Ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler has said he has sympathy for Welsh singer Duffy after her music career stalled - despite her firing him.
The legendary indie musician and songwriter co-produced and performed on soul siren Duffy's 2008 Grammy-winning debut album Rockferry, but played no part in 2010's less successful follow-up Endlessly.
She has yet to release a third album, but Butler said he felt Duffy had been "hurled into the fire" of showbusiness in a similar way to his experience with Suede in the early 1990s
He told the Sunday Times: "She went off the rails and it all went pear-shaped for her. And maybe she brought all those problems on herself.
"But I always had quite a lot of sympathy for her, because she was young, from this tiny village in Wales, and she was just hurled into the fire.
And everyone said, 'Don't act strange.' Why? Of course she was going to go off the rails.
"When I was in Suede, I did the same to a certain extent; that was one of the times when I was closest to being a bit nutty, because it was a bit of a baptism of fire."
Butler is now performing with his new band, Trans. Their second EP, Trans Green, is out now.
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