Stephen Duffy & The Lilac Time
Stephen Duffy has tried his hand at many things, but only in 2007, did he get around to growing a beard for the first time. It’s not a development in which he invests much significance, but somehow, listening to the 15th album of his recording life, it seems fitting. You can hear every experience accrued during his life broken down into a single source of rich creative fuel.
In the 1970s, punk came to Birmingham, which, one way or another, usurped folk music in his affections and got him – via art school – into an early Scott Fitzgerald-inspired version of Duran Duran. In the 1980s, Stephen briefly became a pop star, made an experimental album about MDMA, ran away to the country and formed The Lilac Time. In the 1990s, he made a great undiscovered prog-pop album with Nigel Kennedy, lost and found himself in Alaska and returned to Camden where, for a brief time, London learned to swing again. And so to the new century. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Stephen held hands with strangers in Washington Square, singing songs for peace into the night. Then, two years down the line, he commenced a creative liaison with this country’s most well-known solo artist.
If there’s an air of taking stock about the songs on Runout Groove, it probably has something to do with the dizzying course Stephen’s life began to take in between the release of 2002’s Keep Going and the 2007 sessions that yielded these songs. Co-writing and co-producing Robbie William’s Intensive Care thrust Stephen into uncharted territory, but by the time that campaign drew to a close, Stephen’s itinerant life left him longing for a home that he no longer had. When he finally returned, Stephen moved to the fringes of Hampstead Heath and surrounded himself with the things that reminded him who he was: a pile of Incredible String Band albums lies propped up on the kitchen worktop; an acoustic guitar is nestled on a stand beside a library of art and music books.
And here is the record he wrote on it. You might say it’s Stephen’s most contented set of songs, except that the easy listening connotations might, at times, be misleading. True, there’s a song called Happy Go Lucky on here – a title drily suggested by a friend who heard his last album. In it, the voice navigates its owner’s existential quandary over a freewheeling boom-thump beat that draws a line between the suburban life from which he ran away and the complicated one from which he can’t bear to retreat: “I hated my labour/And I hated my life/I got drunk on that hatred/And made her my wife” Well, it’s probably not what his friend had in mind, but it is, by way of compensation, one of the best songs to ever bear the Lilac Time imprint.
Long-time fans of his work since he formed The Lilac Time in 1988 will know that when it comes to the path of true love, Stephen is a lousy map reader. And yet, he has never countenanced the idea of abandoning the journey. Many of his most exceptional songs – Natalie, Julie Christie, Julie Written On The Fence, The Darkness Of Her Eyes – have idealised the female form over the years; many more of them have attempted to deal with the fall-out from another burnt romance. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of them is A Dream Of A Girl, an exquisite reverie to contentment which remains nonetheless defined by its author’s previous travails. Like a rock jutting out onto a particularly inhospitable stretch of coastline, the stillness of Runout Groove is sculpted by flux, shaped by adversity. Amid all this, the album’s sole cover, Don Everly’s Until I Kissed You, comes on like the morning glory of a sunny Sunday you thought you might never see again.
Increasingly, The Lilac Time’s sound finds at its centre, the psychically attuned harmonies of Stephen and multi-instrumentalist Claire Worrall. It’s her milky tones voice you can hear on the aforementioned songs. She also sounds sublime on the yearning drivetime pop of Driving Somewhere and Aldermaston. Quoting Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger along the way, the latter song sees Stephen attempting to make sense of a world which has changed alarmingly little since the third Aldermaston march drew crowds largers than V.E. Day and the Coronation: “I was born along the Aldermaston March/Now I’m older and still marching through the dark.”
Alongside comparative Lilac Time veterans such as Claire and, of course, Stephen’s ever-present brother Nick, Stephen enlisted the help of jazz-folk icon Danny Thompson, whose inimitable contributions shine at the heart of many of Runout Groove’s standout tracks. Thirty-five years ago, Danny played on John & Beverley Martyn’s Primrose Hill. Now he appears on a paean to North London’s other great apex. Parliament Hill Fields landed fully formed after Stephen took an early morning walk to the Heath armed only with the Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs. Danny and Stephen are no less inspired on Dark Squadrons. – cock an ear to their inspired one-take display the song which most transparently exposes what wonderful things can happen when a songwriter raised on George Harrison and Incredible String Band lets the tape roll.
Stephen, of course, has never been shy of revealing his sources. True to form, he reveals that new single Driving Somewhere was an attempt to evoke “Townes Van Zandt in Two Lane Blacktop and Fleetwood Mac’s cover of The Beach Boys’ Farmers Daughter.” Desert Shore emerged at the 29 Palms Inn after a day spent driving through the Mojave Desert listening to Nico’s Desertshore. Even The Lilac Time’s name is an acknowledgement of past inspirations. It stems, of course, from a Nick Drake song in a decade even less hospitable to Drake’s oeuvre than the one that killed him off. Also in that decade, Stephen wrote The Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun – a requiem to a society soured by Thatcherism. If a festival like the Green Man had existed back then, it was a song born to be heard at it. Clearly, Festival organisers Jo and Danny agreed. This year, they asked Stephen to reconvene The Lilac Time for the 2007 Green Man. As the sun set over the natural amphitheatre at Glanusk Estate, The Lilac Time’s stunning eight minute version of Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun felt worth every minute of the wait. It just so happens that the same performance will climax The Lilac Time’s next release. Also entitled Runout Groove, it will take the form of a DVD telling the story of Stephen and The Lilac Time up until this point.
He’s never planned too far ahead, but by the time the next chapter appears, Stephen Duffy will have been a recording artist for some 35 years. It’s a good time to reflect, before embarking on the next 35; to watch the needle skate into the runout groove; then lift it up and see what side two has in store.
