Slinky Vagabond: 'I think this record is more together'

Alongside his educational commitments, Duffty, who grew up near Doncaster and studied fashion design at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London before becoming a noted designer who worked with David Bowie and the Sex Pistols, has returned to his other love: music. This month his band Slinky Vagabond are back with their second album, The Eternal Return.

Duffty feels his partnership with the seasoned Italian musician and producer Fabio Fabbri has deepened on this release. “I think this record is more together,” he says. “Although there are a couple of songs of mine on it that I released on an album in the 90s, I wanted to do new versions of them. One of them admittedly the guitar licks on it are very ‘Noel Gallagher’, but I saw it as timely because that Britpop moment does to be creeping back into the consciousness with Oasis reforming.

“I was just with a guy in London who’s created an exhibition and he was the DJ and founder of a nightclub called Smashing which was one of the seminal Britpop nightclubs where people like Jarvis Cocker would also DJ, and it seemed to me that younger people are interested in that moment again, so for this record there are a couple of tracks on it that have that vibe. It wasn’t at all a planned thing, it just happened.

“But a lot of the other material Fabio and I have written together, much more so than we had before. I think we were just finding our feet as a partnership for the last record. It started as a fun project, we didn’t have any intention of making a record, but with this we wanted to make a complete package.”

Writing via email, Fabbri agrees. “During the production of the first album, we focused on creating a distinctive and recognisable sound for Slinky Vagabond. We experimented a fusion between our separate songwriting styles. I concentrated on the music side and Keanan on the lyrics. This trend was repeated itself for The Eternal Return but with greater awareness and passion.”

Explaining his vision for The Eternal Return, Fabbri, who cites Hull-born guitarist Mick Ronson of the Spiders From Mars among his influences, says: “First of all, we wanted to create good music which could seem banal but this is a good reason to write music in this era. Actually our vision was projected towards creating something less earthy and more imaginative. We tried to find a sound that combined rock music with this kind of feeling.”

The album continues Duffty’s Bowie connections, with guest appearances by pianist Mike Garson and singer Ava Cherry, plus a track co-written with guitarist Earl Slick.

Speaking to the The Yorkshire Post from Los Angeles, Garson says of the differing styles he adopts on the tightly-written Anthem and the more free-form Ad Astra: “I have both abilities. Mick Ronson in 1972 gave me maybe the best advice of anyone and yet it haunted me financially but not musically, he said, ‘Don’t just become a studio musician, you’ll become white toast and you’ll be just eaten up and spit out, keep your voice and play things you like’ and I stuck with that for many, many years. Now I do a little more studio but it’s still by choice and the ones I do in my house I almost view as like a mentoring.”

Slick regrets not being able to play on the album’s closing track, End of The Show, which he co-wrote. “Circumstances at the time didn’t allow me to do it,” he says. Nevertheless he’s pleased to see the song, which he and Duffty began work on back in 2008 in an early incarnation of Slinky Vagabond, finally see the light of day. “Especially as I forgot about it, because it was a long time ago,” he says.

He even rejected Duffty’s suggestion that he should have the lion’s share of royalties for the track. “It’s a funny thing about writing besides working as a sideman,” he says. “To be honest I was always more comfortable with that than having my own band, because there was no bull****. ‘Here’s David Bowie, he’s John Lennon’...so I know that my role is very specific and I didn’t have to get involved in who royalties and the rest of that. (Someone going) ‘I wrote this much more of that than you do, so let’s split it 47-53’. Dude, we were both in the room, learn something from Lennon and McCartney and Jagger and Richards.”

Cherry, who had a relationship with Bowie in the mid 1970s, became friends with Duffty after they met at a Bowie convention in Liverpool last year. She says that she declined his suggestion to duet with him on the album’s opening song Lady Bump Discotechque; however, she did contribute featured vocals. “I would’ve had to have taken into consideration the key that he wanted to sing it in and stuff like that, so it just wasn’t going to fit as a duet for me, but I love the song” she says. “I just figured to put a little enhancement. It’s still featured, it’s not really backing vocals. Featured people just take a line on songs all day long on stuff, so that’s really how I saw it.”

Duffty is keen for Slinky Vagabond to play some shows this year. “Some friends of ours in New York have a band called The Ritualists, and actually the singer from that band, Christian Dryden, is an excellent bass player and drummer and he played drums on our entire album, so what we want to do is pair up with his band so we can play gigs together and then his rhythm section can join is so we’ll have a kind of ad hoc band that can perform the songs live electronically, and then do some other gigs that are more event-based – tell a few stories, play a few songs and that will be that,” he says.

Fabri is similarly enthused. “It would be very important and exciting for us to go on tour and also a challenge to experience a real live contact with the audience,” he says. “Although it would be logistically complicated due to us living in different parts of the world, we are trying to plan a few live gigs in the near future.”

As well as the album, Duffty also has a book out. Called The Fashion Entrepreneur, it sprang out of his educational work at the University of Southern California’s Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy.

“I started getting involved in higher ed by accident,” he says. “I’d done a little bit of guest speaking in schools before that, but that’s totally different to actually teaching. In 2012 I accepted a position in San Francisco and my wife and I moved there for three years. it was with a big fashion university.

“I did it through force of circumstance, to be honest. I had no teacher training, so I was a little insecure about doing it and it was a big job with a big school, and a friend of mine was the director of the school, so he said ‘we’ll give you the support you need’, and I found that I loved it.

“Despite the fact that I didn’t know how to teach in a formalised way, I did know a lot about our industry, success and failure and the way to build a business, the way to design and to be creative. So I found that easy to impart to younger people who were wanting to pursue that. Then over time I’ve seen those kids graduate and get jobs and start businesses and they all stay in touch.

“Over the years, what has happened to me is I’m quite a good administrator and manager so I always end up going further into that side of higher ed, so I end up being a director or a manager of programmes and then I’m doing less teaching and a lot more managing of faculty which I can do quite easily but I don’t like that as much. It’s much more gratifiying to teach and see the success of young people.

“But the Iovine and Young thing, I started working with them a couple of years ago because they’re not a fashion school but they have students also from other universities with the University of Southern California that were interested in some fashion content. That is amazing because I’m teaching people that are software engineers or contemporary dance majors, doing diverse in-depth study and I’m bringing them into specific subject matters like fashion entrepreneurship, sustainability, fashion history and so on – and that is all the basis of that book.

“It’s five segments – fashion design, fashion business, fashion marketing and public relations, sustainability and consciousness in building something. All of what I’ve learned I’ve put in a very condensed way into that book. It’s not like war stories, it’s nothing to do with my career, it’s basically hung around several fashion professionals who provided interviews and then on that I layered my experiences and guidance. I hope it’s a useful tool for people to start and business or to guide their career.”

The Eternal Return is out now. https://www.slinkyvagabond.net/

Keanan Duffty’s book, The Fashion Entrepreneur: the definitive guide to building your brand, is published by Laurence King, priced £30.