I’d like to start things by first asking the question: why isn’t Stephen Duffy the most famous and the most eagerly celebrated artist in Britain right now? Even without recourse to his skewed and lyrical intellect, his astonishingly elastic wit, his impossibly tight trousers and his effortless romanticism, Duffy is a man who can whittle a golden, delicious pop tune from a lump of old timber and still have enough left for a pair of bedside cabinets and a keepsake box in which to stuff all his old letters and postcards; items which, conveniently enough, make up the contents of this very album itself. Even when success seems most doubtful, as it does right at the beginning of this album when the resounding bell of self-importance threatens to monopolise his good intents with a parade of minor triumphs and a transparent style of narrative bordering on the juvenile (‘Tune In’/’Eucharist’) Duffy is able to wriggle a hand-free and wrestle his way out of the straight-jacket with a delightful turn of phrase, a shot of sparkling insight and some satisfying hooks. And if that wasn’t enough, those who know Duffy, will appreciate the irony of his extravagant bluster and strike a seam of self-deprecation as deep as it is wide.
Needless to say, with lines as bare and confessional as ‘I was born in Birmingham but soon I would escape/With education incomplete and two songs on a tape’ it’s fair to describe this album as a rifle through the drawers of a strange and eventful life punctuated by success, transformed by failure and absorbed by the peculiarities of love and death. In a bare-knuckle scrap between James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and Duffy’s ‘I Love My Friends’ Duffy wins hands down. Not because it’s more accessible. Not because it’s some 500,000 words more economical but because it has all the natural profundity of life as it is lived and some of the sweetest hooks and choruses put to record. And for all his plaudits, James Joyce couldn’t carry a tune half as well as this guy.
So here you have it; the savagely tuneful candy-pop of ‘You Are’, the cool, autumnal sighs of ‘The Deal’ and ‘Autopsy’, the moist, supple Bossa of the blithe and seductive, ‘She Belongs To All’ and the chilling melancholy of the genuinely moving ‘The Postcard’ – all topped and tailed by some gentle contributions from XTC’s Andy Partridge, Blur’s Alex James, Elastica’s Justin Welsh, Aimee Mann and the talented Stephen Street. This reissue is also supported by a staggering range of bonus tracks not featured first time around.
That Stephen Duffy isn’t the most famous and the most eagerly celebrated artist in Britain right now scarcely matters. That Robbie Williams is the most famous and the most eagerly celebrated artist in Britain needn’t now be something to lament but to embrace, providing as it does the happiest of endings and the most delicious of ironies. Sometimes it’s the background that provides the clearest relief.