A New, Old-fashioned Girl

Modern pop phenomenon Duffy talks to Neil McCormick about why shes in love with the 60s.

STAR of the moment, Duffy, is a bit of a torrent. She arrives in a whirl of excitement, small and pretty and full of chat and laughter. Guiltily confessing she has been smoking ("Can you tell?"), she douses herself with a perfume sample plucked from someones desk then opens her mouth wide to enable an acquaintance to blast her with breath spray. "Thats nice," she says, "Whats it called?" Then she hoots with laughter at the label.

" Snog Me Senseless! But weve only just met!"

Duffy is being marketed like some kind of demure 60s pop idol, all black-and-white and blonde (think Dusty/Sandy/Petula and young Marianne Faithfull) but, in person, she is so vivacious and alive to the moment, the nostalgic image seems misleading.

For all the retro fittings of her number-one single Mercy (a kind of Lulu sings Stax jazz-soul stomper, with just a hint of hip-hop groove), and the epic strings, soulful melodrama and classic girl-group charm of her album Rockferry, she seems a thoroughly modern girl.

She talks quickly, with a gushing enthusiasm that might border on the naive if it werent framed by self-mocking humility and childlike curiosity. Her answers to questions tend to offer far more information than you really need, or can even process. "I like to talk," she says. This is an understatement. But she is pleasant company, with an infectious passion for music.

"I was quite isolated growing up, but now Im a bit of a music geek. I love discovering things and finding out what stemmed from where, and what went on in this era, and how that had an effect, and how did people react in that time. How was it the first time you heard Bowies The Man Who Sold the World? What was that day like? Its amazing!"

A name to drop in music circles since late last year, Duffy — like 2008s other big tip for the top, Adele — appears to have been fast-tracked for fame in the wake of Amy Winehouse, whose stellar success put the classic female soul voice at the top of the music industry agenda.

In fact, 23-year-old Duffys development has been a drawn-out affair. Rather than dropping her given name (Aimee Duffy) to avoid confusion with Winehouse, the truth may be that she was trying to draw a veil over a brief period of local TV fame. She grew up in the north Wales seaside town of Nefyn, and Welsh is her first language. There was no record collection, no music shops, just an old-fashioned wireless usually tuned to Radio 2, Britains most popular radio network (playing music from the 1960s-1990s and contemporary charts).

"I have always had an affinity for nostalgic music. We werent aware of the latest trends. For me, music was so far removed from belonging to anything."

A defining moment appears to have been her discovery of her fathers video of the 60s TV pop show Ready Steady Go.

"I remember the first time I saw Mick Jagger, I thought, Hes cool. The Beatles, the Stones, Sandie Shaw — it was the sexiest thing ever. I wore that video out."

At 15, she was immersed in the local music scene. "I was such a terror. When youre young and youre female and you have a band, you have like five boyfriends in that band. But Id have about five bands going on, and each band wouldnt know about the other. I was like a pessimistic lover: I knew that none of them would work out, but I would keep them on the go for enjoyments sake."

At 16, she was invited to audition for Wawffactor, a Welsh-language version of Pop Idol on S4C (Channel Four Wales), and got all the way to the final, eventually coming second.

"It was a year out of my life. I kind of got myself into something I couldnt get out of. I didnt understand it; I had no idea what I was doing. It was the worst experience of my life. I had no faith after that, no self-esteem. I didnt trust my judgment."

She spent a period singing other peoples demos and tracks before, aged 19, coming to the attention of Jeanette Lee, a music industry veteran who co-founded Rough Trade Records. "She asked me what I wanted, and I didnt know. I couldnt articulate it, but I just wanted this huge, lush sound, this grandness. I wanted something extreme because I was feeling extreme."

It is easy to understand what Lee saw in this little force of nature, and why she and iconoclastic indie label Rough Trade — unlikely partners with A&M in Duffys career — were prepared to back her through a four-year process of self-discovery and music-making. It was, she says, almost a year into the project before she was introduced to former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, and they almost instantly wrote the song that set things in motion.

Rockferry, the albums title track, is a big, melodramatic, 60s-style ballad, Phil-Spector-meets-Gene-Pitney, about a girl leaving her past behind. "Its a song about struggle, about overcoming. I knew I had a mammoth job on my hands to write that record, because I had to live up to something. It was either really step up and sing it or go home. When we were done, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders."

The comparisons to Dusty Springfield are based more on her dress sense and poise than musical similarities. Duffys voice is reedier and coarser than Springfields, yet shot through with authentic emotional force. Her musical styles draw on a wide range of retro genres, yet the girl herself has a contemporary edge.

"As a person," she says, "I always draw the line. I have to because Ive been hurt and Ive been disappointed. I made all those mistakes, Ive had to learn quickly, and I knew that, if I was going to survive this, I had to be strong. So theres an element of defiance."

Like Winehouse, Duffy brings something new to the past.

"Ever since I was little, I have been old-fashioned. I would hate to be pigeonholed to one era, but the 60s was a mad, liberating time, from the blues influence on rock, the soul movement, hippies. If youve got to start somewhere, the 60s seems a good place to start."

Rockferry is out on Universal. DAILY TELEGRAPH

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