Runout Groove
Stephen Duffy & The Lilac Time
Tracklisting:
1. Another Time
2. Driving Somewhere
3. A Dream Of A Girl
4. Desert Shore
5. Dark Squadrons
6. Until I Kiss You
7. Aldermaston
8. Pruning The Vine
9. Happy Go Lucky
10. Parliament Hill Fields
11. No Direction
12. The Kite & The Sky
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.