We are privileged and honoured to host a concert with GRAEME DUFFIN Guitarist of Wet Wet Wet 1984.

A very special evening of music, living with a stammer, faith, and being the fifth ‘Wet’, as well as plenty of well known and a few lesser known songs.

Graeme will look back over his incredible music career through the songs and stories that have shaped his life.

In dialogue with friend and musician Rob Halligan

Graeme Duffin toured the world and appeared a staggering 54 times on Top of the Pops with Wet Wet Wet

Lead guitarist, backing vocalist, co-producer on all of Wet Wet Wet's 27 major hit song

"Love Is All Around": No1 for 15 weeks in 1994 by Wet Wet Wet - one of the most successful pop bands in British music history

Wed 7th May 2025 | Doors open: 7.00pm

GRAEME DUFFIN TRIBUTE ON YOUTUBE:  Wet Wet Wet "This Time Live": a Graeme Duffin tribute

WET WET WET ft GRAEME DUFFIN:  "Love Is All Around" at Live 8's "Final Push" in Edinburgh's Murrayfield Stadium 

GRAEME DUFFIN on Spotify

Graeme Duffin is best known as the guitarist for Scottish pop sensation Wet Wet Wet. For more than 40 years his guitar playing has been a signature sound of one of the most successful bands in British pop history.

Following on from a sold-out Wet Wet Wet tour in 2024, which saw them perform to tens of thousands in major arena across the country, the band have now announced another huge 2025 tour of the UK throughout January, February, and October.

Inventively during alternative months of 2025 Graeme Duffin will be touring as a solo artist, joined by good friend and fellow musician Rob Halligan, as he looks back over his incredible music career through the songs and stories that have shaped his life.

A very special evening of music, faith, living with a stammer, and being the fifth ‘Wet’, as well as plenty of well known and a few lesser known songs.

Get your ticket booked asap, and not be disappointed, for the Leeds stop on Wed 7th May 2025 at Acoustic Nights @ The Barn in Meanwood.

Graeme Duffin is a current member of Wet Wet Wet and has been from the day the band was formed in the 80s.

“I actually got the offer to join Deacon Blue and Wet Wet Wet in the same week".

“The Wets didn’t even have a record deal at that time and I didn’t know any of the boys. In fact I was nine years older than anyone else in the band."

“I was old friends with Deacon Blue’s singer Ricky Ross, but I still had to say ‘I’m sorry - but I’ve just agreed to join the Wets’.”

“Musically I was a good fit, but stylistically at that point I had really long hair and a beard and wore a hippy coat."

A musically-articulate, slightly older addition to the gang of Clydebank school-chums, he had been playing jazz, funk and folk – often with musicians older than himself – on the Glasgow scene years before he was drafted into Wet Wet Wet.

"At primary school I was playing all the Shadows tunes. Hank Marvin. He was my first guitar hero. I thought, “It sounds great, how do you play that?” Fortunately it was all quite easy. After Hank Marvin there were people like Jan Ackerman of Focus! And I did like Steve Howe at the time, I have to say."

Tom Morton, an old friend of Graeme Duffin, wrote in an article titled "Scotland's Great Lost Album": "I knew of Graeme’s previous exploits with legendary Glasgow jazz funk combo Maybe The Floor and his reputation as one of the city’s top guitarists." Morton then came across a superb late 70's album "On the Line" by a Glasgow folk band called New Celeste. "Not long after the record’s release I met the young, extremely hirsute guitarist called Graeme Duffin, fresh from months on the European gig circuit with New Celeste. He had decided the glamorous van life of gigging from Irvine to Lorient, John O’Groats to Hamburg, was over."

In 2024 after 45 years, the New Celeste "On the Line" album has been remastered and re-released online. Produced in 1979 brilliantly by Ulli Weigel mixed at the legendary Hansa on the Wall, soon to become famous for the work there of Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Graeme Duffin’s jazz-rock and funk chops are more to the fore on the album than anything else he’s done. Reviewed as “the best thing to come out of Glasgow since Rangers and Celtic. They are without doubt the best contemporary band in the country.”

Graeme Duffin continues “So Wet Wet Wet could see I could play and decided to give me a go, so the beard went off and I got a haircut.”

The Wets exploded onto the pop scene in 1987 with their debut single "Wishing I Was Lucky", before going on to appear a staggering 54 times on Top of the Pops.

They first topped the charts in 1988 with the Children in Need charity single "With A Little Help From My Friends" and hit the No1 spot again in 1991 with "Goodnight Girl".

But undoubtedly they are most famous for their cover of The Troggs' sixties hit "Love Is All Around" from the "Four Weddings and a Funeral" movie soundtrack - which was No1 for 15 weeks in 1994.

"I was always very grateful for the song "Love is all Around". It extended the career of the band by a good few years and it’s certainly stood the test of time. When it comes on the radio occasionally, it still sounds vibrant and fresh. Yeah, I played lead guitar on it .. and sang a lot of the backing vocals and had an involvement in the production."

And Graeme, who played on all 27 of their major hits, maintains he was happy to live out of the limelight as he was already a married dad with two kids Esther and Jamie when they hit the big time.

In fact the “fifth Wet” was deliberately kept in the shadows by the band’s record label Phonogram and was once even scolded when he made it into a publicity picture.

Graeme has a unique position in the band because, although he always toured and recorded and featured musically with Wet Wet Wet and been on Top of the Pops about 54 times, he was left out of most of the promo work due, he says to the band being marketed at teenagers and him being about ten years older than the rest of the band.

Graeme adds: “But while Marti was the frontman I was always happy just being a musician. I think the key is not to think you’re a pop star and believe your hype."

“Because that way you go from saying "‘Do you know who I am?" To one day saying "Do you know who I used to be?". We met plenty like that over the years with a huge chip on their shoulder.”

"Wet Wet Wet pretty much followed the obligatory Rock and Roll manual and the ups and downs, but somehow the friendship and the commitment to each other has been strong enough to keep that cohesion there and to sustain the band. That old adage that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts is true with Wet Wet Wet. Whenever the band get together and do a gig there is definitely something very special that happens."

As Wet Wet Wet continue to headline festivals around the UK and Europe, Graeme has also found the time to return to his jazz roots with a solo flamenco album called "Spain".

Graeme Duffin’s solo album "Spain" was launched at Glasgow’s Linn Factory on 18th August 2022. It is available to listen to online on all the major platform.

Graeme, who co-produced nearly all of The Wets' studio albums, says: “All the decades of experience in studios across the world with the Wets allowed me to pick up the skills to produce the album I always wanted to make. I would hope that even people that don’t like jazz would appreciate this as a chill out album.”

The pandemic inevitably had curtailed the touring schedule of Wet Wet Wet. That is when Graeme returned to his early love of jazz, and, employing the skills of a lifetime in the music business and the connections he has made, to produce his first solo album "Spain".

Named after the tune by the late Chick Corea that opens it, "Spain" was made entirely at Duffin’s home studio on Glasgow’s south side, with the participation of chums from Scotland’s jazz scene.

“I didn’t start it until well into the first lockdown,” Duffin explains. “I bought a nice nylon-string electro-acoustic guitar, and it was an opportunity to re-explore the music I had been starting to play 35 years ago. That was before the appearance of a certain pop group meant it was put on a back burner."

Duffin is still reluctant to describe himself as a jazz musician, although the quality of the album argues otherwise. Self-released, it reached number four in the UK Jazz and Blues charts.

As well as being a very fine guitarist, Duffin is a recording technician of formidable experience, whose skills have more recently been employed assembling a new Wet Wet Wet album, The Journey, which was released in 2021.

Until 2020 Graeme was a partner in Motherwell’s Foundry Music Lab, a studio complex in the industrial town to the east of Glasgow.

“My studio partner Sandy Jones found a newer council-owned place with more space, but I had been working more from home anyway, so I took it as my cue to make an exit.”

“Sandy Jones and I have recorded hundreds of albums, so I’ve been utilising the experience I’ve gained and the pop production sensibilities I’ve learned, getting that fine detail and getting everything sitting in its place. I really enjoy all that and it was good to apply it to my own project for a change. It was exciting to hear it come together."

BRING A FRIEND

Free Car Parking available in the Meanwood Valley Urban Farm large car park.

Also available is Wheelchair access. Please email Andrew at the venue on barnacousticnights@gmail.com if you need to discuss accessibility.

HOW TO BOOK YOUR £7.50 TICKETS see Tickets below.

THE CONCERT WILL BE A PART SEATED AND PART STANDING EVENT.

SEATS ALLOCATED ON FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED BASIS.

PRIORITY GIVEN TO ADVANCED TICKET HOLDERS.

Hot Food and Coffee on Sale from 7pm | BYOB

It is recommended that you ARRIVE EARLY at the venue from 7pm to allow time to order your coffee and/or food and get the best seats.