The "New Amys" Adele and Duffy
The Retro-Soul Sounds of Two Hot New Singers
Amy Winehouse's retro soul look and sound has inspired a string of imitators. Adele and Duffy are two of the best at the head of the pack.
With the immense success of Amy Winehouse and her Grammy Award-winning album, Back To Black, it was inevitable that similar artists would emerge in her wake. The two being hyped the most are London-born Adele Adkins and Welsh-born Aimee Duffy.
Adele
According to articles published in The Guardian and The Independent Adele's biography is thus: Known professionally by her first name, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in Tottenham, North London in 1988. She was 14 when a friend of the family who worked in the music industry invited her to record a cover of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and she realized that she had the potential to be a singer. Adele graduated from the famous BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology which is the same school once attended by Luke Pritchard of The Kooks, Kate Nash, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua and Amy Winehouse.
In 2004, she began to play small gigs with only four songs to perform. By the time she graduated from The BRIT School in 2006, record labels were beginning to take notice. She would ultimately sign with XL Recordings which is also the home of Radiohead, Basement Jaxx, M.I.A. and Devendra Banhart.
Before she had even released a single Adele was invited to perform along with such heavyweights as Paul Mcartney and Bjork on the popular music TV series Later With Jools Holland. A few months later, in October 2007, she released her first single, "Hometown Glory" which reached #32 on the British charts.
In December 2007, Adele was named as the first-ever recipient of the Brit Awards Critic's Choice, an award given to the most promising new artist. A month later, the BBC placed her in the #1 spot on their Sound of 2008 poll and she had released her debut album 19.
Adele's been hailed as the new Amy Winehouse, and it's not difficult to understand why. Both have deeply soulful voices, write songs of heartache and perform them with deserving emotion. Both also have brassy personalities and a mix of maturity and immaturity that lend them nearly endless charm.
19 is an album that blends jazz, pop, folk and blues with a glamourous sense of pain and loss, like only the very best soul singers are capable of. Adele's older-than-her-years voice is rich and voluptuous as it soars over lyrics that it may be hard to believe were written by a girl barely out of her teens.
Duffy
The artist who placed second after Adele on the BBC's Sound of 2008 poll is Welsh-born Duffy. According to The Times and AMG, Duffy was born Aimee Anne Duffy alongside a twin sister named Katy in 1984 in Nefyn, Wales. Much of her childhood was spent in the tiny coastal community in north-west Wales where she knew she wanted to be a singer from a very young age, though her musical horizon was limited to the classic LPs of her parents and a videotaped episode of Ready, Steady, Go!
Despite her limited exposure to music, she performed with a number of bands in her teens and recorded a number of demos until 2004 when she caught the attention of Jeanette Lee, the co-founder of the Rough Trade record label and management company, home to such acts as Babyshambles, Pulp, Super Furry Animals and Belle & Sebastion.
Lee took Duffy under her wing and moved her to London where she introduced the young ingenue to producer and former-Suede guitarist, Bernard Butler. To Butler and everyone at Rough Trade, Duffy's artlessness was charming and utterly refreshing. Had her raw talent fallen into the hands of someone like Simon Cowell, her debut album would be markedly different than it is.
Duffy's new team of supporters worked for three years to ready her for her debut. Butler wrote with her and helped to shade a retro sound that suited her voice, influences and look. With Rough Trade as her management, she signed a record deal with A&M and was soon being hailed along with Adele as one of the new "Amy's".
Duffy's first single, the haunting "Rockferry" was released in November 2007. By the time her second single "Mercy" shot straight to #1 in February 2008, Duffy had performed on Later With Jools Holland an almost unprecedented three times in three months.
In March 2008, she released her debut album, Rockferry which went to #1 on the UK Album Charts. It's a thoroughly retro-sounding album, with references ranging from Roy Orbison and Burt Bacharach to Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield. Thoroughly drenched in '60s soul, it's startling how Duffy's voice has remained untainted by the modern idea of "she who sings bigger sings better".
