Singing star Duffy's blonde ambition

Reuters

Swing it: Duffy performs at the Glastonbury Festival 2008.

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Singing sensation Duffy may be blonde, and she's definitely ambitious. But when it comes to her gossip-girl status, any comparisons with Madonna end there.

"My sister Katy is the party girl. She's the free bird, the one that likes to have a good time," she says.

Still, Duffy was, as a teenager, a bit of a bad ass. She blames boredom, the ho-humness of life in Nefyn, a tiny town near Bangor, in North Wales, where she grew up.

"There was nothing to do there. It was so boring."

She drags the "sooo" out, her bubbly telephone voice strangely at odds with her very grown-up-sounding professional one.

She and her mates smoked behind the bikesheds - "and not just cigarettes", she giggles - and talked about boys.

"I was quite mischievous, I guess. I always seemed to be looking for trouble."

It's perhaps ironic then that since being thrust into the limelight earlier this year - when her debut album, Rockferry, hit the British charts at No. 1 - the young singer has pretty much kept her head down.

It's the way she likes it now, she says, speaking from somewhere near San Diego, where she kicks off a 10-date United States tour, before opening five East Coast shows for Coldplay.

"There's a lot of pressure that comes with this. There's a very fine line between being famous and being a celebrity ... celebrity is pretty scary and I don't think I want that."

Born Aimee Anne Duffy - she dropped her first name five years ago when she began singing professionally - she's the elder, by 10 minutes, of twin sisters.

Always the "bossy one", she grew up listening to the radio. There were no LPs, no posters of boy bands on her bedroom walls.

"I didn't listen to a lot of stuff growing up. There wasn't anything I really obsessed about," she says.

A meeting with Bernard Butler, former Suede guitarist, four years ago changed all that. Butler introduced her to the soul music of Anne Peebles, Al Green and Marvin Gaye.

The new, single-monikered Duffy, who had previously only sung with local bands and recorded in Welsh (a three-song EP), was born, and the girl who was once told by a lecturer to, "go on the dole, love, and become a singer", did just that.

Butler, now one of the most in-demand producers and session musicians - he's played alongside the likes of The Libertines, Paul Weller and Manic Street Preachers - co-wrote four of the songs on Rockferry.

Others were written with Jimmy Hogarth, the man behind James Blunt's award-winning album Back to Bedlam, Eg White (Take That, Natalie Imbruglia, Will Young) and Steve Booker (Boyzone, Lindsay Lohan).

Despite that, Duffy says it's her album, not theirs.

The bossy one explains: "It was quite a strange experience working with so many people, but it's definitely mine. I wrote the words and the melodies, and they helped me create the finished songs from the bottom up.

"If I had let them have too much artistic control, I would have had three different records on my hands. I had to be quite forceful about how I wanted it to turn out, the direction I wanted it to go."

The biggest-selling album in New Zealand so far this year, it borrows heavily from the 1960s, hence the inevitable comparisons - Dusty Springfield, Lulu, the "new" Amy Winehouse.

Duffy sighs, defensive at being labelled.

Sure, she says, her music is derivative, "and I do lean towards that type of music, but there's all different shades to our personalities. I can't say certain things appeal more to me than others.

"Sometimes I will listen to a Prince record because it's sexy and fun, then I'll listen to Sam Cooke because it's historic and epic and real ... and I guess that's why I like soul, it's sort of desperate, there's a sense of longing, a sense of wanting more."

She's also copped some flak about her age - a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't argument. How, contend the critics, can a kid of 24, a former waitress with no real musical background, who as a teenager said she wanted to be a famous singer, claim - as the hype suggests - to be the next big thing?

"It's interesting, this industry. Nothing in life is how you expect it," she says.

"There's a very fine line between being famous and being a celebrity. On one hand you have to be young to be a pop star, but to have real status as an artist you have to have experience, to be taken seriously you have to have gravitas. "Just because you're young doesn't mean you haven't experienced life and you can't express things - it doesn't make you less able."

And if anyone has experienced life, it is Duffy. Her parents split up when she was 10 and she and her sisters - twin Katy and older sister Kelly - went to live with their mother and stepfather in Pembrokeshire.

A brief stint in a safe house followed, when her stepfather's ex-partner was found to have plotted to pay NZ$9000 to have him killed.

"It was a pretty awkward time in my life. Everyone has strange twists in their life, they happen in every family ... it was just one of those things that, if it doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger."

She's looking forward to her first trip to New Zealand and makes an effort to show she knows something about us after I mention an Auckland band that has also been given the Butler workover.

"Yeah, I heard that, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, yeah?" Almost. It's Cut Off Your Hands, I say.

"Ooh, that's right. Well, good luck to them," she yells, as her minder tells her she's got yet another interview.

Duffy
March 31: Vector Arena, Auckland
April 1: TSB Arena, Wellington
April 2: Christchurch Town Hall
Tickets: www.ticketmaster.co.nz and www.ticketek.co.nz