Duke Special (aka Peter Wilson) is back with a new set of songs - this time without the 'quirky stuff'. He's learned how to love his art and his home town of Belfast, he tells Jim Carroll.

PETER WILSON pulls up in his gold-coloured car outside Belfast City Hall. It is the sunny afternoon after the night before, when he turned, yet again, into Duke Special, a soulful vagabond with a heart of gold.

It's a transformation that happens every single time he goes onstage. On this occasion, he was supporting Snow Patrol at at the city's Botanic Gardens. The Duke probably cut quite a dash on that big homecoming stage, a vaudeville superhero with elegant, old-world grace and a bundle of magical melodies at his disposal. As he drives towards east Belfast, where he and his family live, leaving the cranes and cement-mixers of a city centre going through its own metamorphosis behind, Wilson is still taken aback at the reaction to the previous night's show. "It always amazes me when people listen and when they get what it's about."

What he also can't get over, he says as he points out the car window, is that all the songs were written in a wee room over a yoga studio up that street. He shakes his head. It's something he will have to get used to as the next phase in the Duke Special story begins.

That's the cue for Songs from the Deep Forest. Whatever about the naive beauty and charm of his Adventures in Gramophone collection of early demos, or those captivating live shows that have taken him from Downpatrick to Dingle, the new album is a big, bold step forward.

Of course, Wilson's bitter-sweet, bruised romanticism and grandiose sense of sound are still very much fully intact. What has changed is everything around these stellar peaks. The scale is significantly enhanced, for one, and there's a new lushness to the production. It's the sound of someone who has found his voice and is now happy to amplify his emotions.

"I was confident that the songs would sound like Duke Special," Wilson says of the new album. "They were strong enough that we didn't have to rely on the same kind of crazy techniques we used on the first record. I didn't have to use loads of crackle or anything like that to get my ideas across. I wanted to have character without the quirky stuff."

Sitting in a cafe, Wilson tucks into a late breakfast of chips and onion rings. Fortitude is required, because the new album sees a new kind of campaign commencing for Duke Special. Now signed to V2 Records, touring and promotion are set to become his daily grind for the forseeable future.

But this is what Wilson always wanted, an opportunity to introduce his songs and the Duke to new audiences. He started out playing every bar and venue that would have him up and down the island.

"I was always curious about other people's touring schedules when bands I knew, like Watercress, were going to places like Connolly's in Leap or the Róisín Dubh in Galway. Touring like that seemed to be a great way of establishing a fan base and seeing if you could pull an audience." His show was designed to catch the eye. "Right from the start, I realised that people would remember the live show if it was different and that's why I used the gramophone on the stage. Because it was a one-man show, I wanted some variation in the sound and that's where the cymbals came in."

The Duke's sound had taken time to come together. Spells in bands had led him to believe he could strike out alone. "It was a process of elimination. I didn't want it to sound smooth and I didn't want it to sound like a straightforward indie band. I wanted it to have character and an old-world charm.

"When people said it sounded like something from a musical, I was initially alarmed, but then I realised that was okay. I was comfortable with what I was doing and that made me really confident. You can have fun with a piano. It doesn't have to be ballads. It can be unexpected."

Wilson's first musical stirrings had come in church as a young boy. "I grew up going to Presbyterian churches and singing harmonies. That had a huge impact. I'd be in the congregation listening to these amazing baritone voices. I'd try to copy them and sing from down in my boots before my voice broke."

Religion even turned him into a teenage pyromaniac. "When I was 14 years of age, my parents gave me this tape about the satanic influences in popular music. After I listened to that, I arrogantly went off and burned all my elder sister's records while she was away at university." Wilson laughs about it now. "It was a real fit of self-righteousness. To save my sister from evil, I burned her Eagles and Led Zeppelin records. Some of them, like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, were spared the fire." His sister was not pleased. "She thumped me when she came home. I'm still buying her records now to pay her back. I got Hotel California last Christmas."

Yet religious music was all Wilson listened to for a couple of years. "People like Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman and Keith Green were recording artists who also had this faith aspect to their music. It was expressing something I agreed with. I wanted to explore my relationship with God and here was this music which was doing that."

His own early attempts at song-writing, he admits, weren't up to much. This changed when he heard Canadian folkie Bruce Cockburn. "He had this thing that you could sing songs about the light or you could sing songs about things the light enabled you to see. That was a big turning point in my writing because I realised I was much more interested and comfortable with writing about what was going on inside me as opposed to me singing about other people."

As he got older, he began to listen to people such as Tom Waits and Johnny Cash, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello. "You realise that things are a lot less black and white. There's a lot of grey and that produces some fascinating songs."

By the time he had come to play to paying audiences, he had a whole bunch of dramatic songs about love and heartbreak to perform. In small rooms up and down the land, audiences would swoon with delight. "I would survive on whatever CDs I could sell at the end of the night." Some nights, he'd bed down in the dressing room before hitting the road the following morning. To make ends meet, he sang and played in a Belfast piano bar. "Five hours a night of old country songs - Dylan, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, you name it. I wouldn't play Piano Man, though.

Little by little, things began to change. One EP became two EPs and then came the Adventures in Gramophone album. "It had so many flaws, but I think the charm is in that we went for a lot of character, we kept the crackles on it." Record labels pricked up their ears and started calling. "We were nominated for the Choice Music Prize and after that, it went completely mental. This was something we recorded down the road in a wee studio and it wasn't even on a proper record label."

But it was Wilson's songs as much as the sound that piqued interest. "A lot of my songs are about being in the throes of a relationship," he says. Some start from a certain point of reality, but there's obviously fiction in there as well. I find that to be a really gripping subject matter.

"I think it's also interesting to find the beauty, poetry and magic which is in the middle of a relationship, because that's the point I'm at. I'm married to Heather and we have three children and I'm writing songs from that perspective." He admits it's a balancing act to go "from being on a big tour to picking up the kids from school", but it keeps him grounded. "I want to try to bring more of home with me on tour and more of the excitement which comes from being on the road home."

One thing he doesn't want to bring home is the drinking that goes with the road. This year, Wilson has noticed how much drink is around him more and more. "You're playing in an environment every night which is geared towards drinking. You have free booze on your rider and you have people there who want to buy you a drink. It gets boring on the road, so you drink. You're so full of adrenalin after a show that you want to keep that buzz going so you drink. It has become a habitual thing for me and I'm trying to give it up."

Something else Wilson has noticed of late is his attachment to where he was born. When he was growing up, Wilson hated Northern Ireland. "I was absolutely sick of the place, I couldn't wait to get away. I come from a Protestant background, but what the hell does that mean? It didn't make sense that just because you were born into a certain place that you had to have certain loyalties. I didn't feel any connection at all to the strong feelings so many people had about the place."

Now? Wilson smiles. It's a little different now. "Since I started making music, I realised how much I can draw from here in my songs. I live in east Belfast and consider it to be my home. I suppose I'm also excited about doing everything from here and showing other musicians that you don't have to be London-centric or Dublin-centric to get ahead. You can do positive things here, provided you shake off the negativity first."

George Best's funeral provided Wilson with a sight of the Northern Ireland and Belfast he loves. "There was this pride that he came from here," Wilson remembers. "It was something you could genuinely be proud of for the right reasons. It wasn't about lording it over people about some battle from a couple of hundred years ago or some other political thing."

There may, however, be little time ahead for Wilson to sit around in east Belfast and take all of this in. The road and Songs from the Deep Forest beckon. This suits Wilson just fine. "It's all about making records and songs which will last. I've always been interested in art and this is my art."

Songs from the Deep Forest is released on V2 on October 6