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It's now 10 years since Rockferry - the album that propelled Duffy to worldwide fame and fortune. Her debut sold millions worldwide, her follow-up bombed, then she disappeared. So what happened to the Welsh singer who had the world at her feet?

It's rare to be at the eye of the storm let alone have forewarning that a hurricane is fast approaching.

Yet on February 28, 2008, there was the definite sense that you were in the midst of an earthquake of the musical variety, the reverberations of which were already being keenly felt.

As superstar-in-waiting, Duffy stepped on to the stage at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff, those of us lucky enough to be in possession of a ticket for the 250-capacity show, had good reason to believe that we were in the grip of something special, a force to be reckoned with.

(Image: Huw John)

The timing of the Clwb gig, part of an intimate tour that also included a show at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on St David's Day, had been announced in the second week of January, when there was little idea of what was about to blow up.

There were certainly murmurings at the turn of the year when Duffy appeared on Jools Holland's Hootenanny and was placed second in the BBC's Sound Of 2008 annual tipster's poll, finishing runner-up to a certain London songstress named Adele.

But there was no sign of imminent lift-off when her debut single Rockferry was released in December, 2017, charting at number 45.

Roared on by a Welsh crowd and cutting a diminutive figure, Duffy's debut Cardiff gig saw her in ebullient mood and with good reason – she was riding high at the top of the UK singles chart.

It was 17 days prior to the gig at Clwb, when the singer's single Mercy was released digitally on February 11 – two weeks before the physical release of the single on February 25 - that the storm started to gather pace.

The hook-laden soul pop standard proved irresistible to the British public who snapped it up in their droves, sending it straight in at number one solely on digital downloads alone. It remained at the top of the charts for five weeks until it was dethroned by Estelle's American Boy featuring Kanye West.

Mercy would end 2008 as the year's third-best-selling single shifting 536,000 copies, while the song remained inside the UK Singles Chart for more than a year.

Four days after the Cardiff show, on March 3, Duffy released her debut album Rockferry and the blue touch paper was lit on an absorbing story as remarkable and as volatile as any in the annals of rock 'n' roll history.

Those who thought Duffy, whose full name is Amy Anne Duffy, was an overnight success, would have been mistaken, she had already started to cultivate a name for herself, not least to those in the Welsh language scene.

Born in Bangor on June 23, 1984, and brought up in Nefyn, near Pwllheli, the singer was a staple at the bars around her home, but it was in 2003 that those first steps to success were taken via S4C's answer to the X Factor, Wawffactor.

The music talent show, for aspiring pop singers, was broadcast on S4C between 2003 and 2006.

Presented by Radio Wales' Eleri Sion, the judges for the first series of the show were former Catatonia guitarist Owen Powell, television presenter Emma Walford, musician Peredur ap Gwynedd and Radio 1 producer Aled Haydn Jones.

Duffy competed in the first series of the show, finishing second behind eventual winner Lisa Pedrick.

A chance meeting at the wrap party for the series at the short-lived Union/Undeb private members club on Womanby Street in December 2003 was my very first encounter with the singer.

Introduced to me by Owen Powell, the then 20-year-old with short copped hair bore little resemblance to the kittenish Bardot-alike that she would become.

She was loud, vivacious and as I recount hilarious, no doubt fuelled by a free bar, but nevertheless completely endearing with it.

As a result of her appearance on the show Duffy recorded a three-song Welsh language EP, titled Aimée Duffy, her first recorded output.

Despite her second place finish on Wawffactor she had made a sizeable impression not least on Powell who introduced her to former 60ft Dolls' singer Richard Parfitt.

The pair subsequently introduced the singer to the woman who would act as the catalyst for her huge success Rough Trade Records' Jeannette Lee, who took Duffy under her wing, eventually becoming her manager.

She in turn introduced the singer to former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler who became her songwriting partner and member of her band, crafting the retro sound that would become her trademark.

Duffy signed to A&M Records in the UK on November 23, 2007 after crafting an album that had been around three years in incubation.

Those of us who had witnessed her soul-stirring performance at Clwb Ifor Bach were in no doubt that we were witnessing the birth of a star – and so it proved, and then some.

It’s impossible to overstate the speed and strength of Duffy's rise in 2008, from an all-but-unknown singer in January, to scoring a number one single in February, a number one album in March and becoming a million-seller by the summer.

Within a year of Rockferry's release not only had Duffy won three BRIT Awards (British Breakthrough, Best Female Solo and Best British Album) and a Grammy (Best Pop Vocal Album), but Rockferry was racking up incredible numbers. By September 2010 the album had sold 6.5 million copies.

Despite the huge success there were signs, even around the Rockferry album, that all wasn't happy in the Duffy camp, as the singer adjusted to being thrust into the full glare of worldwide fame.

(Image: Tim Whitby/Getty Images)

In a 2008 interview with WalesOnline's Gavin Allen, the singer confessed she was “borderline on a nervous breakdown.”

She said: “I used to pride myself on being footloose and fancy free, always having a smile on my face, but I have to be a bit more tough and I don’t know if I can be that sort of person.

“I still feel like a little girl in the middle of quite a tough thing.

“I’m borderline on a nervous breakdown.

“I used to make music when no-one had heard of me and there was nothing else going on in my life,” she continued.

“As a girl I thought I was super-human but there are pressures about being public in what I do.

“All the doubts I have are of myself.

“Can I handle this? Do I want to disappear?”

She may have thought of giving up altogether when in 2009 she appeared in what is seen as a spectacularly misjudged advert for Diet Coke, featuring the singer cycling through a supermarket while warbling I’ve Got To Be Me.

There were even greater doubts when in late January 2010 Rough Trade Management, who with Jeanette Lee had steered Duffy to such huge success, announced that they and the singer had parted amicably.

Then there was but one huge question – how do you follow up a multi-platinum debut album that had recorded such eye-watering numbers?

With new management in tow, Duffy announced that her new album Endlessly was to be released in the UK on November 29, 2010.

Granted an audience with the singer a week before the album's release it appeared those nagging doubts she had about her career were still evident as the world waited her next step.

It was a shock to discover that there was a point when Duffy wasn’t sure she even wanted to make another record.

“I thought about walking away, I really did,” she said. “Not because I thought I’d done it. It’s just that I missed the simple things in life. Life had got so complicated.”

The girl from Nefyn on the Lleyn Peninsula, who had grown up singing for regulars in her father’s North Wales bar, had been propelled into a hitherto unknown world of stardom on both sides of the Atlantic, and a whirlwind touring schedule which meant she had little idea what country she was waking up in from one day to the next.

“One incident that has stayed with me is trying to speak Spanish on a French TV show. That was embarrassing as I didn’t know I was in France,” she recalled. “At the end of that cycle (of touring Rockferry) I needed to be reminded of what I was here to do.

“I forgot for a while what my job was, what my role was. I’m not a model. I’m not a celebrity. So who am I? It all gets so complicated. Holding onto your integrity is really difficult.”

Getting off the promotional treadmill that saw her dizzying elevation to the pinnacle of pop stardom, Duffy needed to take a break, to step back and evaluate her next move.

Unsure how to progress and what her next move should be, fate intervened in the unlikely form of the then 66-year-old Albert Hammond Snr. Or, more precisely, Albert Hammond’s wife.

“He was in his house in LA one day and his wife went ‘Albert! Albert! Look at this girl on TV, she sounds like a black woman!’ And he looked and went ‘Oh my God’.”

Duffy worked on her second studio album with the veteran producer and recorded it in New York.

London-born, Gibraltar-raised Hammond is the father of Albert Hammond Jnr of New York indie icons The Strokes.

He’s also the songwriter famed for penning such classics as The Air That I Breathe (The Hollies), When I Need You (Leo Sayer), Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (Starship) and One Moment In Time (Whitney Houston).

More importantly, he hadn’t been involved in the music industry for a decade, but when he saw Duffy singing Stepping Stone on US show Saturday Night Live he was intrigued.

“He asked to meet and I had no idea about his background,” said Duffy. “He said, ‘I’ve got this song title Don’t Forsake Me.’ I said, ‘That sounds like the soundtrack of my life’!”

She said: “We did a few days in LA, a week in Spain, a week in London and it was done swiftly.

“We had these songs and in my heart they sounded so charming on acoustic demos. And that is what I needed to hear.

“No complications. You know, there is such a thing as working too hard, when everyone does too much you can kill something. But this was just Albert and me having fun.”

Ahead of my chat with the singer I had experienced something of a career first - the only time I have ever received an advanced copy of an album couriered to me, housed in a clear perspex box within which sat a tiny iPod Nano containing Duffy's hugely anticipated follow up to her debut album.

The security surrounding Endlessly was so tight that no advanced promotional copies of the album were available to the press.

Instead, ahead of my interview with the singer I was allowed to listen to the 10 tracks that constituted her much vaunted return on the aforementioned iPod, before it was returned 24 hours later.

This veil of absolute secrecy was either a sure sign of Duffy’s rapid fire ascension to superstar status and indicative of a record company wanting to protect one of their prized assets, or a veiled attempt at damage limitation.

When I informed her of the record company’s overly protective approach Duffy laughed nervously and responded: “Well, it’s good that people are looking after my best interests,” she told me. “I guess I haven’t spent time working on my new album for it to become digital public property before it’s even out there.”

Sadly, the iPod’s delivery wasn’t accompanied by two burly guards flanking the prized possession, nevertheless my first reaction was that while it wasn't a drastic rewriting of Duffy’s winning soul pop formula, it did showcase several new sides to her sound.

An intriguing adjunct to the album’s creation is the addition of Philadelphia hip hop icons The Roots to the playing roster.

In the midst of the pomp of string-laden soul and the stomp of sassy brass there were stripped back acoustic numbers and songs that pulsated with disco and electro beats. Ultimately, however, it lacked the focus and cogency of her debut album.

In its quest to be something different, a departure from the classy, retro-fuelled sound of her debut, it ultimately became nothing in particular. In hindsight it would have been easier to listen to the old adage 'if it's not broken, don't fix it'.

The response to the album was underwhelming to say the least.

Released in the UK on November 29, 2010, it charted at number nine. A solitary single Well Well Well was released from the album, peaking at a lowly 41 in the singles chart.

While Rockferry roared thus far selling more than two million albums in the UK and nine million albums globally, Endlessly's numbers seemed like meek surrender.

To date it has sold just 306,000 copies in the UK, with scant figures available from other territories.

Interestingly Endlessly isn't available on digital platforms such as Spotify, iTunes or Amazon, neither can you appear to buy physical copies of the album through shops such as HMV.

Soon after the promotional campaign for the album ground to a halt Duffy cancelled shows in Monaco and Dubai.

In a step away from music, 2010 saw Duffy playing the character of Sissy in the movie Patagonia, directed by Marc Evans. The story centres on Welsh and Argentine people connected to Y Wladfa, the Welsh settlement in Patagonia.

While she had dabbled in film-related projects - a cover of the Paul McCartney and Wings' Bond theme Live and Let Die, which appeared on the War Child charity album - War Child Heroes, Volume I and penning the song Smoke Without Fire with Bernard Butler, which appeared on the soundtrack for the film An Education, this was her big screen debut.

Save her movie cameo, for somebody who had hinted across two albums that she was struggling with the demands of fame it was only natural that Duffy needed to catch her breath and retreat from the spotlight.

A high profile relationship with Welsh rugby international Mike Phillips ended in 2011.

However, the same year there were distractions she could have done without. During the period of the promotion for the Endlessly album Duffy was managed for a short while by Pet Shop Boys' manager Angela Becker – a relationship that ended up in court, with the manager claiming a breach of a management agreement. And in October 2012 the singer was forced to flee her £12 million London home after a fire broke out in her luxury penthouse.

In 2013 she made a solitary live appearance at New York's Beacon Theatre in September 2013, at a tribute concert to legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, where she performed a version of the iconic singer's Hymn To Love.

As far as media was concerned it was pretty much radio silence, however that same year she was interviewed by Esquire's Alex Blimes where she hinted at the toll her rapid ascent had taken on her and her reasons to escape to quiet anonymity.

“I took a step back,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to slow all this right down. It’s only in the silence you can hear the truth, so I had to turn down the noise.

“I was losing sight of what all this was about. It all got so complex, such responsibility. I was serenading people to sleep, not running NASA. Suddenly I was a product, an enterprise, a businesswoman. But mostly I wanted to be human.”

(Image: Getty Images)

As for a return, she said: “I’ll make my next move. Exactly what that move is, I’ll have to ponder further. It’s the longest chess game I’ve ever played, but I promise my next move will be good.”

Then there was silence – for a few years at least.

In a newspaper interview in 2014, Duffy's former mentor Bernard Butler, expressed his sympathy for the way in which the singer's career had faltered, despite their parting of the ways.

He said: "She went off the rails and it all went pear-shaped for her. And maybe she brought all those problems on herself.

"But I always had quite a lot of sympathy for her, because she was young, from this tiny village in Wales, and she was just hurled into the fire.

“And everyone said, 'Don't act strange.' Why? Of course she was going to go off the rails.

"When I was in Suede, I did the same to a certain extent; that was one of the times when I was closest to being a bit nutty, because it was a bit of a baptism of fire."

Five years after Endlessly, Duffy finally reappeared in 2015 and it was a film project that acted as a low-key musical reintroduction – on and off screen.

Legend was the British movie that saw actor Tom Hardy playing the role of notorious East End gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

Not only did Duffy contribute three tracks to the soundtrack – Are You Sure?, Make The World Go Away and comeback single Whole Lot Of Love – she also took on the role of late American singer Timi Yuro.

Popular club singer Yuro regularly appeared at the Kray twins' clubs in London and was said to be a favourite of Reggie Kray.

While Duffy's comeback was the quietest of reintroductions, with little at stake, those fans who thought it would lead to the announcement of a third album or live appearances, were sadly mistaken.

Nevertheless, behind the scenes there were major developments – most notably Duffy being taken under the wing of one of the world's biggest music management companies - Q Prime, who look after some of the world's biggest stars including Metallica, Muse and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Music Business Worldwide reported that Duffy's comeback was believed to be a special project for French media company Vivendi. Two of their key subsidiaries are StudioCanal (the company that produced Legend) and the Universal Music Group.

But still there was no word of a comeback proper and a supernova re-entry to Planet Pop.

There were several pictures of Duffy in a recording studio published on her Facebook and Instagram pages, but no words to confirm projects and certainly no news of new releases.

Her most recent post on Instagram – on October 15, 2017 - hinted that at least she wasn't contemplating walking away from the limelight.

Accompanying an atmospheric shot of a smiling and barefoot Duffy, she teased: “I will not be online now until the other side of the year. Other news is - I will see you, with something new, at some point soon. Love Duffy.”

Almost a year later, and still we wait.

A couple of weeks ago Chris Evans on his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show played Duffy's Warwick Avenue single and asked the question which has become a common refrain for anyone you speak to about the singer - “whatever happened to Duffy?”

The radio presenter then added: “Back in the day she was ahead of Adele. She couldn't have been any bigger at the time. Now it's switched around somewhat.”

Which is something of an understatement to be honest, but entirely accurate at the same time.

A call to Polydor Records, her former home, confirmed that she was no longer with the label, although it is understood Universal Music (Polydor's parent company) have a retainer agreement in place, which means she hasn't been dropped.

Which makes sense given how much money the singer has made for the company over the years.

As for Q Prime, it's been confirmed she is no longer with the management agency.

A mutual acquaintance asked a good friend of hers what she was up to but he refused to divulge what she was doing now, and would only say - “If Duffy doesn't want to be found, she wont be found.”

Which makes you wonder does the singer still have the appetite to return to the treadmill of an album cycle, to be thrust onto the global stage and all the promotion that entails?

It certainly didn't agree with her the first time round.

(Image: James Davies)

With nine million copies of Rockferry sold it's certain she doesn't need the money.

However, if she did have the stomach to mount a concerted comeback, her Facebook page has not far off a million likes, so she would return with a sizeable social media presence still intact.

It's inconceivable that with a voice of such power, beauty and emotional range she wouldn't deploy it once more in a commercial arena, but if the story of Duffy has proven one thing it's that you'd be a fool to try and second guess what her next move will be.