‘I kept my house in permanent night… living the vampire life,’ says Greg Dulli frontman of The Afghan Whigs
Duvetyne, or in this case the alternative spelling Duvateen, is a twill fabric with a matt finish that makes it ideal for blocking out light.
In its black fire-retardant form, it has widespread use in the film industry to ensure the right controlling effect.
In the first season of the original Star Trek for instance, exterior shots of space, “the final frontier”, were created by gluing glitter to it.
As you’ll discover, it was also used by The Afghan Whigs’ frontman Greg Dulli — and now it’s the name of a pivotal song on the band’s tenth studio album, Soft Control.
It is 40 years since he formed the Whigs in Cincinnati, Ohio, later moving to Seattle to become Sub Pop label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.
But Soft Control, their first LP in four years, has to be one of their most urgent, textured and captivating efforts yet.
When he calls from America’s West Coast, it’s the first time I’ve spoken to Dulli since 2008.
He was in London then during an extended Whigs’ hiatus, promoting The Gutter Twins’ album Saturnalia, made with the late Mark Lanegan, one of the grunge movement’s defining singers both with the Screaming Trees and as a solo artist.
Lanegan died aged 57 in 2022, a year after battling a severe case of Covid at his adopted home of Killarney, Ireland. “Mark is someone I miss . . . every day,” Dulli tells me.
He returns to the subject in hand and provides a fulsome explanation of his song Duvateen.
“There was a time in my life when I put it on all my windows,” he admits. “I kept my house in permanent night, living the vampire life.
“I had a friend in the movie business so I went with her to get some. I saw what it could do for me.”
So, what DID it do for you? I venture with a degree of trepidation.
“It was decades ago and I just didn’t have any use for sunlight or for being outside,” replies Dulli, before adding with a knowing sigh, “It was clearly not a healthy time for me.”
By calling the piano-led song Duvateen, Dulli, who delivers the lyrics with white-knuckle intensity, is using it as a metaphor for the infinite void — or, if you like, mortality.
He admits: “The symbolic nature of it is not lost on me.”
With lyrics that span his childhood, “teacher gonna chase us down the hall”, to the grave, “dig somebody’s hole”, it encapsulates the circle of life and serves as the album’s heartbeat.
Its sound is in stark contrast to the more rock-heavy numbers, drawing this response from Dulli: “When I get a piano song like that, it’s an exciting moment in my life.
“It’s the sort of thing I could play to my mom.” As for the idea that Duvateen is the album’s centrepiece, he says: “You write songs and, as some emerge, they state their alpha-ness.
“Duvateen got my attention very quickly. It started out differently — a bit like Honky Tonk Women for a minute — but I completely changed it.
“It was one of those songs when you feel as if your hand is being guided from beyond.”
I suggest to Dulli that listening to Soft Control’s ten tracks “feels like an emotional rollercoaster”.
“Well, life in general is an emotional rollercoaster for me,” he replies. “It would stand to reason that any art I put forth would be a similar thing.”
Next the single-minded singer describes his path to the album: “We did a Covid record that came out in ’22, then we toured it for a year.
“Then I took some time off and travelled. I didn’t start working on a new record until ’25.
“But once I began writing songs again, they were happening fast and furious. I did 20, 22. Cut them down to ten. And here’s the ten.”
The result is a concise, dynamic punch of an album. “I like 40 minutes or less and I like ten as a round number,” says Dulli. “I’ve been landing on it for the past four or five records.
“They’re like a little family and sometimes they waiting for a little brother or sister to show up. I wrote the final song, Loose Talk, earlier this year.”
The album comes bursting out of the blocks with taut Jungle Roux and riff-heavy House Of I.
Elsewhere, My Lover leans into the band’s R&B credentials while stately The Deepest Part Of The Darkest Shadow serves as a companion piece to Duvateen.
There’s a song called Memphis, Texas, not as strange as you think because there is such place, along with the famous Memphis in Tennessee where Elvis made his name.
The album ends with A Simulation, 70 seconds of ambient beauty segueing into one of Dulli’s most tender vocals and a gorgeous string arrangement.
He calls it one of his “most existential songs”. “I get overwhelmed by injustice, sadness, and people and animals being hurt. I know I’m not the only one wondering, ‘What the f*** are we doing here?’”
But now, before we go any further, it’s time to tell Dulli’s story beginning with his teenage dream of fronting a band, inspired by a legendary psychedelic soul band.
He recalls: “I went to see The 5th Dimension. When (singer) Billy Davis Jr. took off at the end of Let the Sunshine In, it was the most electrifying thing I’d ever seen. I knew I wanted to be a lead singer.”
Having dropped out of studying film at the University Of Cincinnati and flirted with the idea of becoming an actor, Dulli formed his first band, The Black Republicans, in the mid-Eighties.
Did they find it hard to get noticed at first? I ask. “When you’re 20 years old, nothing’s hard, man,” he answers. “You’re literally immortal.
“We all had regular jobs. I drove a taxi. I cooked in a restaurant. I painted houses, put roofs on houses. I was a roadie-type guy at the big theatre in town.”
Crucial to Dulli’s trajectory was the recruitment to The Black Republicans of bassist John Curley, the only Whigs founder member still by his side today.
He says: “We would see this bearded dude at our shows. We all thought he was about 40.
“Then one night after the show, he walked up and introduced himself to me, saying, ‘I’m better than your bass player.’ John came by our rehearsal place and played his way into the band.”
Dulli describes what happened next: “I moved to Arizona for six months and wrote a bunch of songs.
“Then I came back to Cincinnati and started the Whigs with John, Rick McCollum (guitar) and Steve Earle (drums).”
He remembers the Midwestern city on the Ohio River being a “great jumping-off point” because so many towns “weren’t that far away from us”.
Dulli rattles off the places in the manner of Johnny Cash singing I’ve Been Everywhere — “Louisville, Lexington, Kentucky, Columbus, Athens, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh.”
But most inspirational to Dulli was a venue in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, The Jockey Club.
“Back in the day, the jazz dudes Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. played there,” he says.
“Then it fell into disrepair before opening again as a punk rock club. When I got to college, my roommates were deep in that scene and that’s how I got into The Jockey Club.
“I saw The Damned, Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Violent Femmes, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Killing Joke, so many great people.
“And everybody in the area cut their teeth there. If you were in a band, you played The Jockey Club and you played it multiple times a month.”
In 1989, the Whigs self-released debut album Big Top Halloween caught the attention of Seattle-based Sub Pop’s boss, Jonathan Poneman, who offered them a contract.
Suddenly, they were label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana and Mudhoney — but they were a very different beast.
Dulli says: “We were outsiders in more ways than one. We were from Cincinnati and we weren’t from the Northwest.
“Our covers were R&B covers instead of Stooges’. I love The Stooges but we had bonded over The Temptations. At our first rehearsal, we played Psychedelic Shack.
“We formed in October, 1986, and played our first gig in January the following year — and I guarantee you we played Psychedelic Shack at that show.”
Dulli was also infatuated with a Midwestern powerhouse in the shape of genre-defying Minneapolis-based Prince.
“We weren’t trying to sound like Prince,” he says. “But you could grab elements of him and stick them in your quiver.”
So what was it like heading to Seattle and mixing with Kurt Cobain and Co?
“It was like seeing people our age doing cool things,” says Dulli. “When Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off No.1 on Billboard, I thought, ‘Wow! One of our own is at the top’.
“It was an exciting time, certainly in Seattle, where we had a front-row seat to it all.
“We loved all those guys and we loved those bands, played with everybody, and got to know everybody.”
When it came to meeting his biggest buddy from the scene, Mark Lanegan, it was via a different route.
“I met Mark in Boston when the Screaming Trees, Primus and the Whigs were on the same bill but we didn’t start hanging out until around 2000.”
The Whigs enjoyed a stellar Nineties, navigating their way through the music industry “machine” on various labels but coming up with at least three first-rate albums, Congregation (1992), Gentlemen (1993) and 1965 (1998).
In 2001, frazzled Dulli decided to take a step back and the Whigs disbanded. Aside from a brief recording reunion in 2006, the hiatus lasted ten years.
He says: “I had absolutely no intention of being in the Whigs ever again. In my creative life, I’m so proud of the things I did during that time — The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins.
“But when the door opened to the Whigs again, I was a different person and ready to step through it.”
Dulli remembers the times he would pass through his home town of Cincinnati where bassist Curley and his wife were raising their two daughters. “We were all pretty cooked from the Whigs experience but John would come to the shows and would get up on stage and play with either one of my bands — and everybody loved it.”
In 2010, when Dulli was on a solo tour, Curley did his usual thing but was then persuaded to do the next night in Chicago, a five-hour drive away.
He says: “It was the first time in 11 years that anyone had seen John Curley and I on stage together outside of Cincinnati.
“When I introduced him, the ovation was so unexpectedly loud and long. That, effectively, was the catalyst for the Whigs reforming.”
Since getting back together, they have made four studio albums, Do To The Beast (2014), In Spades (2017), How Do You Burn? and the imminent Soft Control.
The current line-up is Dulli, Curley, multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, Christopher Thorn (guitars) and Bryan Lee Brown (drummer who recently replaced Patrick Keeler who tours with Jack White).
Forty years on since the Whigs formed, Dulli says: “I’m still smiling at my good fortune. Still putting out music, playing live, the whole works. I’m a lucky fella.”
He accepts that he used to be “an angry young man” but, at 61, he has found a degree of peace.
“I had an imaginary chip on my shoulder that I needed to get rid of,” he says.
“You can tame yourself but you can always go back to the wild side — just in case you need to explore.”
It’s fair to say that The Afghan Whigs’ latest album is one of his walks on the wild side.
