Like many young persons, this week’s Icon got into the music business to “get laid”, something that decent Herald on Sunday readers will find deplorable.
Paolo Nutini sings of love, that mystical, nebulous, irrational condition by which women con men into procreation and the continuation of our ghastly species. Any decent society would have it banned.
Yet so much music dwells on it. Why can’t they sing about properly interesting subjects such as the underlying rate of inflation, V-neck pullovers, the plight of the postal service (check out my forthcoming prog-rap album, Pragmatic Speculations)?
Mr Nutini is soulful, but not beyond sampling Charlie Chaplin. He’s also a consummate performer, with a languorous but fully engaged style. And he’s a much admired songwriter, despite his deplorable subject matter.
Having sold many millions of albums, and earned 18 Platinum certifications in the UK alone, he reportedly remains a down-to-earth fellow who, living in Glasgow now, has been to known to sample the delights of Guinness in Heraghty’s and to cheer on popular soccer side Celtic at Parkhead. As well as being handsome – one article described his “Timotei hair and Angelina Jolie lips” – he is said to be likeable. The bastard.
Controversially, despite being of Italian descent, Paulo has a Scottish accent, the brogue that causes much bewilderment and ire worldwide. The Irish Times described Paulo’s accent as “virtually impenetrable, thickly layered”. The Irish fe**ing Times!
He doesn’t sing in Scottish, though. He’s not The Proclaimers. Paulo Giovanni Nutini couldn’t help but have a Scottish accent, having been born in Paisley on 9 January 1987 to Alfredo, a Scot of Italian descent from Barga in Tuscany, and Linda, a lass of Scottish descent.
The family ran a chip shop, where Paulo helped out at least once: “it wasn’t for him”, his father has said, perhaps because one customer asked him to deep-fry a bag of Maltesers.
Karaoke king
HE was first encouraged to sing by his music-loving grandfather, Giovanni “Jackie” Nutini, and a teacher at his school, St Andrew’s Academy, who recognised his talent.
The first time he sang in front of anybody was one New Year’s Eve on the family’s karaoke machine. “Everybody was like, ‘What?’ Nobody really knew,” he has recalled.
Moving further afield, he found singing helped what had hitherto been the then teenager’s lack of “luck with the ladies”. And what did he sing? “It would’ve been something really cheesy, engineered to get laid,” he told Interview Magazine in 2014. Anyone looking to emulate this shameful example might like to note that Sinatra went down particularly well. Wish I hadn’t told you that now.
Nutini left school to work as a roadie and to sell t-shirts for Scottish band Speedway, before landing a role as recording gopher in Glasgow’s Park Lane Studios. Here, he started demoing songs, while an appearance at an open-air gig saw the teenager talent-spotted and whisked away to yonder London, where he performed regularly at The Bedford pub in Balham.
Within three years, he was selling out gigs across the UK, not to mention being the support act for The Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse and KT Tunstall.
In 2006, he released no fewer than four singles: free download These Streets; Last Request which charted at number five; Jenny Don’t Be Hasty (20); and Rewind (27).
His debut album, These Streets, was also released in 2006, with the aforementioned songs and others chronicling stormy relationships, encounters with an older woman and asking a lover for one more night together, the purpose of this not being clear.
Brash and horny
HIS second album, Sunny Side Up, went straight to number one in the UK, with more than 60,000 sales. The change in sound attracted mixed reviews. The album was even accused of being “funky”. A Telegraph writer praised the “joyous” blend of “soul, country, folk and the brash, horny energy of ragtime swing”. However, a Guardian scribe enthused that it was “not bad”, with opening track 10/10 “jaunty enough to make you retch”. Harsh!
Sunny Side’s 2014 follow-up Caustic Love was described as being “rooted in classic R&B grooves”. Surely not? As I’ve explained authoritatively before, all music with “&” in it is rubbish. Rock good; rock & roll mince. Country good; country & western tripe. Rhythm good; rhythm & blues evil.
Whatever, Caustic Love debuted at – all together now – number one in the UK Albums Chart. The Independent called it “an unqualified success”, and an 18-month tour following the release saw Paulo perform in North America, Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, not forgetting Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park and an audience of 35,000.
In 2022, eight years after Caustic Love, he released his fourth album, Last Night in the Bittersweet, described by Hot Press as “genre-bending”. Experimental but reliably Paulo, it explores the ups and doons of lurve, with opening track Afterneath featuring a sample of Patricia Arquette’s repeated line “You’re so cool,” from Quentin Tarantino’s film, True Romance.
“True Romance,” quoth Paulo, “was one of those films that immediately stuck with me. Not only the script – it really goes into the rawness of being in love with someone.” Awright, shurrup aboot it.
Paulo has a special love for Barga, the medieval Tuscan town whence the Italian side of his family hails. In 2007, he was awarded the Golden St Christopher medal to celebrate his contributions to the town and its people.
In 2012, in an emotional performance, he played a packed concert in the same opera house that previous generations of his family would visit. The singer told the Daily Record: “I’ve been coming here just about every year since I was a baby and it’s the most amazing place in the world … [It] always feels like coming home.”
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Just pants
AT least, no one threw their underwear at him there, as happened repeatedly in Canada. As he walked off stage at one gig, a bra landed on his mic stand – “a nice exit shot”.
Asked in 2009 if he liked being a sex symbol, Paulo replied: “It’s the only reason I’m involved in music – the hope that I’m going to have some underwear thrown at me. Not really, I just try and dodge it.”
It must be awful really – never getting any peace from pants. He has confessed that he gets recognised hither and yon, telling the BBC: “I don’t see why my look is in any way distinctive, so it surprises me. I think it’s the nose.” Tell you what: that boy’s mirrors are rubbish.