Patrick Duff ~ Coach & Horses, B’Kara, 19/02/2011

{Published in The Times of Malta, 23/02/2011}

Dead Man Singing

Type ‘Patrick Duff’ into the search bar of video-sharing site YouTube and you’ll come across a clip of Duff’s 90s Britpop band Strangelove, performing their single Freak on some UK TV show. In this video the young Duff, all pasty white skin and greasy hair, frantically struts around the TV studio, jumping up onto an interviewer’s desk, arrogantly kicking off the few props there.

It is hard to believe that this is the same Patrick Duff who is now making his way to a lonesome stool in the middle of the inconspicuous Coach and Horses pub on Valley Road in Birkirkara. Wearing a snug ushanka on his head, there is an unmistakable air of gravitas to Duff’s languidly heavy movements and expressionless face.

He spends the first full minute or so, playing a morosely steady one-chord guitar shuffle, looking straight into the eyes of those in the room with his piercing stare. The babble gradually dies down until all that is left is the rattle of bottles and glasses at the bar.

When he feels he has everyone’s full attention, Duff croons his first words of the evening, a somewhat unsettling “Listen to a dead man singing.” The gloomy jazz-like melody calls Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love to mind. There is also an immediately noticeable Jim Morrison-esque quality to his vocals. By the end of the song the audience sounds surprised with a mixture of both wonder and amusement.

Duff introduces next song Spider Woman as being about falling in love with a woman who is an alcoholic. He sings with a frightening intensity; lips curling at the side, an almost psychotic look upon his face.

Much of Duff’s life seems to have been filled with events that have left him rather disillusioned with modern life and Western mindsets. He shares how since childhood he has been consumed with feelings of foreboding and despair. His ten year stint with not-so-commercially-successful Strangelove left him feeling lost when it all ended, all the perks of a rock ‘n roll lifestyle instantly vanishing.

Duff’s turnaround moment was when he discovered meditation some ten years ago, and this is what he expresses has finally allowed him to be at peace within. Yet Duff’s alleged inner peace is at odds with the subject matter of his meditations that seeps into his songs. These mostly feature ancestral or damned souls manifesting themselves to him, such as on the disquieting, if entrancing, King of the Underworld and Old Man Dewydd.

Six songs in and Duff abandons the microphone and continues in a truly unplugged format. “This is how they used to do it in the old days,” he jests. Flowers on my Grave is dedicated to Tim Ellis of local band Stalko, who “made contact with me, invited me over ... and has treated me like a brother.” This gratitude song’s sweetness offers a brief ray of light in a songlist that is otherwise laden with gloom.

Duff’s performance does become unintentionally farcical at times. He harshly howls melodies at the top of his lungs like a deranged drunkard, and then reverts to moments of almost incomprehensible whispers. During a cover of The Doors’ The End, he replaces the original’s spoken-word Oedipus narrative, with his own bizarre story about the sister of the sun in the middle of the Earth, repeating lines like “the sun loves its sister” over and over.

That having been said, Duff appears to have captured most of the audience’s imagination with his enigmatic persona. He may not go down in musical history as one of the greats of the Britpop movement that he was part of, but Patrick Duff’s newfound musical output is certainly much more intriguing than most other releases by survivors of the same scene.