The past few years have been peculiar but enormously kind to Stephen Duffy. He has spent them doing things that even his devoted fans must have despaired of him ever doing: playing Wembley four nights in a row, embarking on the fastest-selling world tour in history, promoting an album that sold 8m copies. The opening of Runout Groove, his first album since his tenure as Robbie Williams' co-songwriter and musical director ended, serves notice that normal service has been resumed in Duffy's world. The Lilac Time strum, sounding, as ever, like a band who could conceivably cover GG Allin's Needle Up My Cock and still conjure the image of people contentedly playing around a roaring fire with a bottle of pleasingly ballsy red on the go. In the background, there is the woody twang of folk-rock veteran Danny Thompson's double bass, which remains among the most peculiarly comforting sounds in rock, like a musical equivalent of the Shipping Forecast. "I feel," sighs Duffy, "like I live in another time."
That confession is hardly going to come as a shock to anyone who's followed his career, much of which seems to have been spent running away from the zeitgeist. Sometimes, you could hardly blame him: he famously quit Duran Duran shortly before they became the biggest pop band of the 1980s. On other occasions, quite what he was thinking remains a mystery. An early convert to ecstasy, he presciently realised that the new drug needed a futuristic soundtrack, but somehow arrived at the conclusion that said soundtrack should involve electronic reggae and lengthy trombone solos.
In 1987, the year of Terence Trent D'Arby and Wet Wet Wet, he decided the time was ripe to form a folk-rock band, the Lilac Time. Rural retreats were sought, banjos and finger-cymbals were played, beautiful, sepia-hued folk-rock songs about nostalgia and regret and cricket grounds in winter were written, and virtually no records were sold, beyond a small but rabid fanbase who quickly came to believe that Duffy was not merely the bloke who quit Duran Duran, then briefly made the charts under the dreadful nom de pop Tin Tin, but a uniquely gifted songwriter. They have stuck with him ever since, up to the moment when precisely the kind of folk-rock the Lilac Time had been peddling for years began enjoying a resurgence in interest. By that point, naturally, Duffy was working with Robbie Williams on the strict condition that they didn't write songs that sounded anything like the Lilac Time.
Said rabid fanbase will not be minded to pick holes in the Lilac Time's eighth album, but those who are might alight on its opening tracks. Finely wrought, beautifully done and clearly the product of exquisite taste - the beardy shadow of the Incredible String Band looms over Dark Squadrons - they also may be slightly too understated for their own good. In fairness, you can see how understatement would appeal if you'd just spent three years in close proximity to Robbie Williams and, in any case, they're followed by a magical, supine cover of the Everly Brothers' ('Til) I Kissed You. Duffy sings it as if half his body's hanging out of a hammock. Even the drum rolls that provide the song's hook seem heavy-lidded and satiated. Chaste 1950s teen romance suddenly sounds adult and post-coital.
Aldermaston has both a phenomenal chorus and a lyric that proudly interlinks the 50s folk revival with the Lilac Time's own Thatcher-era genesis, ponders the death of Franco and the Afghanistan war - and still finds time to mention sexual congress with the type of Gauloise-smoking, sloe-eyed lady who populates Lilac Time songs in profusion. Indeed, one crops up ambling through the French countryside on Pruning the Vine, the song unexpectedly swelling from languid 12-string strum to darkly pulsating chorus. The Kite and the Sky, meanwhile, is delicately beautiful.
These are fantastic songs, evidence of why the Lilac Time has a cult following. Whether their ranks will be swelled by Runout Groove is debatable. It's hard to imagine many of those who shelled out for Robbie Williams' Intensive Care being similarly enthused by its co-author's ability to relocate a lovely, bucolic-sounding folk riff to a modern north London landscape, as on Parliament Hill Fields. Still, you rather get the impression that may not matter to the people behind Runout Groove. "Don't wish for fame," cautions Duffy on a song called Happy Go Lucky, with the tone of a man who's recently seen up close what happens when you do, and concluded that there are far worse places to be than softly out of step with the world.