Luxury Problems?
It's just another sunny afternoon for Patrick Duff
Lying on the grass, being serenaded to the tune of the Kinks’ legendary Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon whilst doing exactly that, wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind when I’d first imagined interviewing ex-Strangelove maestro Patrick Duff.
But moments after arriving at his Bristol (Clifton) apartment where I’d assumed we’d conduct the interview, I found myself trotting down the street alongside a guitar toting Patrick singing at the top of his voice for all to hear. ‘Three little monkeys,’ he sang out with the pride of a peacock, ‘three little monkeys,’ he laughed as I giggled alongside like an excited schoolgirl. ‘Three little monkeys….’ I half expected the three of them to appear and join our Pied Piper parade to the park, ‘…lazing around in the sun’.
It should have come as no surprise that I’d been lured into the sun in this playfully enchanting way. It’s just the simple magnetism of an artist with the kind of luminary charms that make you forget who you are, where you are and why you’d want to be anywhere else.
Mix that with this man’s killer instinct for crafting quirky pop tunes and you begin to see why record giants EMI have elevated Patrick to the ranks of indie idol Syd Barrett, Deep Purple and ELO by paying him the epic compliment of resurrecting their legendary label Harvest for the release of his new solo album Luxury Problems.
And about time too. Coming 14 years into a career that the some said never quite hit the commercial home run it deserved, Patrick is one singer songwriter whose notched up enough stars and stripes to truly warrant the accolade.
Sure, stealing your big sister’s guitar, walking out on school, busking on the street and worshipping icons of the ilk of David Bowie, John Lennon and Nick Cave, before turning out 3 charting albums and becoming a bad seed in a fog of drugs and alcohol yourself, are all things any self-respecting rock star should have on his CV. But emerging the other end to write a album that isn’t a mere shadow of what came before is an achievement few have managed.
And with a little help from some of Bristol’s musical rat pack including honourees such as Adrian Utley (Portishead), Alex Lee (Suede), Mike Mooney and Damon Reece (Spiritulized), Patrick has produced an album imbued with wit, finesse and the same unhampered passion his fans adored on his first time round the block.
A heady cocktail of music genres and lyrical twists, Luxury Problems is a thought-provoking acclamation that feels as if it’s been spawned as much from America’s southernmost outposts and New York’s darkest alleys than Patrick’s Irish roots.
The music’s threaded from folk, blues and rock and roll persuasions, while the lyrics are shot through with nods to everyone from Herman Melville to Jimmy Saville – even Hitler makes a guest appearance.
Crammed with insight and imagery, it leaps from tainted treacle poetry of ballards like Fucked, (You’re the only one who knows how fucked I am) to the twisted heights of comedy capers like Elephant Bill (he cleans his teeth with an electric drill) and Married with Kids (Upstairs she’s back on the phone, half cut and having a moan, white wine on the stereo, she can’t sing but she’s having a go.)
We hear about the ‘wretched hours’ Patrick’s spent lying awake in the glam-charged chant Early Morning Birds and get an insight into his political ponderings in Song to America – (Cause he’s not committing suicide in America, but America’s committing suicide in him.)
At first glance, pale, skinny with huge brown eyes and a little boy smile, he doesn’t look the part. But there’s something about Patrick that radiates a genuine pop star intensity. And it’s not only rock and roll to like about Patrick, because his philosophical musings and wry humour set him far apart from the usual churlish muso stereotypes.
‘I think society is like a well lit circle,’ he says sketching in the grass, ‘and everything that goes on there is very visible. Most people say stay in here, stay in here, you’ll be alright if you stay in the circle, do ABC and you’ll be alright – and then you get the occasional person who lights a little candle and walks out into the fucking darkness on their own - that’s the way I want to go – I’ve always felt that – I’ve never felt comfortable in that circle.’
It’s this dogmatic non-conformity that seems to have shaped Patrick’s career for better and for worse, a determination not to be pigeonholed that has revealed itself throughout his career. At the tender age of seventeen he was spouting songs spontaneously to anyone who’d listen but had no intentions of becoming a working musician.
‘I couldn’t see the point of being in a band. I loved busking because you could just make up things about what was going on right then. People said I should do something with my music, and it sounds silly now, but I just thought they were talking shit.’
Recording songs seemed equally futile to Patrick who was quite happily searching for nothing at all when his commercial career found him.
‘I was walking down the street with my guitar when this guy I knew Dave Francolini shouted out of his car window ‘Have you written any fucking songs on that guitar?’ And I said ‘I fucking have actually.
‘Get in the back of this car’ he shouted at me, ‘you’re going to be a pop star. I didn’t have anything else to do that day, so I thought ‘alright’, I went back to his house, met some other musicians, played five gigs and we were signed.’
And so Strangelove was born and by twenty years of age, Patrick, lyric-writer and frontman for Bristol’s most up and coming band was on a quest for inspiration. Which is how he came to crawl inside Syd Barrett’s head or maybe Syd crawled into his.
‘Syd Barrett was the only person I could understand for a good few years. He was more of a real person to me than any of the fucking people I was hanging around with - he was one of my friends, you know. He definitely influenced me’
‘I think what happens then is those things that you take in, they go right into you and they go into the black hole inside you and they just turn from words into something else and they just start mixing around like a primordial sea and they start mating with each other in a way. They start something else and then something gets fired back out of that black hole and you have to be ready there to catch it and say ‘Ah I got a gift from that, you know.’’
Strangelove went on to produce Love and other Demons and Time for the Rest of Your Life with rock outbursts that the NME described as ‘on the brink of brilliance’. Their music was raw and ruthless with exactly the kind of untamed inspiration with which Patrick’s hero Syd had once grabbed the world with.
‘Strangelove was the real thing, because I did it all spontaneously. It was all about just letting go – I didn’t think about the words, I just thought of any words I could, they were just vehicles for me to go Raaah – the music was incredibly considered, because it was Alex (Strangelove’s guitarist) doing that, so that was Strangelove – a weird mixture of two different things.’
In the years that followed the band were tipped to climb the commercial ladder all the way to the top, touring with the likes of Suede, Radiohead and Manic Street Preachers. But, just as the media began pushing for the pop in Patrick’s success story, Strangelove veered in another direction, refusing once again to morph into a more obvious mould. And after they’d put out an altogether different and far less rock fuelled album also named Strangelove, the age-old tale of drugs, alcohol and too much pressure took its toll and split the band who went their separate ways.
‘It’s something that I don’t really want to go into all that drug stuff and Strangelove splitting up,’ Patrick says pausing the tape recorder. ‘It always sounds rubbish in print.’
Off the record, the plot runs much the same as any other pop star dance down a one-way street, except that Patrick was one of the luckier ones who lived to choose not to tell the tale.
Instead those ambiguous stories seep through the autobiographical blues romp ‘In my junkie clothes’ (I throw my name into the sea, I scrape my face out of history, I crawl into the NCP, there ain’t no fucking space in me) – a song that gives you all the insight you’ll ever need into Patrick’s trip on the mind altered merry-go-round.
‘In my junkie clothes is about remembering not being able to cross the road and so often how people didn’t want me round their houses and just that atmosphere. But it was funny, hilarious as well. I always had a sense of humour about it…I laughed my way all the way down to the fucking gutter.’
There isn’t a lot you can’t find out about Patrick through his music. In the very personal journey that is Luxury Problems you’ll find yourself inside this man’s heart, his head, his philosophies and his fridge. But the one thing that hits you immediately about this album is its individuality.
‘Every time I sit down to write a song I try and write a pop tune but they come out twisted up for some reason.’ A twist that makes Patrick’s music seem right at home alongside his Harvest predecessors.
‘I think over the years I’ve given myself totally to the kind of music on the label, but if I had to say what I think Harvest artists had in common I think it’s that they wrote pop music, but it wasn’t mainstream.’ Although Patrick himself nearly missed the Harvest festival.
‘After Strangelove split up I was asking myself what I was going to do. I had to ask myself ‘Am I a songwriter? Is this really what I’m here to do?’ I walked a lot in the woods and thought about things, but finally I realised that I was following a sort of tradition and that my foibles were all part of the way people who write songs are, somehow out of step with the rest of the world. And instead of having to feel inadequate around other songwriters I realised I was part of the same thing and I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.’
Track ten on the album, Mother Nature’s Refugee which is based on this realisation, is absolute testament that this is an artist whose tapped into his trade, honed his skills and dug to the very depths of himself to find the stuff that’s really worth writing about.
So will there be more? Well considering the fact he’d already written four songs the week I chose to talk to him, songwriting doesn’t look like something Patrick’ll be giving up any day soon. And, lying on the grass soaking up the sounds of his latest creation while watching the sun come down, I for one couldn’t be more thrilled that he’s kept his inspiration alive. And long may it keep coming.
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