You are lost on a summer’s day in an un-named area trying to get home after a night of raving. As you travel you take a left down a non-descript street, conspicuous by the depressing grey colouring of the houses that possess no individuality- a pigeon lies dead on the road waiting for a car to add insult to injury by running over it again. You take a right turn hoping you might see someone to direct you out of this oppressive and depressive area and then……you enter a road, full of vibrantly painted houses all detailing the individual characters of the owners, kids playing a variety of games on the street and adults chatting away in deep but evidently fun conversation-welcome to Dukes Avenue.
Having worked with names like Ed Sheeran and the awesome left field magic of Sampha the trio have already earnt kudos within the industry. Keen to avoid genre restrictions and the bureaucracy of the music business, Jack Moses singer/songwriter and the producers Dutchy and Jason have opted to produce for themselves rather than others.
Freedom of creativity is a beautiful thing and their debut track Beautiful Girl signifies all that freedom with hard hitting subject matter regarding a young prostitute’s life and a cinematic tour de force of a video ‘welcome to Dukes Avenue baby’!
Flavour talked to one third of the group, Jason for some inside info.
The road before Dukes Avenue.
Music for all of us was always the starting point. We all have different memories-Dutchy was dj’ng throughout London, Jack Moses was always singing-and I was just recording music to beats on grime and so on. Music has always been part of us and it was always a destination for us.
Initially Dutchy (who produces) and Jack Moses met at university and they literally just started making music together and creating vibes just for fun. They did a couple of things with a band called New Brand Flex and a few other artists from back in the day. I met Dutchy through a mutual friend and he started messaging me and we just started talking music. We eventually met at his studio started vibing and we all just went from there really.
Finding Dukes Avenue
Dukes Avenue as a group however only came about in December last year but we had all been making music heavily for about five or six years. Dukes Avenue came about really because of our experiences making music for other people. We were doing a lot of pitches through publishing companies and working with other artists. A lot of the artists however wanted specific things and the music needed to go through so many different people it was just too much. We just decided that we need to go and create our sound-we really wanted to have the power to not be affected by others.
Ed Sheeran and Sampha visit Dukes Avenue.
I knew Sampha through a mutual friend and he just happened to come down to the studio and he liked a lot of the stuff we were doing and we just started jamming together-it really just started as fun. Sampha played these crazy leftfield keys, he was just going off into different places creating these amazing different emotions-the guy is just a genius.
With Ed we were working with him just before he got his deal- it was obvious even then, that this guy was going to blow-up. Ed knows exactly what he wants. He sat there for twenty minutes and he had a whole song in his head and the majority of the production as well we just had to assist-totally professional.
Putting Dukes Avenue on the map.
We have an EP which will come out before the end of the year. We probably have like 8 or 9 tracks ready but we are only going to put 4 or five out there but we are still doing the track listing. The thing is we do not want to be restricted by genres and so we have stuff on there that is indie, some of it is rock and we have some House music –I am not sure what genre you would put Beautiful Girl under?!
In keeping our independence, we will put the EP out ourselves. We did not have our own label but we are of course functioning as a label really. We do not want to wait to get picked up we just want to put the music out there and let people enjoy-that is Dukes Avenue really.
Beautiful Girl out but on I-tunes HERE