Stephen Duffy was the first singer in a little band called Duran Duran. He left them in 1979 and began a series of other musical projects before settling into the Lilac Time almost three decades ago with brother Nick. The band’s latest album is No Sad Songs. Stephen Duffy will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Emily Berry
Liz Berry
Chuck Berry
Duffy: I love the poets. Fiction guys are making it up. Poets are living it. Cartoonists draw cartoons. Poetry is the best. There’s never been any money in it. The internet has probably increased its popularity, unlike everything else, like journalism and music that have been diminished and almost destroyed. Poetry seems to be thriving. Readings are hip again. It’s hard to imagine that we have lived through times when it seemed that poetry and the acoustic guitar would be left to atrophy in a museum cabinet. I heard Dylan Thomas when I was in a weird Victorian annexe of our modern inner-city comprehensive school. His voice boomed from a portable record player.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light
You can’t beat that.
Video after the jump.
