NYLON - June 2008 - (Page 110) LIVING DOLL myspace.com / duffymyspace Her profile views have already soared well past the one-million mark. Get on it! Duffy, a Welsh sensation with the voice of a ’60s girl-group star, hopes to restore pop music to its former glory. By Rachel Antonoff. Photographed by Bryan Rindfuss Right around now is a pretty good time to be a friend of Duffy’s. Not because her phenomenal single “Mercy” has been number one in the U.K. for five weeks and counting. Not because she’s being called the new Amy Winehouse and will most likely have hit the U.S. in a big way by the time you’re reading this. Not even because the 23-year-old Welsh songbird is just an all around swell girl. No, it’s because she’s got stuff to give away. “I’m decorating my house right now,” she says. “So I go out and I buy all this random shit and I end up giving most of it to my friends. I’m like, ‘Here’s this really weird heart-shaped mirror with leaves on it!’ Basically, I’ve got a lot of gifts to give these days.” For the rest of us, Rockferry—Duffy’s dreamy, nostalgia-tinged first collection of songs—is gift enough. Perhaps incongruously for a British singer, the eerily lovely title track conjures images of teenagers slow dancing at a ’60s-era prom while the sharp and sassy “Mercy” could easily have been a Motown hit, with Duffy’s raspy, warm vocals dripping over the notes like melted butterscotch. This is pop music in its truest form—a concept that has definitely lost some credibility as of late. “People really underestimate how hard it is to make a pop record,” Duffy explains. “One that’s got dignity and balls and substance.” In person, Duffy—born Aimee Anne Duffy in 1984 in Gwynedd, Wales—is a disarming amalgam of Dolly Parton and Brigitte Bardot with dimples you could spoon cereal out of, and when you combine that with her distinct gravitas, you’ve got an unstoppable combination. Onstage, meanwhile, she looks like a doll come to life. Her performances are full of delightfully choreographed Dreamgirlsesque moves ranging from the random flash of jazz hands on beats to slow, deliberate sideways shimmies. “I think it takes a lot of self confidence to just stand there on stage,” she says. “I don’t think I could do it.” Singing aside, Duffy also happens to be the kind of girl you meet and immediately want to split a best-friend necklace with. She talks happily about everything from her first memory of music (“I was six years old and I saw a black-and-white video of the Rolling Stones. The song was ‘Jumping Jack Flash,’ and Mick Jagger was so sexy”) to her views on her virtually overnight success (“It’s like getting to a really important birthday and realizing you don’t feel any different”) to her modest beginnings (“I started out recording on a horrible karaoke machine: It looked like something you’d clean the streets with, but it was really a good friend, that little thing”). The only thing that seems to trouble Duffy are those constant comparisons to that aforementioned beehive-sporting British songstress. “In a weird way, I get quite offended by the comparison,” she says. “I don’t think our records sound remotely similar. I’m sure she’s a lovely girl and I’m sure we could have a nice conversation, but in terms of what we really stand for, it’s not comparable.” That said, she would still rather be lumped in with Winehouse than have her real musical heroes exposed. “The truth is,” she concludes, “if people knew who my real influences were, the sources that really inspire my work, the people I obsess over, I think I’d feel quite busted. So it’s OK.” She smiles. “They haven’t busted me yet.” : Duffy once worked as a waitress in a fishery. Duffy was the president of her student union at the University of Chester, England, and performed at a local jazz club with guitarist David Burton of the band the Invisible Wires. Duffy was a contestant on Wawffactor, the Welsh version of American Idol. She finished second. Former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler co-wrote songs with Duffy on her album. http://myspace.com/duffymyspace
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.