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Stephen Duffy and the Lilac Time

“Duffy is creating a body of lyrically lacerating work that should win him gold discs rather than indifference.” - The Sunday Times

It’s entirely fitting that the catalogue number NEMY1 belongs to an album by Stephen Duffy – as it was one of Stephen’s songs that gave Needle Mythology its name. Stephen was one of the artists foremost in the thoughts of Needle Mythology co-founders Pete Paphides and Will Harris when they decided to start a label. Several of Stephen’s albums – both solo and with The Lilac Time – were either scarce or nonexistent on vinyl. And while the plan was never to make Needle Mythology an exclusively vinyl label, 

Pete’s lifelong championing of Stephen’s music meant that he’d had plenty of time to envision all the ways in which his work might be given the reissue treatment it truly deserved. It was a job that began with the release of Stephen’s 1997 opus I Love My Friends. Needle Mythology’s reissue of the album reverted to Stephen’s original track list for the record. The version released first time around on the Indolent label had featured two last-minute additions, written and produced by Andy Partridge, which were included at the expense of Mao Badge and In The Evening Of Her Day. Needle Mythology’s release saw the Partridge songs moved to a seven-inch single that was included with all copies of I Love My Friends. 

To date, there have been three more albums of Duffy’s songs released on the label. The Lilac Time’s 1991 masterpiece Astronauts received a remastered, expanded Super Deluxe triple album treatment, with the two extra discs featuring the album’s original demos and a contemporaneous live set. Along with a lavishly illustrated book, telling the story of Astronauts, the release helped to entrench Stephen’s reputation as one of his generation’s greatest songwriters. A year later in 2025, the simultaneous release of 1999’s Looking For A Day In The Night and a collection of live recordings from 2007, simply titled The Lilac Time: Live, met with further across-the-board acclaim. 

Needle Mythology’s programme of Stephen Duffy and The Lilac Time reissues is set to continue throughout and beyond 2026. 

Stephen Duffy - I Love My Friends - Deluxe Remaster

NEMYLP001 | NEMYCD001

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DISC ONE – I LOVE MY FRIENDS

TUNE IN
THE DEAL
EUCHARIST
MAO BADGE
LOVERS’ BEWARE
IN THE EVENING OF HER DAY
HOLDING HANDS WITH GRACE
THE POSTCARD
SEVENTEEN
TWENTY THREE
AUTOPSY
SHE BELONGS TO ALL
ONE DAY ONE OF THESE FUCKS WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE
YOU ARE
WHAT IF I FELL IN LOVE WITH YOU

DISC TWO -BLOWN AWAY 

NIGHT THOUGHTS (INTRO)
BLOWN AWAY
THE WHOLE EARTH SINGING
C’EST LA VIE, C’EST LA GUERRE
GO
SUBURBAN SYMPHONY
ANOTHER GOLDEN SHOT
THE WAITRESS’ STORY
AN EAR FOR SILENT VOICES
THE GIRL OF THE YEAR
LUPIN
WE CONTINUE FOR AUSTRALASIA (OUTRO)

The Lilac Time - Astronauts Super Deluxe Remaster

NEMYLP017 | NEMYCD017

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ASTRONAUTS
|
LP SIDE ONE

IN IVERNA GARDENS
HATS OFF HERE COMES THE GIRL
FORTUNES
A TASTE FOR HONEY
GREY SKIES AND WORK THINGS
FINISTÈRE

LP SIDE TWO

DREAMING
ICING ON THE CAKE
THE LOST GIRL IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN
IF THE STARS SHINE TONIGHT

SIDE ONE DELUXE LP

IN IVERNA GARDENS
HATS OFF HERE COMES THE GIRL
FORTUNES
A TASTE FOR HONEY
GREY SKIES AND WORK THINGS
FINISTÈRE

SIDE TWO DELUXE LP

DREAMING
THE WHISPER OF YOUR MIND
THE DARKNESS OF HER EYES
SUNSHINE’S DAUGHTER
NORTH KENSINGTON
MADRESFIELD
LP2 SOFTENED BY RAIN: THE MAKING OF ASTRONAUTS

SOFTENED BY RAIN: THE MAKING OF ASTRONAUTS

SIDE ONE

ASTRONAUTS MEDITATION
WRITING DREAMING
WE CAME FROM ANYWHERE
SHE IS ALL COLOUR
WRITING FINISTÈRE
THIS IMMORTAL PROMISE

SIDE TWO

IN IVERNA DREAMING
HATS OFF #1
WRITING THE WHISPER
YOU COME BY
NORTH KENSINGTON IDEA
MADRESFIELD DEMO

LP3 ANY ROAD UP: THE LILAC TIME LIVE 1990/91

SIDE ONE

FIELDS
THE ROAD TO HAPPINESS
BLACK VELVET
JULIE CHRISTIE
AND ON WE GO

SIDE TWO

DREAMING
ICING ON THE CAKE
THE LOST GIRL IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN
IF THE STARS SHINE TONIG

 

The Lilac Time - looking for a day in the night - Deluxe Remaster

NEMYLP020 | NEMYCD020

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LOOKING FOR A DAY IN THE NIGHT CD

Salvation Song
The Nursery Walls
A Dream That We All Share
A Day In The Night
I Won’t Die For You
Broken Cloud
The Family Coach
Morning Sun The
All Over Again
Back In The Car Park
Mayfly Too
Sleepy
The Spirit Moves

Bonus Tracks

Reunion Ball (Much Cowarne church version)
Hard For Her
I Want To Be Your Man (Nick’s Garage mix)
Salvation Song (Nick’s Garage mix)
Sleepy (Nick’s Garage mix)
Ratoon

LOOKING FOR A DAY IN THE NIGHT LP

SIDE ONE

Salvation Song
The Nursery Walls
A Dream That We All Share
A Day In The Night
I Won’t Die For You
Broken Cloud

SIDE TWO
The Family Coach
Morning Sun The
All Over Again
Back In The Car Park
Mayfly Too
Sleepy
The Spirit Moves

THE LILAC TIME - LIVE

NEMLPD021 | NEMYCD021

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CD

Trumpets From Montparnasse
A Day In The Night
Driving Somewhere
I Won’t Die For You
The Girl Who Waves At Trains
Bank Holiday Monday
Return To Yesterday
The Silence
The Road To Happiness
The Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun

LP

SIDE ONE
Trumpets From Montparnasse
A Day In The Night
Driving Somewhere
I Won’t Die For You

SIDE TWO
The Girl Who Waves At Trains
Bank Holiday Monday
Return To Yesterday
The Silence
The Road To Happiness
The Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun

THE LILAC TIME MERCH

BUY LILAC TIME MERCH

Stephen Duffy’s 1996 solo album I Love My Friends on vinyl replica CD. Produced by Stephen Street, the album was released to unanimously positive reviews and remains a favourite among his fans. Following a time of personal upheaval, the album was the result of an unprecedented creativity for Stephen. “The tunes and the words were coming faster than I could write them down. That’s the dichotomy of I Love My Friends. My interior world was falling apart, but creatively it was a charmed existence.”

After tasting worldwide chart success with his 1985 hit Kiss Me, Stephen went on to record four albums of exquisite bucolic pop with his group The Lilac Time before recommencing his solo career. Stephen was a formative player in the West Midlands post-punk scene alongside Swell Maps and Duran Duran, whose first incarnation he fronted. In 2002, he reunited with Nick Rhodes to release an album of their early songs with the group. One high-profile champion of I Love My Friends was Robbie Williams.

With the shoegaze and baggy movements at their zenith, The Lilac Time’s fourth album was released at a moment when the left-field music zeitgeist was not focused on the poetic musings of a tribe wandering the Malvern Hills dressed in lilac robes. However, in the ensuing decades, Astronauts has come to be viewed by both fans and critics as a masterpiece. A record that was never quite of its time has, through the years, become truly timeless. 

Be that as it may, Astronauts is not the record Stephen had in his head when he, as he puts it, abandoned it. We’ll never know how that record would have sounded, but it’s hard to imagine a better version of the album he did end up making. The songwriter who brought ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Hats Off, Here Comes The Girl’ into the world envisaged the sort of choruses that would jump from the single speaker of your favourite transistor and lodge themselves into the collective memory bank. But while he really was writing some of his most beautiful melodies, Astronauts is a family of songs that demands to be kept together in the sun-dazed cloud of inspiration that created it. It constitutes a partial retreat from the outward-facing utopianism of its predecessors, choosing instead to dwell on the journey taken to get to this point. 

That this is an audibly different band to the pastoral expeditionaries of the group’s previous releases is almost entirely down to the departure of Nick Duffy and the arrival of Sagat Guirey. Suddenly, accordions, banjos and mandolins are out; Jerry Garcia is in. Sagat’s filigree work on the outro of ‘A Taste for Honey’ acts as a sublime parting shot to a lyric which acts as a wiser, wistful companion piece to Stephen’s 1985 solo hit ‘Kiss Me’, something tantamount to the camera retreating to reveal the years elapsed between the time depicted and the present day.

The distance between the carefree youth of pop stardom and the first intimations of mortality can be measured between the first and second verses of the quietly devastating ‘Madresfield’; from the depiction of the deserted cricket pavilion obscured by fresh snowfall to the sudden shift in perspective from subject to protagonist: ‘No one ever told me/That killing time is harmful/For time cannot recover/What soon the ground will offer.’

For all of that, however, the resulting album seemed to slip further away from the creator and in the end he had to accept he would never be able to finish it. At a loss Stephen surrendered Astronauts to Creation with no plans to promote or draw attention to it. The consciousness shift of which Stephen had hoped The Lilac Time might be a precursor hadn’t happened. Or, rather, it had – but it had happened elsewhere, in the Haçienda and Shoom and in Ibiza. Not on the hills of Herefordshire. 

Prior to the release of Looking For A Day In The Night in 1999, The Lilac Time had lain dormant for eight years. After the best part of a decade spent at the epicentre of a London rejuvenated by the pop cultural wave that would come to be known as ‘Cool Britannia’, an emotionally spent Stephen Duffy hit a vein of deeply personal songs that reconnected him to the bucolic languor of his group’s 1987 debut album. 
 
Working alone for the main part, in a tiny attic space at Air Studios, Stephen found himself writing songs that helped him explore his complex relationship to success and to the death of his father some years previously. Retreat into his own childhood helped him remember who he was and yielded deeply moving memorials to simpler times. 
 
When Robbie Williams – who, in multi-instrumentalist Claire Worrall – shared a mutual friend with Stephen – heard Family Coach he was sufficiently moved to cover the song and commenced a writing partnership with Stephen that would ultimately result in 2005’s multi-platinum Intensive Care album. Claire appearance on Looking was her first as a member of The Lilac Time. The dramatic impact of her arrival can be heard in her exquisite harmonies on Nursery Walls, the title track – and, indeed, every subsequent Lilac Time album, her availability considerably enhanced by the fact that she and Stephen would end up marrying each other. Completing this line-up of The Lilac Time are Melvin Duffy (slide guitar) and the returning Nick Duffy, who contributes two beautiful instrumentals, The Spirit Moves and Broken Cloud.
 
This release of Looking For A Day In The Night marks its first ever appearance on vinyl. 
 
Remastered at Abbey Road by Miles Showell. The album’s original artwork has been expanded into a gatefold sleeve by celebrated artist James Goslingnd now features liner notes by author and longtime fan Caitlin Moran and a printed colour inner sleeve featuring song lyrics. 
In the summer of 2007, an invitation to play the main stage at The Green Man festival in rural Wales saw The Lilac Time reconvene after a five year live hiatus. Fresh from the release of the group’s eighth album Runout Groove, Stephen Duffy – flanked by Claire Duffy, Nick Duffy, Micky Harris, Melvin Duffy and Michael Giri – embarked on a string of warm-up dates, including the performance at the Griffin Theatre in Hereford which forms the basis of this release. 
 
The audio of the concert was discovered 17 years later by Stephen as he was looking for the original tapes of 1999’s Looking For A Day In The Night album. His original plan was to pull out a couple of live versions of songs from that record and add them to the Looking For A Day In The Night CD. But as each song played into the next, he found himself seduced by the magic of the entire performance. Anyone who finds themselves listening to this extraordinary moment in the band’s evolution may find themselves feeling the same way. 
 
Featuring personnel from every era of The Lilac Time, a purposeful joie de vivre that envelopes the entire performance: from the dreamy high noon heat-haze of Trumpets From Montparnasse through to the rolling stock rattle of The Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun, an unapologetic dog whistle to every militant dreamer who still believes in society. And, in between, a cache of Stephen Duffy’s greatest songs: among them Return To Yesterday, Driving Somewhere, A Day In The Night, The Silence and Bank Holiday Monday.
 
For this release, Stephen has penned extensive notes, sharing the origin story of every song on the record. Artwork, once again, comes from James Gosling. 
 
Mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road.