the other day because I was saying that lyrically, no-one ever teaches you what to do, so sometimes I feel like a bit of a fraud because I think I haven’t practiced this, I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m just reflecting on my own emotional intensity and I’ve done that for the last two albums and it’s been very coded, but very me, and that will always be there. By the very nature of so much travel though, I’ve been observing more people and touring brings you very close to people, so I’ve been reaching out a little more externally on this record. As I’ve travelled as well, I’ve found little obsessions along the way. You find yourself travelling Australia and you get a few days off and you see some artwork in Sydney, then you read something and it all comes together. The things you do when you’re away, living out of a suitcase, get magnified, so the thing that really excited you that week becomes your obsession.
I really like the idea of you as narrator, and you often come across almost like a character on stage, with attention always taken to styling your stage presence, so I wondered what you’re gonna bring to this show in Norwich? Well, a lot will depend on the weather. It might be leather hot pants, or I might go full rubber waterproofs really.
Leather or rubber… kinky. Hahaha! Erm, but at the same time, I’ve always been fascinated by beautiful clothes and I like to wear things I can really move around in, rather than strapped up and crazy. So what I think we really bring is a new burst of energy; there’ll be a rawness that I think will be felt by the audience. I’m always wrestling some kind of imaginary dragon on stage as well, so I’ll definitely be wrestling something.
Wrestling a dragon in leather hot pants… that idea’s got me quite excited. It’s all got a little bit Tolkien hasn’t it?
Yes, fetish Tolkien, which is where we should probably leave it…
Emma Garwood
The Duke Spirit perform as part of Saturday’s line-up at Norwich’s new event, The Norfolk Spectacular at the Norfolk Showground on the Arena Stage on September 3rd.
We may import Karen O onto our computers, borrow from Canada Metric’s Emily Haines, and look far for Australia’s Juanita Stein of Howling Bells, but for a female fronted rock band, we shouldn’t look further than our own fertile soil. The Duke Spirit remain criminally underrated by the UK, even though America gets them and the industry gets them – Alexander McQueen got frontwoman Liela Moss so much he put her on a T-shirt. The UK waking up has to be a tide that’s coming in, and 3rd album ‘Bruiser’ might be the one to open their eyes. We talk to the charming Liela Moss ahead of their date in Norwich…
Where are you at the moment? We’re just in East London in our little rehearsal studio, just yeah, rehearsing!
Are you very disciplined in rehearsals? Erm, well we’re getting that way. We’re still a bit last minute about it ‘cause we’ve realised there’s still stuff off the new album that we don’t know yet, so we better get to it.
Absolutely, you need to be polishing that stuff up because we’ve got you in Norwich at the beginning of this month. We’re one of only a few UK dates – are you just trying to fit in a few warm-up dates? Yeah, exactly, we’ve got a few warm-up shows and a couple of in-stores based in London, then a couple of regional shows to warm you up before you end up getting on a coach touring around a very cold Northern Europe.
Those few regional dates, are people more forgiving as you’re breaking in the new material if there are a couple of loose ends here and there? You know what, we’ll hopefully catch people who won’t have bought the album yet, so we can still muddle through and no-one can compare it to the album! Hopefully by the time they pick up the album they’ll have forgotten and no-one will know whether we did the right number of bars in the chorus or whatever.
We’ll hope that no really anally retentive fans will be in attendance. There’ll be no-one giving us the post-match run down… Tweeting every missed beat, haha. The way you got together as a band was quite pertinent to Norwich. You came out of Art School, which is so often a hotbed of musical talent. What do you think it is about that atmosphere? I don’t know, I suppose the one thing that draws people to an arts environment is a searching need to express the inexpressible. I think people are drawn to something a little bit abstract and when people like that join together, you tend to try and express your experiences thus far. I imagine that’s why – it’s been quite historical that way. That being said, three of us were at Art College when we met, but one of us was studying Australian Road movies, another was doing mixed media and I was only doing a foundation course! Where I grew up though, everyone was really into the Rave scene and Fantasia, so when you spotted someone at a little Indie Rock gig, you kind of gravitated towards them. Saying that, I’ve spent a lot of time – I mean, we’ve played the UEA a lot and I’ve spent a lot of time visiting the area and I was there last weekend, ‘cause I’ve got a lot of family who live in Norwich and Wymondham, so I’m down with your East Anglian vibes! I’ve spent many Christmasses and holidays there, me and my cousins.
Where is the best place for you to write? Your favourite environment, or the most conducive place for creativity? It must be really hard to find when you’re constantly on the road… Yeah, I really admire those people who say ‘yeah, we wrote this on tour’, because I can’t do that, I just don’t know how to access that part of my brain when I’m… when I’m just tired. The physical reality of touring is quite brutal, you know. It’s not often I bounce out of my tour bunk and go ‘hmm, I really want to write some music’. I find touring is about something completely physical and uniting with the crowd and meeting the people who like your music and talking with them and the whole thing is like expending energy. The privacy of my own little kitchen is where most of my ideas have been written. I used to think, ‘oh, if only we had a bigger space, we could all do this together’, but I’ve realised that actually, you need this little nest. So it’s still, to this day, a very private, hibernating thing to do.
The Duke Spirit - Everybody's Under Your Spell from Shangri-La Music on Vimeo.
I was really interested in the retreat you took to Vipassana in Herefordshire, where you were silent for a couple of weeks. I often find that to access the very cerebral part of me, I have to be alone, so I really admire what you did there… Yeah, on the surface it was quite a superficial reason that I went. But actually, that’s not true because I find any way that you access your brain – whether you see that as spiritual, or just a physical reality – I find that whole world totally fascinating. This particular course was a silent retreat, and it came after nearly two years of being on tour, and put it this way, it was a rollercoaster of sometimes playing in quite luxurious venues, then two weeks later playing in an absolute shit pit! Given that on and off for two years, I just felt completely fucked, haha, completely spent. I’d read about doing stuff like that before, but this one really appealed because I could just shut the fuck up for 10 days! I thought, ‘this is gonna be magic’, physically, for my voice and secondly for my mind because I’d been in total noise for two years. I feel different now; it’s allowed me to be massively physical when I perform, while knowing there’s this space, this new void that I’ve discovered by doing that.
Now enough of you Liela, haha – I want to talk about all four of you as a band! You wrote the new songs from ‘Bruiser’ initially with a lot more production, then took the brave step to start stripping them back to their bare essentials, which I think takes confidence – where does this come from? Well I think there’s a confidence that comes with lasting as a band for seven years; you reach a point where there’s a stability that finally cements, even without us having huge commercial success or mass appeal, or being very wealthy. We’re none of those things but at the same time what we’ve managed to do is maintain a touring and recording thing; we’ve been consistent and we’ve never given up on what we’re doing. Eventually you become galvanised against your ups and downs and you realise that after two records, you’re getting closer to what you want to express. You get an appetite for something, and you really hone in on what you’re after. You finally hit that sweet spot, and on this record, I think we’ve got that; it’s got the grandeur I’ve hoped for over the years and yet it has some real simplicity that lacks pretention, but at the same time has some moments of glory and sweetness.
I read a quote where you said that ‘Bruiser’ reflects you personally more than any other album, but it’s not necessarily auto-biographical – you seem to be acting as a story-teller. Where do you get these tales from? I was laughing with someone the other day because I was saying that lyrically, no-one ever teaches you what to do, so sometimes I feel like a bit of a fraud because I think I haven’t practiced this, I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m just reflecting on my own emotional intensity and I’ve done that for the last two albums and it’s been very coded, but very me, and that will always be there. By the very nature of so much travel though, I’ve been observing more people and touring brings you very close to people, so I’ve been reaching out a little more externally on this record. As I’ve travelled as well, I’ve found little obsessions along the way. You find yourself travelling Australia and you get a few days off and you see some artwork in Sydney, then you read something and it all comes together. The things you do when you’re away, living out of a suitcase, get magnified, so the thing that really excited you that week becomes your obsession.
I really like the idea of you as narrator, and you often come across almost like a character on stage, with attention always taken to styling your stage presence, so I wondered what you’re gonna bring to this show in Norwich? Well, a lot will depend on the weather. It might be leather hot pants, or I might go full rubber waterproofs really.
Leather or rubber… kinky. Hahaha! Erm, but at the same time, I’ve always been fascinated by beautiful clothes and I like to wear things I can really move around in, rather than strapped up and crazy. So what I think we really bring is a new burst of energy; there’ll be a rawness that I think will be felt by the audience. I’m always wrestling some kind of imaginary dragon on stage as well, so I’ll definitely be wrestling something.
Wrestling a dragon in leather hot pants… that idea’s got me quite excited. It’s all got a little bit Tolkien hasn’t it?
Yes, fetish Tolkien, which is where we should probably leave it…
Emma Garwood
The Duke Spirit perform as part of Saturday’s line-up at Norwich’s new event, The Norfolk Spectacular at the Norfolk Showground on the Arena Stage on September 3rd.