TWYFORD: The Swiss Cottage

Friday 3rd May, 2024

7:30pm

Event information

Patrick Duff is one of the UK’s most intriguing and compelling singer/songwriters. Starting out as a street busker, he became the frontman of Strangelove and continues to this day as an outstanding solo artist, in a career that spans over thirty years.

His songs sound natural, like they’ve always existed and have just been plucked effortlessly out of the ether. You can hear this timeless quality throughout the five solo albums he’s released so far. Having creatively explored many genres and styles, he has always remained true to his muse. There is something unmistakably Patrick Duff about all this music. It is full of stories, poetry and melancholy. Duff cheerfully describes his art as “Love songs to a world that has completely broken my heart.”

August 2024 will see the release of long awaited new album ANOTHER WORD FOR ROSE. An album that’s like looking through a window into the landscape of a person which usually remains hidden. You are drawn by the haunting music into this other world. It’s about going on when you can’t go on.

Patrick Duff’s live concerts are also intense and mesmerising performances that resonate deeply. He says: “My gigs are as much about the silence that surrounds the songs. The silence where the songs materialised as they came to me. The silence of our collective listening. The silence where all dreams end.”

The sense of this silence and stillness is also strongly present in the atmosphere running through his 2022 memoir THE SINGER. An intimate account of the mysticism of his childhood and on into the chaos and redemption of the years in Strangelove, to the time he spent living and musically collaborating in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa.

“In a world where you feel so weak,
Pretty voices keep on singing in your sleep…