Fact #152312

Stephen Duffy was the one who had the sense to quit Duran Duran before they made all those godawful records. He has never achieved significant success, despite consistently making great music, first as Tin Tin, then as The Lilac Time and now under his own name. This, his self-avowed pop album, opens with a couple of painfully autobiographical tunes before setting out on a sequence of beautifully constructed gossamer delights, always tinged with regret and insight. It is pop but, like Bacharach or McCartney, that’s only because the music slips beneath your skin so easily that it takes a couple of plays before the lyrical depth charges (e.g. “I lie and I cheat, I talk with my feet”) start to go off. With his own guitars, keyboards, harmonica and percussion augmented by the likes of XTC’s Andy Partridge, Aimee Mann, The Duke Quartet, Velvet Crush drummer Ric Menck, and Fairport drummer Dave Mattacks, this is an album you could live with forever.
(Source : Johnny Black, review in Hi Fi News, July 1998)