FROM CO-FOUNDING DURAN DURAN TO SOLO SUCCESS AND A SURPRISE REINVENTION AS A FOLK TROUBADOUR, IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT IT’S BEEN QUITE A RIDE FOR THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS STEPHEN ‘TIN TIN’ DUFFY. CLASSIC POP MEETS THE MUSICAL CHAMELEON AS HE UNVEILS HIS BAND THE LILAC TIME’S LATEST ALBUM…
STEVE O’BRIEN
THE LILAC TIME
For a man who co-founded Duran Duran and was responsible for one of the 80s most infectious floorfillers, the No.4-charting Kiss Me, Stephen Duffy was never keen on the mainstream pop of the time. “I wasn’t that comfortable with the synthesizers and drum machines,” he tells Classic Pop over Zoom from his home in Falmouth. “I was having a hard time with it.”
With that in mind, in 1986 the man the world knew as Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy put his solo career on hold for a band project that would eventually see him dropped by his record label, Virgin.
“I played them half the album and they didn’t even want to hear the rest,” he laughs. “They wanted me to carry on making dance records, and why not? But I just felt like it was time to get back to the acoustic guitar, which was where I started, and do the absolute opposite of everything that was going on.”
Before The Lilac Time (the name is from the Nick Drake track River Man – “Going to see the river man/ Going to tell him all I can/ About the plan/ For lilac time”), there was little in Duffy’s musical oeuvre that suggested he was a frustrated folkie. There was Duran, of course, which he co-formed at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1978 with Nick Rhodes and John Taylor (Stephen left after just a year), and the band Tin Tin, which later gave the singer his solo moniker. Then there was his album of experimental house (Designer Beatnik by Dr Calculus mdma) and those synth-drenched solo singles – Kiss Me, Icing On The Cake, Unkiss That Kiss... That Stephen Duffy of all people would go folk seemed as likely as Twisted Sister putting out a shoegazing album.
But folk music had always been part of Duffy’s life. “The first group I ever saw, when I was nine, was The Incredible String Band,” he says, “and before punk I’d played in folk clubs with my brother Nick. It was really after the Dr Calculus thing that I thought, ‘I’ve got to get back to writing songs on the guitar.’ I’d done a little bit on the Because We Love You album, but it was time to completely dedicate myself to that.”
Quite a gear shift then for an artist whose biggest single had epitomised the sound of 1985.
“I was told bac
