Stephen Duffy

'Tripping' "That was written in LA in the end of 2003, and getting it right took months. One of the first things Rob wrote when he picked up a bass was the bassline to 'Tripping'. We had this Daft Punk drum-machine line going on and he played this bass line, and immediately we had a song. I wrote the 'want you to love me' section, and I was thinking that it sounded really nice and melodic, but immediately Rob trumped me with the falsetto line, which was, of course, a much better hook. We used a Waldorf Q for the bubbling sequential thing underneath the track. It was the only time that machine worked. But it had served its purpose."

'Spread Your Wings' "We started that on a Juno 60 and a Linn Drum. We'd gone out and bought stuff that day and went mad on it, using every sound we had at our disposal. The transformation from that to what it became was amazing. In the end Jebin Bruni came into Henson for an afternoon and played ARP String Ensemble and Chamberlin. I met him working with Aimee Mann and Marianne Faithful. Robert and I had done most of the keyboards, so wanted to get a fresh player, and I thought it would be interesting to get somebody in who is used to playing these kind of cranky old keyboards."

'Sin Sin Sin' "This was the first song we ever wrote, and it basically started off as a bass drum doing fours and a bass sequence in eights over the top of it. He sang the whole of the first verse over the top of that, just like that. It was quite incredible. The sequenced section that you can still hear started off as a Reason sound, and then I added the Roland XV5080, and added an SH101 sound and perhaps a Prophet 5 to give it a little bit more of a gritty, gnarly texture. I messed around with that sound quite a lot. We changed the speed of the song many times, and the Reason sound became so strange and deconstructed that it became part of the song."

The keyboard rig Stephen Duffy is using on Robbie Williams' world tour is based around a Korg Triton Extreme workstation and CX3 tonewheel organ emulator.

The keyboard rig Stephen Duffy is using on Robbie Williams' world tour is based around a Korg Triton Extreme workstation and CX3 tonewheel organ emulator.

"During our time in LA, Rob and I went out to junk shops and so on," recalls Duffy, "and bought a lot of vintage analogue gear, like a Juno 60, Prophet 5, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, and Linn Drum. I also bought an ARP String Ensemble on eBay because it has the sound of those early Roxy Music albums. Rob was really into having a kind of 1980s sound. People have suggested that it came from me, since I had a synthesizer hit record in the mid '80s, but Rob was referencing New Order and the Human League and bands like that. I would never have come up with those ideas. Of course, for me it was helpful that I'd had been working with Junos and Jupiters and so on with the Tintin records in the early 1980s."

"During our time in LA, Rob and I went out to junk shops and so on," recalls Duffy, "and bought a lot of vintage analogue gear, like a Juno 60, Prophet 5, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, and Linn Drum. I also bought an ARP String Ensemble on eBay because it has the sound of those early Roxy Music albums. Rob was really into having a kind of 1980s sound. People have suggested that it came from me, since I had a synthesizer hit record in the mid '80s, but Rob was referencing New Order and the Human League and bands like that. I would never have come up with those ideas. Of course, for me it was helpful that I'd had been working with Junos and Jupiters and so on with the Tintin records in the early 1980s."