Just because you’ve been around for the past ten years delivering intriguing concept albums that have failed to make pots of money, doesn’t mean to say the world isn’t listening.

And so it proves with Duke Special (aka Peter Wilson), one of Ireland’s most exploratory songwriters, having previously covered the lives of pioneering photographers, and works influenced by Bertolt Brecht, Paul Auster, and Mark Twain.

With Look out Machines!, Wilson smartly reverts to the pop song format that he had embraced with verve on his early albums, Adventures in Gramophone and Songs from the Deep Forest.

Frankly, we’ve missed these odd pop songs, and here – in collaboration with the likes of Boo Hewardine and Iain Archer - they soar and swerve with equal parts gusto, aplomb and panache. Another bonus is that, as the songs are mostly written in first-person narratives, Wilson the man is to the fore rather than Wilson the detached observer.

Too often overlooked, special is as Special does, and Look out Machines! is a cracker.

See dukespecial.com