When Martin Duffy was 18 he saw an advert in a Birmingham record store that asked: “Do You Want To Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Star?”
Modest to a fault, he was not too fussed about the stardom and when he subsequently found fame with Primal Scream he was never entirely comfortable with it. Yet he knew that all he wanted to do with his life was to play rock’n’roll and so he replied.
The advert had been placed by Lawrence Hayward, founder of the indie rock band Felt, whose three albums had earned them a cult following but little commercial success. Duffy got the gig and Felt immediately restyled their sound around his keyboard playing. The band’s next two albums were almost entirely instrumental with Duffy’s virtuosity on piano, organ and vibraphone to the fore.
He stayed with Felt until the group broke up in 1989, by which time his keyboard playing was in demand across the spectrum of British indie rock. He had already guested on the first two albums by Primal Scream and once he became available the band’s leader, Bobby Gillespie, wasted no time in making him a full-time member.
At the time Primal Scream were toiling on the lower slopes of rock’s Mount Olympus but Duffy’s arrival coincided with their elevation to the summit. The first album on which he appeared as a full-time member was the epochal Screamadelica, released in 1991. A euphoric mix of garage rock, psychedelia and funk, the album defined the hedonistic acid-house scene of the times, was voted album of the year by Melody Maker and won the inaugural Mercury music prize.
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Primal Scream went on to become one of the most notoriously drugged-up bands of them all and tales of excess followed wherever they played. Yet Duffy stayed mostly above the chaos around him. One story his bandmates loved to tell involved him being so drunk in a bar in New York that he did not notice when he was stabbed in the buttocks. On another occasion he broke his ankle while drunkenly dancing in a fountain in France.
Yet the reason such stories were so often retold was that they were the exceptions that proved the rule. “I know he was associated with one of the most notorious bands of the 1990s but he’d wince at descriptions of him as a wild man or hell-raiser,” his brother Steve Duffy, a journalist with BBC Wales, told The Times. “He was the antithesis of that. If he drank too much he’d invariably end the evening talking some amiable nonsense rather than get into any trouble.”
Off stage he was more likely to be seen at an art gallery or museum; searching out neolithic sites and stone circles; following Aston Villa FC or spending his money in the nearest record store to add to his vast and varied collection.
Gillespie called him “the most musically talented of all of us”. Tim Burgess, in whose band the Charlatans he also played, called him “the only musical genius I’ve ever met”.
In Duffy a quirky sense of humour was married to an eye for the surreal and the absurd. “He lived to laugh and play music,” Gillespie said.
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He also lived for his son, Louie, who survives him. He married Della Purcell, who worked in publishing, in Hawaii in 2001 and Louie was born two years later. The marriage ended in divorce but they remained friends and their son divided his time happily between his parents’ two nearby homes in Brighton.
Duffy’s talent enabled him to cope with any style that was thrown at him and he was an in-demand session player who featured on tracks by Oasis, the Chemical Brothers and Beth Orton among others. Yet his virtuosity meant that bands tended to remodel their sound around his playing.
Martin Bernard Duffy was born in 1967 in Birmingham, the second of three sons to Bernard and Bernardine Duffy. His father, who died when he was 12, was a toolmaker and shop steward at the British Leyland plant at Longbridge during a time of repeated strikes and industrial action. His mother was a secretary before becoming a piano teacher at the local Catholic primary school after her children were born. Educated at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School, Kings Norton, he took a few formal piano lessons but by the age of 10 or 11 he had developed his own style and an enviable capacity to hear a tune on the radio and reproduce it instantly.
With a repertoire that ranged from boogie-woogie to Beatles songs, he often played the piano at school at lunchtimes to entertain his classmates queueing for their food. His first paid performance came at 16 when he landed a gig at a Cambridge college ball. He was by then playing an electric organ, an ex-demonstration model given to him by a family friend who ran a musical instrument business and recognised his exceptional talent.
On leaving school he briefly worked in the archive section of the Birmingham register office before he answered the advert to join Felt. Content to be an adaptable sideman, he only made one solo album, in 2014, and even then had to be cajoled into doing so by Burgess. Titled Assorted Promenades it was a collection of impressionistic instrumentals, influenced by his admiration for contemporary classical composers such as Harold Budd and Arvo Pärt.
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It was a fine record but he was reluctant to promote it or to release a follow-up. “I’m quite shy,” he said. “I don’t blow my own trumpet.”
Instead he left his music to do it for him.
Martin Duffy, keyboard player, was born on May 18, 1967. He died of a brain injury after a fall at his home on December 18, 2022, aged 55