Dance Till All The Stars Come Down

Two years ago, hi-fi+ spoke to English singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy, frontman of country-folk band The Lilac Time, and a founding member of Duran Duran, about his long-lost late ‘70s / early ‘80s group The Hawks, as well as other projects.

He told us: “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 I sat on that for two years and thought, ‘Oh God – this is going to seem so out of date by the time it comes out’, but now it seems more relevant than it did when it came out because of everything that’s going on.”

Now he’s back with Dance Till All The Stars Come Down – the title comes from a line in a W.H. Auden poem – which is The Lilac Time’s first album since 2019’s Return To Us and the eleventh since they released their eponymous debut in 1987. It’s a record that’s more relevant than ever, despite some of it being written in 2015.

Speaking about the album’s first single, ‘A Makeshift Raft’, which was inspired by Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, drowning while attempting to reach Greece in 2015, as well as Trump becoming the Republican party presidential candidate, Duffy says: “It’s the first song I wrote for the album. So ‘first’ in fact, it could’ve been on the last album, Return To Us.” 

He adds: “I started writing in 2015, when three-year-old Alan Kurdi drowned with eleven others trying to reach Kos and was photographed being carried off the beach his corpse had reached.”

Like the rest of the album, ‘A Makeshift Raft’ doesn’t feature conventional drums or bass.

“This is the one song I almost broke with the precept of no drum kits,” says Duffy. “For my sins I erred toward a bass drum, but the precept endured.”

First song, the dramatic, ‘50s tinged strummer, ‘Your Vermillion Cliffs’, opens with a wonderfully melancholic line Morrissey would be proud to have written: “I’ve never liked my birthdays, they always make me sad.”

Second single, ‘The Long Way’, is a pithy rebuke to Tory voters – “Who votes to be homeless / To be unemployed / Who votes for kindness / To be destroyed / They offer just hatred / Or suicide” – while the gorgeous and romantic ‘On The Last Day of the Last Days of Summer’ (“Dance ‘till all the stars come down  /  Stay with me until there’s no else around”) has acoustic, Lennon-style guitar picking as heard on ‘Julia’ from The White Album.

‘Candy Cigarette’ features some delightful bluesy-folk mandolin playing that harks back to those great Rod Stewart albums from the early ’70s.

The whole record is acoustic, stripped back, sparse and intimate – rustic country-folk.

Very much a family affair, The Lilac Time comprises Duffy, his brother, Nick, and wife, Claire.

Ben Peeler plays pedal steel guitar and the songs have been beautifully mixed and mastered by the Grammy-winning John Paterno, who has worked with The Lilac Time since 2015 – his other clients include Bonnie Raitt, Badly Drawn Boy and Robbie Williams.

Duffy, who turned 63 this year, says the final song, which is the poignant, reflective and nostalgic ‘The Band That Nobody Knew’ – “That was our time in the shade / No one but the driver got paid” – is about the dysfunctional relationship he had with touring. 

It recounts his time on the road: “I loved how it felt / Between towns / And all the ups and the downs / The acrobats dropped by the clowns.”

Explaining his thinking, he says: “It was just being out there, thinking about the next deal and the next album. This is our next deal and this is our next album. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it.”

Duffy believes Dance Till All The Stars Come Down is the best album The Lilac Time have ever made – he might just be right – and he says he wrote each song as if they were to be the last one ever written. If he never wrote another song, it would be such a shame, but when he makes albums as good as this one, you can forgive him.

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