Stephen Duffy - I Love My Friends (2019) [Hi-Res]

Stephen Duffy’s 1996 solo album I Love My Friends available for the first time ever on vinyl and vinyl replica CD. Following a time of personal upheaval, the album was the result of an unprecedented creativity for Stephen. “The tunes and the words were coming faster than I could write them down. That’s the dichotomy of I Love My Friends. My interior world was falling apart, but creatively it was a charmed existence.” Strictly speaking, this version of I Love My Friends isn’t a reissue. On delivering the album to his label Indolent, Stephen was asked to record two more songs for putative single release. Produced by Andy Partridge, these songs necessitated the last-minute removal of two songs which have since passed into fan lore as two of Stephen’s all-time best: Mao Badge and In The Evening Of Her Day. This release of I Love My Friends restores these songs to the record, honouring Stephen’s original vision for the album. The two Andy Partridge-produced songs You Are and What If I Fell In Love With You? will be available on a seven-inch single which comes with all vinyl copies of I Love My Friends. They are added as bonus tracks to disc one of the CD version. In a 2015 appreciation of Stephen’s career, The Guardian singled out I Love My Friends as a high watermark: “Charming, touching and at times profoundly upsetting, it was a memoir of young loves and naive pop dreams that descended into raw tragedy on The Postcard, in which Duffy comes across a forgotten photograph of himself with a girlfriend who’d since died, and mourns her afresh. Heart-stopping stuff.” In 2003, The Sunday Times wrote “Duffy is creating a body of lyrically lacerating work that should win him gold discs rather than indifference.” While the 2019 vinyl release of I Love My Friends comes with a seven-inch containing the Partridge songs, the expanded 2019 CD release of I Love My Friends comes with an entire bonus disc of songs titled Blown Away - Selected Demos Volume 1.