Just over a year ago Duffy was a virtually unknown singer-songwriter who
dreamt of buying her family a Christmas turkey from Marks & Spencer
rather than from a cheaper super-market. This weekend she is a millionaire
whose debut album Rockferry has been proclaimed the year’s bestseller.
With a voice driven by Welsh wind power, the 24-year-old songstress from
Gwynedd ripped through the 2008 charts, leaving rivals such as Take That,
Kings of Leon and Leona Lewis, the 2006 X Factor winner, trailing behind.
Even if you missed Duffy singing at the recent Royal Variety Performance, the
final of Strictly Come Dancing or Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve show, it is
difficult to avoid her ballsy soul songs on the airwaves and her blonde,
attractive image in the public prints.
Now everyone wants a piece of the girl who, when Mercy topped the chart last
February, became the first Welsh female to achieve a No 1 pop single in the
past 25 years. Rockferry, described as the best pure pop album since Amy
Winehouse’s Back to Black, has sold 1.69m copies in the UK and more than 4m
worldwide. Duffy has been nominated for three Grammy awards in 2009.
Once likened to Jessica Rabbit, the curvaceous cartoon seductress, Duffy seems
frozen by the headlights of media exposure. “I still feel like a little girl
in the middle of quite a tough thing,” she said recently. “I have sold my
soul and I’m no longer anonymous. The scary thing is that this feels to me
like just the beginning. I’m borderline on a nervous breakdown.”
With a verbal lilt as a reminder that Welsh is her mother tongue, the singer
is often at pains to confess to her own naivety and her unease at growing up
under the “microscope” of public scrutiny. Despite her three years in
London, she misses the small-town life of visiting the fish and chip shop,
going to the pub and speaking Welsh with her mates.
One interviewer, expecting to meet a carefully groomed star, was confounded by
Duffy: “I was surprised that she was very childlike, sweet and innocent,
with this babyish voice. She seemed to be in a little bubble where she copes
with fame by pretending it doesn’t exist. I got the impression she was
frightened of being a superstar.”
Curious, then, that this media-shy artist, whose sultry performances are at
odds with her girl-next-door wholesomeness, should provoke such controversy.
The most common charge is that Duffy represents a new breed of female
wannabes, reengineered by slick marketing men to sound like Winehouse, the
talented and troubled singer whose retro1960s sound helped to make her a
star. Why else, say detrac-tors, did Duffy drop her first name, Aimée,
except to play down the obvious comparison?
“Duffy and the singer Adele were both clearly aimed by their record companies
at people who had bought Amy Winehouse’s second album,” said a rock critic.
“It was a sound that Winehouse’s producer, Mark Ronson, had created from the
more exciting pop-soul sounds of the 1960s. To call it soul music is
slightly ridiculous, since that implies you put your soul into it and that
it’s deep and genuine. There’s nothing genuine about this.”
To which Duffy has a simple reply: she dropped her first name when she was 19,
since she had always been called Duffy by schoolmates and friends. And she
began writing Rockferry - named after Rock Ferry, in Birken-head - as long
ago as 2004.
Not everyone has been persuaded by those arguments. Winehouse burst onto the
music scene in 2003 with her debut album, Frank, which was nominated for a
Mercury prize. In 2004 Duffy released an EP of Welsh ballads under her full
name, before executing an abrupt change of style and moniker.
The carping clearly rankles. The Welsh singer claimed to be “flattered” by the
comparisons, but could not suppress her irritation: “I want to be known as
Duffy, not the new anyone. I think I have worked hard for what I have
achieved and want to be known for my talents, not anyone else’s.”
Fierce sniping came from another quarter. Estelle, the British hip-hop singer,
attacked Duffy and Adele for misrepresenting genuine soul music: “I’m
wondering, how the hell is there not a single black person in the press
singing soul? Adele and Duffy ain’t soul. She sounds like she heard some
Aretha records once . . . that don’t mean soul.”
Disarmingly, Duffy expressed agreement: “I gather she meant I didn’t define
soul music. It’s not my intention to define it. You can only try and
reinvent it.” However, she did not see eye to eye with Estelle on the notion
that skin colour should be an issue: “We don’t live in that race-conscious
society. It’s really mad that she’s playing that card.”
This riposte hints at a kernel of resilience hardened during Duffy’s traumatic
childhood, when she saw her family riven by the threat of violence. She grew
up in the seaside village of Nefyn in north Wales with her twin sister Katy
and her older sister Kelly. Her father, John, had been sent from Liverpool
as interim manager of the local Nanhoron Arms hotel, where he met and
married Joyce Williams, who was working there as a waitress.
Duffy’s early years were idyllic: “Nefyn was an amazing place. It was safe,
friendly. You could stay out all hours, playing on the beach.”
She began singing at the age of six, carrying a notebook filled with her
scribbled lyrics, and claimed to have discovered rock music by watching her
father’s videos of the 1960s show Ready Steady Go!: “The Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, the Walker Brothers, Sandie Shaw and Millie singing My Boy
Lollipop. I thought it was the sexiest, most exciting thing ever.”
Towards the end of her time at primary school, her parents separated. In 1996
Duffy’s mother married her childhood sweetheart, Philip Smith, who had taken
the family to live in Pembrokeshire. However, Smith’s divorce from his
previous wife, Dawn, had been acrimonious: he won custody of their four
children. Dawn, after receiving a demand to pay maintenance, reacted in an
extreme manner.
She offered an acquaintance, Robert Rees, £3,000 to kill her former husband,
telling him: “I want you to blow his head off.” Rees promptly informed the
police, who moved the family into a safe house. Dawn was sentenced to three
and a half years in prison in 1998. An alcoholic, she died in 2002, just 18
months after her release.
Even before Dawn’s proposed contract killing, she had made the family’s life a
misery, Duffy said. “It was really bad. We’d see Dawn occasionally and we
got tormented through our mid-teens. She would make funny phone calls and
all that stuff. We were really afraid.” The experience turned Duffy against
drink and drugs: “I’ve seen the dark side of addiction, so it doesn’t float
my boat.”
One positive note was that Duffy’s voice was acknowledged on her first day at
her new school, when the music teacher pointed at her and asked her to sing
solo. “My face was burning, but after hearing me, he said, ‘There’s
something in that. Carry on.’ ” This contrasted with her expulsion from her
previous school’s choir because her voice was “too big”.
At 15 she ran away back to her father’s house in Nefyn, causing a year’s
estrangement from her mother and sisters. She went on to pass her A-levels,
but she had struggled in an English-speaking school and decided to extend
her musical career beyond singing in local clubs.
Returning to Wales in 2003, she was invited to appear on Waw Ffactor, a Welsh
television show similar to Pop Idol. Although she came second, she found it
“the unhappiest time of my life”, notably being asked to dress as a
transvestite.
To keep everyone happy, she went to Chester University to study culture, but
felt out of place and dropped out. Luck favoured her in 2004 when one of her
demo tapes reached the desk of Jeannette Lee, who had rebuilt the Rough
Trade record label with Geoff Travis. “Instantly I was completely taken with
this amazing voice,” Lee recalled. “When she came to London to see Geoff and
me, we were just bowled over.”
They introduced her to Bernard Butler, the former Suede guitarist turned
producer, who gave her an education in soul music by down-loading tracks
onto her iPod. After she and Butler wrote the title track of Rockferry, Lee
became Duffy’s manager and a small group of writers and producers were
enlisted. She wrote “the lyrics and melodies”, which were embellished by her
team.
Last year was a “whirlwind” that took her to America, where she attracted
attention but failed to make a full breakthrough. “She’s known in New York
and Los Angeles, but not Iowa,” said a critic.
The break-up of her three-year relationship with Mark Durston, an events
manager, with whom she fell in love while still a student - “He cheated on
me” - has left her wary of romantic ties. “I’m really happy on my own.
Because, that way, no one can hurt you.”
It may not be apparent to others, but she can feel herself changing from the
shy little girl she once was. “There will come a point when I have to become
a strong woman. I have to learn not to take any shit from anyone any more.”
