More Blue-Eyed Soul From Wales

Though Lee and Duffy were working incognito, the British music industry managed to get wind of what they were quietly soldiering away on. Lee began having to turn down offers to introduce her talented ingénue. It was a time, says Butler, for Duffy to soak up musical influences she had never come across in her sheltered childhood in Wales. "She was with me when she bought an iPod, and she would come round to my house and I would fill it up for her each time with dribs and drabs starting from the ground up," Butler says. "All musicians are like sponges: you squeeze it and it comes out in some beautiful way or not. With Duffy gold dust came out."

Last autumn, after signing a record deal, Duffy was released like a storm on the British musical press. "When I heard her songs, I booked her straight away on my show," says the BBC's Whiley. "We had her perform in this massive church and she just blew everyone away." Her talent is on full display in such songs as "Warwick Avenue," a breakup song without any guile or cheese, sung with smoky vocals and a powerful, lifting, heartbreaking crescendo. "Rockferry," a nod to her father's hometown in Wales, is a different song—recorded in only one take—with no chorus but sweeping vocals and pounding piano that give imagery of crashing waves and divine isolation.

With the press always desperate for comparisons, many have hailed her as "the new Amy Winehouse," the talented but troubled British jazz singer. Duffy politely scoffs at this association of same-named Amys. "It is quite shallow to think someone is replaceable," Duffy says. "I am not a jazz singer, but what can you do? I am not going to complain about what people are saying." And audiences certainly aren't going to complain about Duffy.

© 2008