Best robbie time in my opinion, even better than 2003 (which I only watched backward). For him it must have been horrible watching the documentary. For me Intensive Care was such a great album and still is and Stephen Duffy and Rob did great song writing.

@petepaphides

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5h

Today feels like the perfect day to tell the story about how Stephen Duffy came to the attention of Robbie Williams and how I tried to cheer him up by quoting a Sting lyric at him.

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“He looked at me as if to say, ‘How the fu** is Sting going to make this any better?’”

Pete Paphides

Who knows why Stephen Duffy was prepared to tolerate the advice of a non-musician fan ten years his junior – but at the very end of 1998, this is what was going down. Pop stardom was a dot in the rear view mirror. He didn’t want to go there again, but he was writing the best songs of his life and where was that getting him? His last album I Love My Friends was due to come out on BMG’s “indie” subsidiary Indolent. They bankrolled a flash video for its lead single Seventeen, released on three formats – all with different songs on them – to maximise its chances of charting.

But in a post-Spice Girls world, the wind was blowing in a different direction. The man from BMG took Stephen out for pizza, thinking that this was a sensitive way to drop an artist. A car crash moment compounded by his apparently well-meaning explanation – that they weren’t running a charity here and it was time to balance the books. Stephen immortalised the humiliation in a song called All Over Again, which he would record for his next album. Not a solo album, but a resurrection of The Lilac Time.

Lest we forget, he’d been here before. Back in 1986, he walked away from the Virgin deal that vaulted him to the cover of Smash Hits and Top of the Pops. The Lilac Time were a cross between The Monkees and The Incredible String Band, holed up in Malvern living the dream that they sang about. Their eponymous debut was released on a tiny indie label called Swordfish. David Bates, head of the revived Fontana imprint, bought into the dream and issued the album with some of the cash generated by Tears For Fears’ reign of world domination. Caring capitalism at its best!

So, a little over a decade later, Looking For A Day In The Night was the reset. Back on an indie label. Back with The Lilac Time. Not a tactical retreat, but one of almost medical necessity. So much to figure out. Bereavement. The realisation that the music industry didn’t owe him a living. The break-up of another relationship. “Write down your dreams or you’ll forget / She told me when we met / They hold the key to what you’re feeling,” he sang on A Dream That We All Share, taking the advices of his therapist at face value. When you’ve scythed away all the distractions, all the things occluding the road to happiness, what’s really left? The songs on Looking For A Day In The Night seemed to be asking this question over and over again.

There was a new voice in The Lilac Time, cocooning Stephen’s entreaties on The Nursery Walls. “I’ll be the light / And I’ll be the dark surrounding you,” harmonised Claire Worrall. What felt so right in the studio poured out into the wider world and almost 27 years later, in the house they share with their daughter Daisy, they’re still harmonising. And me? Back in 1998, I’d negotiated the transition from fan to friend. So when Stephen finished work on the record, it made sense for him to call me and ask if I wanted to hear it. One by one, in his attic space at Air Studios in Hampstead, these songs were released into the space between us like sky lanterns. The hazy magic hour intimacy of Mayfly Too and Sleepy. The small hours existential reckoning of Back In The Car Park. That first Lilac Time album had featured a song called Return To Yesterday in which Stephen pledged to “face tomorrow in a fury of denial”. But Looking For A Day In The Night was, in some ways, a return to yesterday. To that first album. A wiser, more weatherbeaten return to yesterday. A re-examination of young idealism, held up in the harsh light of morning.

“But what’s the point?” smiled Stephen as The Spirit Moves purred its last. “Who is even going to care about this record?” Which brings us to the advice I was in no way qualified to dispense. “Every song you put out into the world,” I told him, “Is like one of Sting’s messages in a bottle.” He looked at me as if to say, “How the f*** is Sting going to make this any better?” I continued undaunted. You don’t know when you're going to wake up one day to find your “hundred million bottles washed up on the shore.” You’ve just got to keep throwing them out there.”

I’m not sure what practical outcome I was imagining when I dispensed my fortune cookie homily, but in another part of London, Stephen’s future wife found herself in a rehearsal room with boy band fugitive Robbie Williams who, himself was smarting from an acrimonious separation from BMG. She played him the song about being dropped over pizza. He could laugh about it now because Angels had given him a hit that eclipsed everything he’d done during his Take That indenture. “Any more where that came from?” he wondered. She played him The Family Coach – a wistful reminiscence of childhood parlour games in simpler times being played out as the astronauts of Apollo 8 accomplished their space mission, pausing only to wish all of us on “the good Earth” a merry Christmas.

In the early months of 1999, the tabloids tied themselves in knots trying to figure out what Robbie was doing with Spice Girls absconder Geri Halliwell in the narrowboat where they were holed up for the best part of a week. The answer, surreally, was listening to Looking For A Day In The Night. Mainlining the succour of these songs – songs written for no greater audience than the therapist who told Stephen to use the studio as a confession booth.

Between Looking For A Day In The Night and eight million worldwide sales of Intensive Care – the album Stephen co-wrote and produced for Robbie – lies a chain of causality or, if you like, a hundred thousand bottles washed up on the shore. In 2007, after the adventure of a year-long tour spent playing to packed arenas of Robbie fans, there came another reset of The Lilac Time. A prominent billing alongside Robert Plant, Joanna Newsom and Vashti Bunyan at the Green Man was preceded by a warm-up show at The Griffin Theatre in Hereford. It was the best they’d ever sounded on stage. Another 15 years would elapse before Stephen casually mentioned to me that they’d recorded that show. And because, by this time, I had a record label of my own, a perfect opportunity presented itself. A first ever vinyl release (and remastered CD reissue) for Looking For A Day In The Night alongside a vinyl and CD release of the first ever live album by The Lilac Time, both out today.

“He looked at me as if to say, ‘How the f*** is Sting going to make this any better?’” | Patreon

How did it feel to re-enter modern pop with Robbie Williams… and how did it feel to leave again?

Going into it was easy because I’d just done The Devils, so I was using a lot of those techniques with Rob: the idea that there’s no point on working on something that you then have to fix; capturing moments of exuberance when you’re writing a song and you don’t know where it’s going. It was amazing to get back into these big old studios, like A&M, and to see the end of that era. 

They phoned up when the record came out and said it had sold a million copies in a day, and I thought “My God, obviously I’m never going to experience this again”. 

Then later I thought, well, I don’t think anybody will experience that again… sadly, not people like me who’ve come through the singer-songwriter path. 

It eventually sold eight million copies or something. But when I left I went right back to being the Kiss Me bloke who left Duran Duran – as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. It didn’t fit my story, or Rob’s either. It was as if it never happened. 

But being part of that big machinery made me realise I had made the right decision by not being in the Durans. I was happier in a little van going around the US with no roadies in The Lilac Time. Obviously, I was a hopeless pop star – it only lasted about 15 seconds for me. I enjoyed my first seven albums – The Ups And Downs to Astronauts – but it’s the eight after that which I feel closest to and the happiest with. 

But I know, to most people, I made one single. And however thankful I am to that record, I’m glad I don’t have to sing it every night to make a living. So that period did answer a lot of questions. I realised I had made all the right decisions: swimming against the tide was easier than going with the flow. 

Classic Pop Magazine

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