Larry's Boy Done Good! - Nobby Explains The Phenomenon That Was Duffy Power

These looks, that name - what could possibly go wrong?

Ray Howard [posits Nobby - Ed.] may well have considered himself one of the lucky ones when he was re-christened Duffy Power by manager Larry Parnes. At least he didn't end up as Elmer Twitch, the name that Joe Brown refused.

I was vaguely aware of Duffy Power, but only as one of the Larry Parnes' Silly Names of the early sixties. It was only when I read Colin Harper's biography of Bert Jansch that I discovered there was a lot more to him than that.

"Long regarded by critics and cognoscenti as one of the most compelling British singers and songwriters of his generation, and as a recording artist whose career – perpetually blighted with bad luck – never remotely equalled his talents. In a nutshell, his time at the coalface of rock’n’roll, pop, folk, blues and progressive rock – and in truth no single genre is wide enough to pigeonhole the man’s music – spanned the late fifties to the mid-seventies, after which time he seemed to fade entirely from view." (quoted from Colin Harper's website)

After being discovered by Larry Parnes and suffering the obligatory name change, he never achieved the success of Marty Wilde, Georgie Fame, Billy Fury or others in the stable, possibly because he turned down the song "Livin' Doll" and left to go it alone. He was a vocalist of some note and as such Lennon and McCartney apparently wrote "I Saw Her Standing There" especially for him, when they were toying with the idea of just being songwriters. He became only the second person ever to cover one of their songs on 20th Feb 1963 (The Beatles recorded their version on 11th Feb) backed by the Graham Bond Quartet, including John McLaughlin (guitar), Jack Bruce (bass) and Ginger Baker (drums).When word came back that John & Paul found it "too jazzy", it was re-recorded and toned down, a month later.

As well as a pop singer, he became enamoured by the blues and worked as a duo with Alexis Korner for a year in 1964/5 playing the folk clubs and fronting Blues Incorporated on the 1965 lp "Sky High". Later that decade he recorded some demos with a world-class pool of collaborators (McLaughlin, Bruce, Baker, Danny Thompson, Terry Cox, Phil Seamen and others). This was eventually released by Transatlantic in 1972 as "Innovations" to critical acclaim. "The resemblance to Billie Holiday is the most striking thing about Duffy Power," according to Gramophone." At his finest he communicates the same sense of emotional involvement, the same distraught lyricism." He then formed a group "Duffy's Nucleus" with Thompson, Cox and Mclaughlin but it came to nothing bar some BBC sessions so Thompson and Cox moved off to form the rhythm section of Pentangle.

He did various session work in the late 1960's through to the 1980's, including harmonica on the soundtrack to The Italian Job, and harmonica on Bert Jansch's Birthday Blues album, but worked for the DHSS for many years. He was dogged by mental health [mental illness - Ed.] throughout his life, which coupled with drugs, hindered him from making a breakthrough into the mainstream. There was a brief comeback thanks to Paul Jones and others in the 1990's which resulted in him recording several radio sessions and contributing to the Bert Jansch tribute album "People on the Highway". 

In 2011 he released a new cd "Tigers", which is the subject of my download and the first thing that I had heard by him. I find the combination of his voice and minimalist guitar/harmonica totally mesmerising. It's an almost entirely acoustic record of just him, his bluesy voice, guitar and harmonica. Laid back folk blues, I should cocoa. The standout track for me is his cover of the reggae song "Johnny Too Bad", but his own composition, "Tigers" comes a close second, and the rest a close third. Success still evaded him however and he remains just a footnote in the story of the UK music scene. He died, aged 72, in 2014.