Preview: Duke Special, The Duchess, York, January 17

That night the dreadlocked Irish singer, songwriter and pianist plays the Stonebow music bar, his career moved on apace from his first appearance in York.

“I played at Fibbers with Juliet Turner, a songwriter from Ireland. That was five or six years ago, when I was opening for her,” he says.

Duke Special will have company tomorrow but not in the form of the RTE Symphony Orchestra, his guests on his new album, set for mainland release on March 16 but available already via his website and in Ireland.

“In York the show features me on the piano and Temperance Society Chip Bailey, who’s the most amazing percussionist. I found him playing drums on the Magic Roundabout in Swindon, where he lives… well, that’s the story I’m telling. Of course it’s not true, but yes, he lives in a burrow in the middle of the Magic Roundabout.”

Duke Special performs with “just me and the drummer”, most of the time out of necessity.

“But for me it’s about the songs, and I can do them with an orchestra or just with a piano,” he says. “For me, it’s always the core of what I do, and cutting the cloth accordingly to who I’m playing with.”

His aforementioned new record, I Never Thought This Day Would Come, is billed by Duke Special as “an album for sleepwalkers, skeletons and gravediggers, for those who have fallen down so far they can taste the soil between their teeth”.

“I guess it’s for people who feel they have messed up,” he explains.

“The songs are grappling with coming to terms with who you want to be and who you are. It’s coming to terms with, on the one hand, wanting to be this great poetical figure, and, on the other hand, with being flesh and blood, and having those things go round your head as they go round everyone else’s.

“It’s about coming to your senses but being a free spirit at the same, and I’ve absolutely been through that ideal.”

Duke Special plays The Duchess, York, tomorrow night. Tickets: £10 in advance on 08700 600100; £12 on the door from 7.30pm.