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.
Duffy: I’ve been writing a book since 1979. It is in two large cardboard boxes and two suitcases. I have a letter from Pete Townsend when he worked for Faber in the ’80s, on Eel Pie headed paper wondering what I wanted to do with it, as it was then, and that he thought it was something. It might have been better to publish then, as now it is a lot more of something. In the ’90s, when I was depressed, I almost published it as a book called Memory & Desire, but looked on Amazon one night and saw that the book was to be published on June 21 and was 497 pages long. It wasn’t, and I froze and pulled it. Then it might have been a sad book and I would have had to write another happy book. As it is I have versions in the third person and one in iambic pentameter. I have a recent version perhaps only four years old that seems to have been written by a ghostwriter. The ghost of Ezra Pound at his most oblique. I may still have time to address it all again, but perhaps from these editorial utterances you may have noticed a distinct lack of the universal. Who’s David Blue? He’s the guy who plays pinball in Renaldo And Clara, etc. I love David Blue by the way. Unlike Sam Shepard, nothing I write is definitive. Every question is answered with a question. The flip side is I found my voice early, but some, perhaps even I, wish it had been better hidden. The book together with the film, the short version is almost a month long and the unreleased archival stuff, housed in a small town in Portugal, is going to be put together to be called My Life’s Work Volume 1. Until then I would suggest you buy No Sad Songs tout de suite.
Video after the jump.
