It’s always the same story. You’re sitting there waiting for one whiskey-voiced diva and then a load of them come along at the same time.
But comparing Duffy to the likes of Amy Winehouse isn’t really fair. Winehouse’s records interpret the music of the past for the people of the future. The Duffy album is something different. It’s an amazingly accurate throwback to the BIG pop music of the 1960s and belongs to an alternative timeline where, not only did punk never happen, but The Beatles broke up after one album. It’s all big backing vocals, strings, glockenspiels, upstroke electric guitars and bass-lines that could pull a train, and features co-writes and production from Bernard Butler. It’s an homage to the likes of Shirley Bassey, Glen Campbell, Dusty Springfield, Scott Walker, Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb. The only nod to the present tense is in the ‘Rehab’-like intro to the second track, ‘Mercy’, which quickly becomes a slab of Northern Soul mixed by the Propellerheads. In general it’s straight out of 1963: the melodies are satisfying, the singing is beautifully controlled, the arrangements are spot on and the mix is crystal clear and fuzzy at the same time (just like all ’60s classics).
But there are a couple of problems:
1) Duffy affects the voice of an aging diva but she really needs to let that voice marinate in a bit of adult experience for it to be totally convincing.
2) Lyrically it deals too much in generalities that stop these songs from becoming as great as the classic tracks they reference. The Big Music she’s aiming for needs to be grounded in idiosyncrasy. Hence the greatness of songs like ‘MacArthur Park’ in which Richard Harris can ridiculously yet amazingly croon “Someone left a cake out in the rain/I don’t think that I can take it/Because it took so long to bake it/and I’ll never have that recipe again/Oh No." Quite mad, but it feels like he’s referring to something real. Duffy uses simple truisms like “I know it’s wrong/Hanging on too long" (‘Hanging On Too Long’) that are just that little bit too general to be convincing.
But this does contain some pretty cracking songs – the aforementioned ‘Mercy’, the beautifully stripped down ‘Syrup And Honey’ and geographical classics like ‘Warwick Avenue’ and ‘Rockferry’ (a la Jimmy Webb’s ‘Galveston’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’). And it certainly all hangs together in a very coherent fashion. But if they mix the ingredients around a bit and suffuse the retro action with some real contemporary life experience this could develop into something very, very cool indeed.