09 Feb: Another Times Article - Duffy recording for another movie

This article appeared in the Times on Feb 8th. If anyone has the Times please let me know if there was a better photo from this new photoshoot. :-)

From this article we learn that Duffy has done a recording of "Stay With Me Baby" and another recording for a movie about Radio Caroline.

A Life in the Day: Duffy

The 24-year-old sweetheart of British pop on fame, family and her search for a soul mate

It’s often my cat, Felix, meowing at the top of his voice, who gets me up. Last night I was up till 4, chatting with a friend. We were drinking red wine and coffee and I smoked all my cigarettes. But I felt fine this morning, no hangover. I got up, fed Felix, put the kettle on, made some porridge and turned on Radio 2. My family always listened to it when I was growing up, so it’s habit now, and it makes me feel like Mum’s in the room. It’s like when I moved to London four years ago, I looked for a place by the Thames — I was born by the sea, in a fishing town in North Wales, and I wanted to carry on living by the water here.

I can’t be dealing with anything fussy when it comes to getting ready. If I don’t have to dress up, I’ll stick on skinny jeans or shorts over black tights with a T-shirt and a woollen cardie. I’ve got a really big thing for men in woollen jumpers — don’t ask me why! To be honest, I’ve got very little room here for clothes. I love my flat but it’s tiny, it’s like a granny flat. I just end up giving stuff to charity shops. I actually worked in the local Oxfam until a year and a half ago. It was while I was making my first album, Rockferry.

The album’s success last year was amazing, but with it came all the attention, and that was quite overwhelming at times. It’s so easy to get swept up by it all. You start to worry about all sorts of things — how you look, what you say… By the end of 2008 it was getting to me. I hadn’t set out to be the world’s most beautiful woman, to be the best-dressed person in the room, or to say something funny every time I opened my mouth. I just wanted to make music. And to save my sanity I had to keep telling myself that.

This year’s got off to a great start. I couldn’t believe it when my manager, Jeannette, told me I’d got four Brit nominations. Now my time is filled with all sorts — recordings, rehearsals, meetings. Some days lunch is at a lovely restaurant in town, other days it’s burger and chips on the go. One recording I did recently was up at Abbey Road Studios. It’s a song for a new film about Radio Caroline. Another one I’m doing is of one of my favourite love songs of all time, Stay With Me Baby. It’s been done by some great artists in the past, but it’s Terry Reid’s version that blows me away. I’ve got a lot to live up to.

Of course I write a lot about love myself, but it’s not always romantic love. In the title track of Rockferry, lines like “I’d build my house, baby, with sorrow” are about leaving the town I came from and the bad things I’d experienced there. A turning point came when I was 19, when I realised that to do the thing that was going to make me happy, I had to leave everything behind — boyfriends included. I can be brutally cut-throat when it comes to relationships. I’ve got a trail of casualties. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s probably a flaw in me, but it’s my way of surviving.

But I’m just like anyone else out there looking for true love. I don’t want everyone to love me. Just one person. Some people spend their whole lives looking; others think they’ve found it then realise they haven’t. I’ve done that. But I’m not giving up. I even believe in love at first sight. It happened to me once — I fell for this guy, but it was his best friend who fell for me. I didn’t want to end up in some awful love triangle, so I walked away. Right now I’m in no hurry. But who knows — the love of my life could walk through that door any minute.

In the evenings I love nothing better than getting into my gingham pjs, putting on an old movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and cooking. What’s great is that my sisters — Katy, my twin, and Kelly, my older sister — have also moved to London. They even live on my street, so they often pop over. I might make brie and courgette soup, then linguine in a cream sauce. We’ll chat about our day or laugh about back home — like when we used to dye our hair, or go fishing with our uncle for mackerel, or help Dad at weekends at the working-men’s pub where he was a barman — we’d do the cleaning in return for a bottle of Coke, which we thought was very glamorous.

When I call it a night I’ll take off my make-up, put on my eye mask, say goodnight to Felix and climb into bed. I recently bought a topper for my mattress and it’s heavenly. It’s got to be the nearest thing to lying up there on some fluffy cloud. I’ll have drifted off in seconds.

Interview by Ria Higgins.

Photograph by Big Rocket