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Taken from HeraldScotland (Jun 19, 2021)
Wet Wet Wet's Graeme Duffin on life after Marti...and his solo jazz album
You will recognise him if you have been following Scottish pop music over the past 30 years and more. From their earliest appearances and recordings, Graeme Duffin has been the guitar-player with Wet Wet Wet, when the group's mix of original tunes and soul covers was launched by manager Elliot Davis and his Precious Organisation in the early 1980s.
by Keith Bruce
Graeme Duffin |
The band hit the real big time a decade later when a cover of The Troggs' Love Is All Around was used on the soundtrack of hit film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
But Duffin has never been an "official member" of Wet Wet Wet. A musically-articulate, slightly older addition to the gang of Clydebank school-chums, he had been playing jazz, funk and folk - often with musicians older than himself - on the Glasgow scene when he was drafted into the band.
The template for his involvement is spelled out on the inner sleeve of the first Wet Wet Wet album, Popped in Souled Out, under two separate pictures: "Wet Wet Wet are Marti Pellow, Graeme Clark, Neil Mitchell, Tom Cunningham"; and under a smaller solo portrait "All guitars by Graeme Duffin".
Now with new singer Kevin Simm replacing Pellow, Wet Wet Wet are still very busy, although the pandemic inevitably curtailed the touring schedule of the group. So the guitarist returned to his early love of jazz, and, employing the skills of a lifetime in the music business and the connections he has made, produced his first solo album, Spain.
Named after the tune by the late Chick Corea that opens it, Spain was made entirely at Duffin's home studio on Glasgow's south side, with the participation of chums from Scotland's jazz scene.
"I didn't start it until well into the first lockdown", Duffin explains. "I bought a nice nylon-string electro-acoustic guitar, and it was an opportunity to re-explore the music I had been starting to play 35 years ago. That was before the appearance of a certain pop group meant it was put on a back burner.
"I was getting back into some of the tunes I used to play and really enjoying it, so I put feelers out to see if anyone would be interested in helping me. I wasn't very sure how the proper jazzers would take me, but piano player Paul Harrison was very positive and encouraging".
Duffin also approached violinist, singer and presenter of BBC Radio Scotland's jazz programme Seonaid Aitken to add her Stephane Grappelli style to one track.
"There was also a slot for a solo on a Clifford Brown tune, Joy Spring, that I asked guitarist Martin Taylor to fill. It is all music I'd been playing years ago.
"I wasn't necessarily playing it terribly well then, but I was learning from the people I was gigging with at the time, like sax player Bobby Wishart to whom I owe a great debt for his perseverance with a young guitarist who didn't really know very much about jazz at all".
Wet Wet Wet & Graeme Duffin. Photo by Dougie Sounes |
Duffin is still reluctant to describe himself as a jazz musician, although the quality of the album argues otherwise. Self-released, it reached number four in the UK jazz and blues charts.
What is undetectable is the way the ensemble sound was created, with Duffin piecing together the jigsaw of recorded contributions sent to him by his associates. As well as being a very fine guitarist, Duffin is a recording technician of formidable experience, whose skills have more recently been employed assembling a new Wet Wet Wet album, The Journey, which is released at the end of June.
Until 18 months ago he was a partner in Motherwell's Foundry Music Lab, a studio complex in the industrial town to the east of Glasgow.
"We'd taken on the building as an empty shell and built the studio from scratch, with rehearsal rooms and a training room for education work. Then the owner of the industrial estate said they were selling off that part to a developer to put a petrol station and some shops on it.
"My studio partner Sandy Jones found a newer council-owned place with more space, but I had been working more from home anyway, so I took it as my cue to make an exit".
The fact that Duffin was approaching retiral age - he turned 65 the day before we spoke - was a factor in his thinking, but nothing about his current schedule looks like retirement, even with the limitations placed on musicians by the health emergency.
"Sandy Jones and I have recorded hundreds of albums, so I've been utilising the experience I've gained and the pop production sensibilities I've learned, getting that fine detail and getting everything sitting in its place. I really enjoy all that and it was good to apply it to my own project for a change. It was exciting to hear it come together, growing arms and legs".
If that process has a downside, it is that he doesn't feel ready to take his new music on the road, even if that was feasible - although there may be more of this musician's modesty in his excuses.
"Doing it in the studio is one thing, but playing it live. . . I like to be able to assemble it a bit at a time. The solos aren't entirely improvised, they are more compositional.
"You really must be more steeped in this kind of music and playing it every day with other musicians; I'm not in that place right at the moment. I was kind of starting to get there in the past when I was doing more jazz gigs. There is a possibility of doing some gigs if the opportunity comes up, but whether it is financially viable to have a bunch of other players involved is another question".
In any case Duffin had his hands full with two new Wet Wet Wet albums in the works at the home studio.
"Ever since the second album I've had a co-production credit, and as things moved on over the years and there were advances in technology, I would get the job of piecing together Marti's vocals, making a composite vocal out of several individual takes, and I just got more and more used to doing that. Traditionally we'd all be in a studio situation together with an engineer at the helm, but in the current situation it is just me. I'm less expensive and we keep it all in-house.
"The new material has come together very well I think. I have files sent to me remotely and piece the tracks together. Once everything is in place, we'll replace the programmed drums with Tommy playing in a studio".
The lifting of restrictions permitting, the group will follow the release of the album with a long UK tour in the autumn.
"Then there's a hits album with Kevin Simm singing on the songs everyone knows, which has been an interesting exercise, recreating the old tracks from scratch. Tommy Cunningham had played the drums for that a couple of years ago, in February 2019, and then other things took off and we ended up having an extremely busy gigging year.
"In fact 2019 was the busiest gigging year for Wet Wet Wet in decades. And 2020 had been shaping up to be a busy gigging year as well. We had an Australian tour planned for the Spring, in April-May 2020, and that's now scheduled for the end of 2022, two and a half years on from the original plan".
As well as recording his own music and albums by the bands who passed through the Foundry, Duffin has produced 13 albums by his daughter Esther and her band Ashton Lane, with husband Tim O'Connor. Talk of Esther's music brings us to the faith that she shares with her parents and the role of Christianity in the family's life.
"Esther's having a bit of a change of approach. She had been doing very well via Facebook but she came to the conclusion that Facebook is causing a lot of damage to individuals and the social fabric.
"She decided that was going against a lot of the principles that she holds dear, but pulling out of it was a brave thing to do".
It is clear that his daughter's thinking on the demands of living a Christian life in the 21st century chimes very much with his own.
"When your relationship with God is core, everything should come out of that, on a case-by-case basis. Faith plays a very big part in my existence - it has to be across the board".
That way of approaching his belief has been with Duffin for 50 years.
"I had a slightly uneasy relationship with the evangelical church that I was brought up in as a teenager. When I started to perform music I was dragged before a court of elders who told me that I needed to stop.
"There were maybe five or six of us of a similar age in a Bible class and I used to play the guitar there. They said I'd have to stop playing guitar, although it was OK to sing, which to me didn't make a lot of sense".
While Duffin has continued his association with congregations that many might call "evangelical" - in particular Queen's Park Baptists in Glasgow - he distances himself from the description.
"The term 'evangelical' has been hijacked in America, and I can't have any association with that. There's a section of the church that has become the religious wing of the Republican Party and that is completely unacceptable.
"Pledging allegiance to the flag in a church is obviously idolatry. Yet there are millions happy to do that; it is shocking. I certainly wouldn't be associated with that type of Christianity".
Wet Wet Wet's new album, The Journey, is released on June 25.
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