It’s confusing being a Duffy fan. In the early days, Stephen Duffy had two alter egos: (Stephen) Tintin (Duffy), and The Lilac Time. (Oh, there was Dr. Calculus, but we won’t talk about that.) Stephen’s brother Nick Duffy was the member of the Lilac Time who wrote the instrumentals, but later, Nick would make his own great albums, under the various names of Bait, Eagle Ombina, and lately, Nick Duffy. The Lilac Time, meanwhile, was to become ‘Stephen Duffy and the Lilac Time‘ as Nick became less involved. All this in addition to Stephen’s solo projects as ‘Stephen Duffy‘ and just plain ‘Duffy‘.
All of which means that the various proliferating permutations of Duffys are causing considerable cataloguing problems in my iTunes library.
So now what are we to make of this?
Two possibilities:
1) The Lilac Time crew has made a new album, helmed by Nick instead of Stephen. It’ll be like a really good Nick Duffy album, but possibly even better.
2) The brothers Duffy have found a new way to mess with my iTunes.
Either way, I’m intrigued.
25 July 2012 at 4:09 pm
Is there another set of artists around who have done so much damage to a man's desire to alphabetize his CD or iPod collection? You can throw Me, Me, Me, The Devils and Stephen A. J. Duffy into the mix as well.
The vastly under-rated Nick is just as monikerly challenged as his under-appreciated younger sibling.
Nick's tune are always good to tap feet to and it was nice that the first three Fontana CDs got a full release with Nick's tracks in full situ. If you can dig up any of his earlier tunes you will do yourself a huge favour Original Super Mango and Hotel Angst are well worth whatever you can scrape together for the original casssettes or digital versions.