The Duke & The King : Nothing Gold Can Stay

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Now on extended leave from his critically acclaimed band of Brothers, drummer and vocalist Simone Felice and Robert Chicken Burke unveiled their Acoustic-Glam-Gospel combo The Duke And The King at The Bush Hall, London on May 26th – aided and abetted by Nowell “The Deacon” Haskins – where they debuted the new album “Nothing Gold Can Stay”. Simone has always been considered the driving force behind The Felice Brothers, by not only adding a loose-limbed rhythm to his brothers’ soulful take on the Great American Songbook but also through his wild-eyed and occasionally unpredictable behavior onstage.

Whereas Simone Felice and his brothers tapped into one of the richest veins of America’s folk tradition on their last three albums; for his debut with new band The Duke & The King, Simone and old friend and new partner Robert Chicken Burke together now combine elements of blue-eyed soul and Topanga Canyon – as indigenous and vintage as CSN (their name itself is a reference to Mark Twain’s great American novel, Huckleberry Finn), but with the modern outlook and heartrendingly personal style of Ben Harper, or even The Eels. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was recorded in splendid isolation in a makeshift studio in Bearsville, New York State then taken down The Hudson to be mixed and mastered by Grammy award winning hip-hop maestro Bassy Bob Brockmann (Notorious B.I.G’s Ready To Die). It’s an album that is populated by those on the brink of fame and fortune, those just getting by and those who have lost their way. Inspired by the sights and sounds that surrounded them both as they grew up in New York City, from The Summer Of Sam and the beat box’s bass heavy boom to BB guns shooting Challenger from the sky – and by the flip side of the not-so-great American dream – boyhood friends turned scarred veterans. The Duke And The King’s debut album celebrates adolescence’s not so innocent times while grudgingly accepting the occasionally harsh reality of the streets of a city that they both grew up on. It’s a time and a place they can never return to – as they say on the closing track One More American Song – “there ain’t no gasoline gonna take us back that way again/when the years have rusted out our fenders/when our jeans were torn/ and we were all the best of friends/when the music sewed us together” – but once you’ve let this album take hold it’s a time and place you’ll never forget.

Diverse Records is proud to announce an audiophile 180g single LP version of “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, mastered (as ever) by Ray Staff at Air Studios, taken from 24bit/96k sound files.

DIV019LP One Sheet