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Music Interview: Stephen Duffy

Music Interview: Stephen Duffy
Image by Brian Robinson

On the afternoon that I phone singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy, at his home in Falmouth, Cornwall, the eyes of the world are on the town and its neighbouring areas.

“It’s full of police because Boris Johnson has just turned up and Biden’s here for the G7 Summit – it’s a stupid place to put it, as there isn’t a motorway here and loads of the roads you can’t get two cars down simultaneously,” he says. “Whovever thought that was a good idea is nuts.”

Unsurprisingly, we’re not here to talk about traffic logistics, or politics – although his last album with his country-folk band The Lilac Time, 2019’s beautiful Return To Us, did tackle Brexit-related themes – or his time as ‘80s pop star Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy; or his stint as a writer for Robbie Williams, or his short-lived Britpop supergroup Me Me Me, with Alex James of Blur and Justin Welch of Elastica.

Instead, we’re delving back into his early days, when he was a 19-year-old art student and struggling post-punk musician in Birmingham, where he was born and grew up.

Duffy, who turned 61 last year, was the original vocalist with Duran Duran – he left before they got famous – and then, in 1979, he went on to form the band Obviously Five Believers, who were also known as The Subterranean Hawks and The Hawks.

The ‘great lost group’ (Duffy – vocals, Dave Kusworth – guitar, Dave Twist – drums and Simon Colley – bass), put out one single, ‘Words of Hope’, which is now highly collectible, but, after failing to get signed by a label, they split up in 1981, after only 18 months, and very quickly Duffy went on to bigger and better things.

Now, more than 40 years later, following Kusworth’s death in September last year, Duffy has unearthed some archive cassette recordings of The Hawks and worked with Grammy-winning audio engineer John Paterno to restore and improve them, and make them available as an album for the first time ever.

This month, the record, which is credited to The Hawks and called Obviously 5 Believers, is released on CD and vinyl.

It’s a fascinating listen – naïve, yet charming, quirky, raw and rough around the edges – ‘60s-inspired post-punk, with plenty of teenage angst and melancholy.

There are moments of brilliance, like the jangly guitar pop of ‘The Bullfighter’; the wailing, Dylanesque harmonica on ‘Something Soon’, Velvet Underground homage ‘A Sense of Ending’, and the ‘50s-rock- ‘n’-roll-meets-garage of ‘What It Is!’

These fledgling, ramshackle songs provide a tantalising glimpse into what could’ve been and pre-date the sound of The Smiths, who they often sound like, by a few years.

SH: How have you been during the COVID crisis? Did The Hawks album project come about because of lockdown?

SD: I was about to start recording a new album, so I was writing that. I hate having records sitting around without being finished – you start to pick at them and second guess them, and start thinking ‘Is it any good?’, or ‘will it go out of date?’

My last record [The Lilac Time’s Return To Us] wasn’t about Brexit, but it was very current politically. I sat on that for two years and thought, ‘oh God – this is going to seem so out of date by the time it comes out’, but now it seems more relevant than it did when it came out because of everything that’s going on.

I like to finish a record and then release it, but I didn’t record the [new] songs – I just carried on writing… and then, unfortunately, that was when David Kusworth died.

The last time I’d seen him was when I played at The Glee Club, in Birmingham [in 2019] and I think the last thing he said to me was ‘Release the Hawks tapes’, which he’d said many times before, but when it’s the last thing that somebody says to you…

Before he died, I had begun to look at the tapes and I’d been talking to David Twist about it. We’d thought we’d do some work on it before showing it to David Kusworth but, unfortunately, he died and we never got a chance to do it, which was a shame.

The cassettes followed me around. I’ve lived all over the world, but every time I left England, I’d put everything in storage and then get it out when I came back.

I’d never really listened to them because I thought they were hopeless, but then when David Kusworth spoke to me about them, I thought they had a kind of period charm.

I agree – they have a lovely, adolescent innocence to them. They’re quirky and rough and ready, but very endearing…

In our innocence, we assumed that we’d just make a tape, go down to Rough Trade and they’d put it out – we didn’t have any ideas about signing with anyone else. Rough Trade have never signed me – the bastards…

I’d write a song with David [Kusworth] we’d rehearse it and then we’d record it – we wouldn’t think about it again. We’d just write another one – we didn’t have a plan.

, Music Interview: Stephen Duffy
Photo Credit: Brendan Jackson

We probably played 50 or so gigs. In the beginning I just used to jump around, but then I started playing the guitar. We did a gig at The Hare and Hounds [in Birmingham] and I took my Fender Twin amplifier on the bus.

Afterwards, I was left in Kings Heath with it, but, luckily, a girl who was at the gig called her dad and I got a lift home. Otherwise, I’d still be sitting there now, on top of my amplifier.

How much work was involved restoring the Hawks tapes?

I worked with John Paterno, who’s done all of the last few Lilac Time records, so I knew if he said it was OK to release it, it was going to be OK. He’s done his very best to get whatever was on tape out of it.

We had to try and get rid of some of the hiss and to get some separation – these cassettes had been sitting around for 40 years and some of them weren’t very well made. We had to bake some of them.

It was a gruelling process, but it’s an entertaining record, in a vague way, especially for people who are fans of David and are interested in my records.

I can’t imagine people sitting around and listening to it that much because it’s taken from 40-year-old cassettes, but it’s an interesting thing and you can hear that there’s something going on. We could’ve gone on to make interesting records. I feel like we’ve done justice to it.

How was it going through the Hawks archives?

It was sad because David Kusworth was gone, but it was a fun thing to do because the pictures of us looked so good.

You look at them and you think ‘I would’ve signed that band just on the strength of the pictures, let alone what they sounded like’. They had fantastic hair!

Those pictures and the name Obviously Five Believers – that’s got to be a deal in anybody’s lifetime! It doesn’t matter what the music on the cassettes sounds like, just get them in the studio with somebody – [Duran Duran producer] Colin Thurston, probably, and it will sound fine. But nobody had that feeling at the time.

Why was that?

Going right back to the ‘60s, Birmingham had been such a great place for music – my uncle and cousins had played in bands, and you had The Moody Blues, The Move and, later on, ELO, but, unfortunately, because it’s so close to London, people drifted away from Birmingham, so when the next wave came along, instead of there being all these great managers and studios, and people with experience to help you, there was nobody.

That meant that the next wave of musicians, like The Beat, UB40 and Duran Duran, signed to London record labels and had London management. The only people left in Birmingham who knew anything about the industry were complete stoners – you were just getting advice from very stoned people all the time.

The Hawks were together for 18 months. We made some tapes with Bob Lamb, who then went on to make records with UB40, in his little flat in Kings Heath – he was an absolute genius with his four-track machine.

Bob had been in the Steve Gibbons Band – we all looked up to him, as he’d actually done things. He’d toured the States with The Who and he had lots of Rolling Stone magazines – we were very enamoured with him.

As a band, we didn’t have any idea of what we were doing – we didn’t make demos of songs and then think we’ll listen to them and look at how we could make them better to be a record.

The tapes aren’t demos – they’re just field recordings. We recorded the band and then I sang over the top of it.

, Music Interview: Stephen Duffy
Photo Credit: Brendan Jackson

We didn’t even get our first single cut properly – we sent the tape off, but we didn’t master it.

I just don’t understand what we thought we were doing – we didn’t think about making records. We were just living, and we were quite happy doing what we were doing and making a bit of a racket. It was kind of like the ‘slacker’ thing before ‘slacker’.

But then all the other bands got record deals and were on Top of the Pops, so we started to think ‘well, what exactly are we doing?’, which is when I left, in Christmas 1981.

I had two ideas about what I was going to do – one was to be a folk singer with an acoustic guitar – and the other was to do an electronic thing.

By the summer of 1982, I’d bumped into John Mulligan [of Birmingham new wave band Fashion] recorded ‘Kiss Me’ and I was signed to WEA – it was that quick. The idea of me becoming an acoustic folk singer went out of the window for a few years.

What music were you into when you were in The Hawks / Obviously Five Believers? Both names have links to Bob Dylan…

We were in with that early Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes scene and we were listening to the same sort of things they were – ‘60s stuff. There was a heavy Velvets, Stones and Dylan thing going on. We were also into Beat poetry.

We’d been kids in the ‘70s – it was funny how quickly we’d gone through all of that stuff, then punk and post-punk, and had already got back to the ‘60s before most people had even forgotten about it.

Where did the name The Hawks come from?

When I was in Duran Duran, we had song called ‘Hawks Don’t Share’. We were going to be called The Subterraneans after the Jack Kerouac book, but then Nick Kent [music journalist] put out a record as The Subterraneans, so we had to change our name – we became The Subterranean Hawks. We shortened it to The Hawks, which I thought was a terrible name. I wanted us to be called Hawks Don’t Share, but people said to me ‘why do you keep coming up with these incredibly long names?’

I thought that was cool – then when Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark came along, I was proven completely correct.

The Hawks had a jangly, melancholy sound at times. Were you The Smiths before The Smiths?

Yes. When The Smiths came along, in 1982, it did occur to me that I had gone the wrong way by doing the electronic thing – I was never really suited to it. I didn’t have a feel for it, like I did for playing the acoustic guitar.

Somebody said that we were either hopelessly old-fashioned, or incredibly ahead of our time. Our greatest fan was Nikki Sudden from the Swell Maps, who David Kusworth went on to work with. The only review we ever got in our lives was in ZigZag [magazine] – Nikki wrote it.

Do you have any regrets about leaving Duran Duran?

No – when ‘Planet Earth’ came out, it was exactly what they wanted to do, which is exactly why I left.

, Music Interview: Stephen Duffy

Obviously 5 Believers by The Hawks was released on August 27, 2021 (Seventeen Records). It’s on CD and vinyl.

stephenduffy.com

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