Singer Duffy sits next to a clear blue swimming pool on a hotel rooftop patio, the sun setting behind her blond bouffant. She takes a sip of her drink, widens her blue eyes and grins.
“Just like the movies!” she exclaims about the setting — repeating a waiter’s observation.
It all does seem just like the movies, and a long journey for an ambitious gal raised in a tiny town in North Wales who now lives in London. Just hours earlier, she performed her ‘60s-inspired hit “Mercy” for the first time on U.S. television, singing her heart out for a taping of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” A day earlier, she played to a sweaty crowd at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in the California desert. Her album “Rockferry” — already a chart-topping smash in England — made its U.S. debut Tuesday.
The 23-year-old — born Aimee Anne Duffy, but known simply as Duffy — is one of several young female singers from the United Kingdom descending on the United States.
Amy Winehouse, whose double-platinum U.S. debut “Back to Black” album won five Grammys earlier this year, and fellow London crooner Lily Allen’s critically acclaimed debut, “Alright, Still,” may have jump-started this so-called British Invasion. But Duffy and others such as chart-topper Leona Lewis, Adele, Kate Nash, Laura Marling, Estelle and Amy MacDonald are mapping out their own paths from Europe to the United States, and the women are all unique.
Still, some have dubbed them the “new Amys.”
Duffy sighs at the comparisons.
“I kind of want to be left alone a little bit, with that. I want to hide. I prefer to be not known than to be known as something completely wrong,” Duffy told The Associated Press during an interview at a Los Angeles-area hotel.

accesshollywood.com