"I don't think it's overstating the case to say that, had Jeff Duff hailed
from a country in the top half of the world, he could now be as acknowledged
and acclaimed as a David Bowie, or Lou Reed, or Iggy Pop. But egalitarian Australia
has never been terribly fond, nor forgiving of its gifted eccentrics, most of
whom (Barry Humphries jumping swiftest to mind) have been forced away from its
shores by disdain or, worse, indifference.
When Jeff Duff took refuge in England in 1977 he had, as they say, worn out
his welcome in Australian rock. He was simply too much of a handful, this waif
with a wharfies voice camping it up out front of a ballsy, brassy jazz-rock
ensemble. Australian music fans, congregated in suburban beer barns loudly demanding
that their rock'n'roll heroes ''suck more piss'', were caught a little off guard
by Jeff and his band Kush, a band as left-of-centre as the lower continent has
ever produced. I mean, hey! the band was ok, but the androgynous bloke floating
around the stage in leotards, garish make-up and a touch of the operatics was
a bit, ah...... suspect.
Although he would straight-facedly tell a reporter in 1987: ''l didn't intend
to outrage, it was not deliberate'', Duff mischievously played games with the
trash press, who, with very little effort on their part, cast him as some sort
of transvestite terror hell bent on corrupting a nations morals. He may well
have been, but Australia wasn't the nation. Duffo left the country and relocated
himself in a city and country which has not only bred but embraced eccentrics.
Arriving in London as punk was shaking the mother country by the throat, the
lad fitted like a sequin on a tutu. The exhibitions, the extremism, the visual
assault so integral to the punk culture that it could have been a sequence from
his own fertile imagination. Sucked into the vortex, he became a thread in the
fabric of this alienated age; a knotted thread. Soon Andy Warhol was issuing
forth his oft-quoted utterance: ''Sinatra, Presley, Jagger, Popeye..... &
now Duffo."
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Glenn A. Baker, Australian rock historian
For the complete Jeff Duff story click here.