Album Review: No Sad Songs by The Lilac Time

The Lilac Time return with their first album of all new material in eight years, and their first since primary songwriter Stephen Duffy and bandmate Claire Worrall were married, with the life-affirming and aptly titled No Sad Songs. Replete with tunes about love, weddings, and romantic inspiration ("All I want is what you bring me/Christmas Eve as a child"), it's clear Duffy is in a more optimistic frame of mind here than on 2003's melancholic and crisis-themed Keep Going. Combined with a positive, even grateful outlook, the album's instrumentation consisting of mostly acoustic instruments, including all manner of stringed ones, makes for an at once dignified and down-to-earth indie pop spin.

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Every once in a while, an artist that seemed to have faded quietly into permanent obscurity can summon up a late career renaissance that’s as surprising as it is welcome. It happened last year with Roddy Frame’s excellent Seven Dials album; now it’s the turn of fellow literate 1980s singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy to show that there’s life in the old dog yet. Like Frame with Aztec Camera, Duffy made his name as the front man for a group that was a solo venture in all but name.

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During the 80s, Stephen Duffy famously added “Tin Tin” to his moniker and scored two glossy international hits, Kiss Me and Icing On The Cake. Then, through co-writing Robbie Williams’ 2004 No 1 hit Radio, and most of the tracks from Williams’ chart-topping Intensive Care, he enjoyed a belated second brush with stardom, even if it came by proxy. On both occasions, however, Duffy shunned the adulation and rapidly returned to The Lilac Time: his all-consuming, pastoral pop project whose meandering career has accrued fierce acclaim but yielded little mainstream success.

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