I Am The Duke And I'm Here To Sing

Reinvention is good.  And as someone who has spent a great deal of their life inventing and reinventing himself, I speak with some authority.

It's been a strange year.  I don't take kindly to being told what to do, especially when it concerns how I make a living.  I started my career as a performer in the mid-nineties and from about 2007 onwards, work had finally become steady and consistent.  So when the coronavirus hit, I had my wings truly clipped.  And I was not happy.

"What to do, what to do?" I thought.  

"Oh, lackaday, oh lackaday!"

You see, having taken a while to get up and running, there was a fear that inertia would set in and that, when the time came to start gigging again, I would have lost the appetite for it.  And then what would I do?  In my late forties, surely it was too late to start a new career.  So, I tried to keep active, learning new songs, preparing new set lists, in the hope that some sort of normality would soon return and I could start performing again.

There would be one crucial difference, though.  Since 2007, I'd been performing as Stefan Sings Swing (my name is Stefan and I sing swing.  Bit of a no-brainer, really.)  Originally, the show had been based solely around songs made famous by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr et al.  However, as the years had gone by, so the show had expanded to include so much more than just swing songs, to the point where the title of the act had long ceased to be an accurate description of what I do.

Enter The Duke.

In theory, you can get away with anything when you give yourself a different name - it's a very freeing experience - and if I saw there was a singer called The Duke playing in a bar, I would have no preconceptions about the kind of music he might be singing.  But the name itself sounds classy and I like to think that I live up to it.

The Duke.  You might not know what you're going to get, but you can bet it's going to be good.

So, what does a night with The Duke entail?  In short, a lot of music and very little in the way of chat.  I realised a long time ago that audiences really don't give a flying fuck in a rolling donut about who wrote the song or when it was written or what the song means to the singer - it's supposed to be a gig, not an auditon for The X Factor - so I tend to just crack on and do what I'm being paid for, which is to sing.  And, at the risk of sounding smug, it's something I do rather well. 

My shows typically run to two hours, sometimes longer, and consist of popular and classic tunes from pretty much every genre: pop, blues, jazz, soul, rock and roll, swing and r'n'b.  In short, everything apart from country and western (well, you've got to draw the line somewhere).  All in all, it seems to work.

So, that's the sales pitch over.  As with the previous blog (now deleted) this site will focus on pretty much everything except my singing career; I just wanted to do an update on the act before moving on to more interesting fare.

Be seeing you...