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Folk, world, rock.

Born in Alum, Rock, Birmingham, I’ve known Stephen Duffy since his days as a founding member and vocalist of Duran Duran prior to their signing with EMI. I’ve followed and been an admirer of his music through his many incarnations, from the rough-edged sounds of The Subterranean Hawks through the still iconic Kiss Me (in its different versions, including the 1982 original with Mulligan and Dik Davis of Fashion and the Top 10 hit of 1985 ) to his early house identity as Dr Calculus, solo albums, The  Devils with Nick Rhodes and the ongoing country-folk inflected English pastoral pop of The Lilac Time. Never once have I been disappointed.

Four years on from their last album, The Lilac Time line-up remains as Duffy, brother Nick and wife Claire, joined again here by multi-instrumentalist Ben Peeler on pedal steel, with no bass and minimal use of drums. It’s de rigueur for artists to say their latest work is their best yet, but that’s certainly true of Duffy every time he releases an album. Otherwise, why bother?

It opens with the Orbisonesque tumbling guitars, steel and muted drums of Your Vermillion Cliffs, the first line of which has him declare, “I’ve never liked my birthdays/They always make me sad”, going on to offer the sage wisdom that  “It’s not what happens to you / It’s how you react / It’s not what they say to you / It’s what you say back”  before ending, “Can’t promise you a rainbow /All I can say is this / We can leave tomorrow / For your vermillion cliffs”. Its image of a bus without a  driver is picked up on the gently swaying (a slow shanty of sorts) The Long Way (“I took the long way to nowhere at all”), an understated protest song rebuking Tory voters (“Who votes to be homeless / To be unemployed / Who votes for kindness / To be destroyed / They offer just hatred / Or suicide”) but also offering hope (“You don’t have to be thin / The house doesn’t always win / And I’ve lived my life on a string / Like a stray / Don’t save anything for best / This may be as good as it gets / And don’t waste time having regrets”) in the embrace of a fellow community (“I’m old but I’m happy / I found my tribe”).

A simple but beautiful love song  (“You said a word of love / Out of which we wrote a book”), the rippling Lennon fingerpicked style acoustic six-minute On The Last Day Of The Last Days Of Summer has musical echoes of Lesley Duncan’s Love Song. It provides the album’s title as, borrowing from Auden’s Death’s Echo, he sings, “Dance ‘till all the stars come down / Stay with me until there’s no one else around”. A slightly more uptempo bluesily picked dobro melody line and trilling mandolin carry Candy Cigarette, a song rooted in nostalgia for when he lived in London and would regularly haunt the Rough Trade store on Talbot Road where Nikki Sudden worked and who would turn him on to new music, specifically Cat Power singing Salty Dog from her Covers album. Written by bluesman Papa Charlie Jackson, it includes the term ‘candyman’, a euphemism for addiction, in this case to music and a way with words that taste of candy,  but the reminder here that “You pay for it / Nothing  sweet is free”.

With Peller’s steel to the fore, A Makeshift Raft is the album’s most politically informed track, the opening verse written in response to a photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned with eleven others trying to reach Kos, being carried off the beach, the second verse a response to the ongoing Syrian civil war before moving on to Trump becoming the Republican party presidential candidate, with Allen Ginsberg the obverse image. It ends, though, on an upbeat note as he sings, “Invent the sky to house the stars / Invent fingers and guitars / I’ll see you on my handlebars / Sing me songs of love”, echoing Lennon’s avowal that all you need is love. It also features the Duffy yodel.

This is the next album, and it’s magnificent; it will make your heart dance until the stars come down.

Tracks:
01. Your Vermillion Cliffs
02. The Long Way
03. On The Last Day Of The Last Days Of Summer
04. Candy Cigarette
05. A Makeshift Raft
06. Adiós and Goodnight
07. So Far Away No. 2
08. We Missed You
09. The Band That Nobody Knew

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIoQ0OvgaZ8