“If you get any sort of success, people want to
hate you for it. I never made music to be hated.”
DUFFY

[newsstand] next door.” He turns around and introduces me—in Welsh—to a clump of patrons, several of whom, it turns out, are former classmates of

Duffy’s. They eye me shyly. All I understand is the word Spin.

After dinner, I stop for a pint at the Sportsman, a modest pub of curiously ill repute; when pressed, locals grimace and dismiss the Sportsman as “grody.” (In a delightful bit of mythmaking, one detractor insists patrons are required to urinate into a hole in the ground.) Inside, the air is scented with a particularly sour, if not uncommon, mishmash of ale, whiskey, vomit, sweat, and piss. I slump into a booth and order a glass of Brains Bitter, a Welsh pale ale. A few minutes later, a cluster of middle-age men in track pants engage in a spontaneous rendition of Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.”

Duffy was a prominent citizen of Nefyn even as an infant: She and her sister,

Katy, were the first twins born here in nearly a century and were photographed for posterity in the arms of the previous pair, then 90 years old. Although her parents divorced when she was in elementary school and her mother and two sisters have since relocated, Duffy’s father still runs Nefyn’s Constitutional Club, a pub where Duffy took her first steps. Duffy speaks tenderly of her family, although their role in her success seems minor. “When I knew I wanted to be a singer, when I was very, very young, I kept that very private,” she says.

I pass back through the center of town on my way to Caeau Capel. There’s a church, some modest houses, a small hotel, a World War II memorial, and a stone bench encircled by a small group of bored-looking kids. In my room, I can’t figure out how to turn on the TV. I go to sleep early, with the windows open.

didn’t have it in the background of my life,” she confesses. “I’m still learning.” Now her two favorite records are Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Arcade Fire’s Funeral. “There are so many other records that I love, but when I want to immerse myself in something beautiful, I immediately think about those two—there’s soul in both those records.”

Duffy is unapologetic about her ongoing education, even though her guilelessness is occasionally wielded against her. (In its review of Rockferry, the NME dubbed her “a science museum exhibit with a robotic grin.”) It can be tricky to reconcile Duffy’s ambition with her relative inexperience: While it might seem reductive to judge a girl by her record collection, the notion of longing for pop stardom—without savoring pop music—feels inherently disingenuous. Still, Duffy believes she was presented with soul music at the exact right moment. “Phil Spector believed in timing, and I do as well,” she says. “Love, hate, everything in your life, all the people you meet, all the things that you do,

all the things that you think about—without it being the right time, I don’t think anything can ever really be manifest.”

DID YOU GO TO NEFYN?”

Duffy squeals when she spots me after soundcheck the next day at the Leadmill, a dark and sticky rock club in Sheffield. “That’s mad,” she says, eyes wide. “Let’s have tea.” As we move toward her dressing room, I recount my pint at the Sportsman. “You know the shop across the road? That’s where we would sit, every night, just waiting to go into the pub,” she says. “We just sat there.”

Soon after Rockferry debuted, the British press began trawling Duffy’s past for headline-worthy nuggets, and not long after the album’s release, they landed a big one: In 1997, Duffy’s stepfather’s ex-wife attempted to hire a man to murder her former husband, and when the plot was uncovered by the police, a 13-year-old Duffy and her family were whisked to a safe house, where they spent one long, sleepless night while the woman in question was apprehended. Although it’s a troubling story, it’s also not particularly indicative of Duffy’s relatively chaste childhood, and it hardly rivals the self-inflicted drama of Winehouse’s marathon rap sheet. The public expects soul singers to possess certain private demons, but Duffy, who now lives a relatively tame, single life in London, is stubbornly, if charmingly, innocent. “People want to know about your past, dig up the shit,” she sighs. “But at what point do you stop being human because you have some pictures taken and make a record?”

It’s awfully easy to be enchanted by Duffy’s small-town candor and by what also appears to be a genuine lack of knowledge regarding the last two decades of pop music. “I didn’t grow up a music fan. I only knew classic songs. I didn’t obsess about music, I didn’t own it, I didn’t listen to it before I went to bed, I

WITH ITS COLOSSAL, looming hills and infinite green, north Wales is so stupidly bucolic that it also feels unreal. It’s not difficult to hear that richness in Duffy’s big, belting voice, itself mossy and fertile and out of time. I wrap myself in sweaters and amble down to the shore. I walk the mile or so to the Nefyn & District Golf Club, which is mostly empty. I sit at the edge of the parking lot, staring down at the ocean, looking at the road back out of town.

A few weeks after I return to New York, another female British singer steps up to publicly brand Duffy a fraud. Alison Goldfrapp tells an interviewer, “Great, we’ve had Amy

Winehouse, so now let’s have ten of them and we’ll train them up. That’s what Duffy is. I think she’s got an amazing voice, but she’s been trained to sound like that. It was a business plan.” Late that night, Duffy calls my apartment, clearly struggling with the condemnation—these sorts of barbs are particularly discouraging, she notes, coming from other women. Accordingly, Duffy is careful to never speak reproachfully of her peers; she’s remarkably hesitant to discuss Winehouse’s struggles and declares Britney Spears “a sweet, positive, upbeat pop star who fell into this very negative fishbowl.” But this has hit a nerve.

“I was raised with my mum and my two sisters—we were the four musketeers after my parents divorced,” she explains. “I try to surround myself with all these females, and I just don’t get [the negativity from other women].” She sighs. “Sometimes I do feel like I want to disappear. People judge you for all the wrong reasons. If you get any element of success or recognition, people want to hate you for it. I never made music to be hated. I don’t do this for any reason other than the fact that I love music.”

Duffy’s relative blankness—she didn’t grow up with a pile of scratchy Stax 45s under her pillow, she doesn’t drink excessively, she doesn’t come preequipped with much she can use to claim authenticity—might seem like a liability. But when you strip away the cultural context, soul music is as much about yearning—for a kinder man, a nicer home, a bigger life—as anything else. And, given Nefyn’s staggering remoteness, Duffy, with her massive, mournful pipes, seems uniquely qualified to sing about wanting more.

Double up: Aimee and Katy Duffy with Nefyn’s other twins, in ¹⁹⁸⁶