The Quiet Scotsman

languorously sprawled on the bed of a luxurious Glasgow hotel room, lovingly cradling a battered old Gibson guitar, Paolo Giovanni Nutini yawns widely. The 22-year-old musician sounds a lot more wrecked than he looks. “Sorry, man, but I’ve no had much sleep these past couple days,” he apologises, in his thick – and occasionally impenetrable – Scots accent.

Nutini’s exhaustion is understandable. It may be par for the course for your average multi-platinum-selling rock star, but the olive-skinned, almond-eyed and strikingly handsome Scotsman has just spent the previous 48 hours partying with a bunch of supermodels in Milan. “Aye, I’m just back this morning from a little two-day jaunt in Italy,” he laughs. “It was a Giorgio Armani gig. There was this fashion show there that I got invited to, and once my partner caught wind of it, I didn’t really have any other option but to go.”
It’s difficult to tell whether Nutini’s webbed brown wool cardigan and light blue T-shirt are designer clobber or thrift shop chic. No matter. Either way, sporting a five o’clock shadow, he looks the cover star part. Buoyed by the news that his sophomore album, Sunny Side Up, has hit the No 1 spot in Ireland, he has a lot to be cheerful about. In a way the album title says it all about Paolo Nutini right now:

Born and raised in Paisley, a suburb of Glasgow, where his family have lived for four generations, Paolo Nutini is of immigrant Italian stock. He is immensely proud of his Italian heritage and returns to the village that his great-grandparents left all those years ago as often as he can.
“I’ll try and go back again this summer,” he says, “try and get a taste of the nice weather, and the food and try and disappear for a wee while. I would usually go to Barga in Tuscany, which is like a little small town in the mountains.”
The people of Barga are obviously equally proud of him. In 2007, following the success of his million selling debut These Streets, Nutini was awarded the highest civic honour the town can bestow – the Golden St. Christopher Medal
“Aye, that was great. It’s not an award, it’s like a small medal of St Christopher’s. It’s a medal of recognition. It’s not so much for my achievements in singing or in music, it’s more because I always try to promote Barga and that part of Tuscany in the best way possible because that is a fabulous part of the world. It is a nice little haven. You know, it hasn’t been spoiled by consumerism. It’s still a very natural place. I love it, so I always try and make people aware of it.”
Can you speak Italian?
“I can, but I’m very patchy,” he admits. “I know what most things mean, whereas the grammar, I forgot a lot of it from when I learned it as a kid, because when you’re younger, you know, your mind is like a sponge. But it all seems to have moved to the back of my mind. But whenever I go there, if I go there for a few weeks, it kind of sparks it again, and I start finding my way around the language a bit better. So after two months there, I’m fairly confident I could come back fluent.”
Chances are it may be quite some time before Nutini has a full two month gap in his schedule. With an appearance at the Meteor Awards and various other live commitments already pencilled in, not to mention a new album to record, he’s likely to be kept busy. However he’s taking it all in his stride. He has no aversion to hard work, that’s for sure. “It’s nae bother at all, man,” he laughs, lightly strumming the Gibson.
It’s in the blood. His family still run a fast food takeaway in Paisley so he knows what hard work means. But he was always into music. “I grew up listening to vocalists more than songwriters,” he recalls. “There weren’t a lot of people that I grew up listening to that wrote a lot of their songs, you know. A lot of these early Stax/Atlantic musicians, even guys like Elvis, or Ray Charles to an extent wrote a lot more of his own stuff – but, you know, a lot of the big songs there was great writers doing it. So I grew up listening to a lot of Otis Redding, Joe Tex, The Coasters, Sam and Dave, and stuff.
“I just loved singing. I was obsessed with singing. Even vocalists like Sinatra, you know, I loved these singers. They commanded all the respect in the world but none of them really wrote a hell of a lot of songs. And then, really when I found that I got more into it, I got into more troubadour/acoustic music. I came across Nick Drake, John Martyn albums, that kinda stuff.”
When did he decide to become a musician?
“To be honest, I think I’m still trying to become a musician,” he laughs. “But since primary school, I loved to write things, little poems, little sorts of humorous wee things. You know, based on the day, they’d ask you to write about something you watched. And I’d go in-depth on every football match that I’d watched. I just liked to write, you know, and trying to sort of paint things in an interesting way. And I think the first ever time that I got anything published, it was a small poem that I wrote that was published in the Celtic Yearbook and I was in second year in high school. So that is still one of my proudest moments.”
He can’t remember exactly how the poem went, but he can still recall the subject matter. “Celtic are my team and it was about beating Rangers 5-1. And I got a call saying, ‘Buy the Celtic Yearbook, you’re in it’.”

To become a songwriter Paolo Nutini needed to connect those two elements: to marry the impulse to tell stories with the desire to sing. And to do that he needed an instrument, something on which he could tease out the melodies that were forming in his head and shape the germ of an idea into a complete song. He credits Damien Rice as the catalyst, the one who inspired him to take up the guitar – and in doing so to make the vital creative breakthrough.
“I remember hearing O long time before Damien Rice released it,” he says. “I think the first thing was the song ‘Volcano’ on a VH1 special. A black and white video with just him and Lisa Hannigan singing the song. And then, through his website, I found other pieces of music, I found the release date of the record, and that made me pick up a guitar, really, because I could play most of the album over four or five chords. So it helped me, it helped me a lot. And I eventually got a chance to meet him and thank him. He’s a good guy. So that kind of makes it all the better.”
There were other influences, of course – notably the desire to attract members of the opposite sex. Which is one reason why music became far more important than studying.
“I started off good at school – and then I think girls came into it and it all kind of went downhill,” he smiles. “I got distracted. Yeah, all of a sudden school was a whole different ballgame. And I found that – maybe this is where I got the notion as well – through singing songs in school, all of a sudden girls that wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire, were giving me the time of day. I thought, ‘Oh, here we go’.”
An academic career was never on the cards. In 2003, Nutini left school, at the age of 16, to become a roadie with up-and-coming Scottish band Speedway.
“Yeah, I left school. At the time I was making music with the drummer from Speedway [Jim Duguid]. He was writing with me and making demos of the earliest ideas that we had, or that I had, and that I took to him. And slowly but surely, I went on and tried to set up the drums, and eventually I got there, and I would sell the T-shirts, do the internet promo. So it was just load in-load out, help read the map – whatever the hell it took. And then in return I would get a little smoke of a joint! And I’d get some beer money, or maybe I’d get some money to get fed. So it was good experience.”
No wonder he has sympathy for the roadie . . .
“I think as an artist, if you’ve been the guy that’s usually trying to pack everything up at the end of the night while everybody else is getting into the kind of joys of after the show – when you’re finished your show and are heading to that party or whatever, it helps you appreciate the people that have still got to pack everything down.”
Pretty soon, he was opening for Speedway, as well as loading their gear out afterwards.
“Slowly but surely, [we] got our set together and I’d go on with the drummer and do an acoustic set before they came on. And yeah, it just all kind of picked up then, we started to get some shows in London.”
He moved to London a year later and began gigging more regularly.
“I don’t love a lot about London, to be honest – but if there’s one thing I do love about the place, it’s the scene. And I know that Ireland – as far as the acoustic scene, you know, the music scene goes – you don’t get much better. But in London there’s a lot of venues. Places like the Bedford Arms in Balham, another wee place called the Ginlick, smaller little clubs that you’ll always get like five-band battles, and in the first half you’d have two songs, and you’d have three songs in the second half.
“So there’d usually be people there to watch the other four acts, from record labels or publishing. And you know, it’s a Catch 22: if they want to watch another band’s second three songs they have to sit through yours. So, you kind of, by default, get seen.”
The book My Struggle by Paolo Nutini would be a short one. Relentless gigging paid off and the young Scotsman’s raw talent was quickly spotted. Within no time at all, he found himself signed to Atlantic Records and set to record his debut album at the age of 18.
“It was very quick,” is how he remembers the recording of These Streets (which would go on to shift more than a million copies). “You know, from walking into the studio to record this with the producer, to walking out, it seemed very quick, you know, compared to this record. It wasn’t a case of three and a half weeks or months, you know, it was jig time. And then while we were, we were playing gigs, before we even finished it, we were playing gigs across the street, starting to kick off the tour. It certainly wasn’t a way I’d ever make a record ever again, now that I’ve got a bit more experience.”

Although These Streets immediately broke him into the mainstream, he had his doubts about some of the songs even before he recorded them.
“Some of those songs had been kicking around since I was 16, and certain people were getting excited about them, but I had sort of lost a bit of my conviction as to what they meant to me. Even then, you know. Things change.”
They certainly do. He had written songs “like a diary”, documenting the split-up with his teenage sweetheart Teri, but just before he went in to record them, he ran into her in a bar and they got back together again.
“We were not together and she was the main inspiration behind a lot of the record,” he admits. “So then if you imagine not seeing that person for a year-and-a-half and writing about ‘I wonder what it would be like . . .’, and thinking about that and putting it into the songs about how you can only imagine what she’s doing and who she’s doing it with. You know, who’s she having sex with, who’s going to be next, and all these kind of things.
“And having these songs – and then I think it was a week before I went into the studio to record them, we got back together. Nobody knew what the hell was going on and what I was doing, and then I met her in town. And really, ever since then, we’ve kind of been back on. So it was very strange recording all those songs. Yeah. Recording all those songs about kind of longing for someone when they just came back into your life was very strange. It would have been a bit convenient if it was just after the record had been released (laughs).”
You didn’t have to drop any particularly nasty songs after you got back with her, did you?
“Actually, I think I had to drop one,” he smiles. “But you know, I think it’s just something that, ach you know, I think if I was the kind of person that she could …you know, I write the songs because they mean something. And I think even a lot of the time for me I don’t really get what I was …you know, it’s only by the time I’ve actually recorded a version I’ve figured out what I meant (laughs). A lot of the things, because you are searching, you are kind of going through your consciousness to get these words, and these songs are a part of you. A lot of it is subconscious, a lot of it kind of comes out, and then by the time I’ve recorded it I realise, ‘Oh shit, actually that song means a wee bit more than I thought’. That’s maybe a little bit more… I don’t know what the word is… a little bit more… oh fuck, my vocabulary’s gone! I need sleep! Poignant! That’s it. Poignant.
“I like that in songs if you write a song about someone,” he continues. “A lot of the songs on this new record are just things that I’ve either been through, or I know they’re just coming around the corner, or I know somebody who’s going through them right now, and I kind of put myself in their shoes and write what I think my take would be if I was in their situation. And a lot of the times I let them hear it, and if they don’t recognise what I’m talking about, then some things I tell them and some things I don’t. But most of the time they’ll go, ‘That’s not about me, is it?’ And you go, ‘Yeah. What do you think?’ (laughs).”
Sunny Side Up proved a radical musical departure for Nutini. While These Streets had showcased the work of a guitar-toting soul-influenced singer-songwriter, his eclectic follow-up cast him in a whole other light.
“Musically where I’m at, I don’t really have a genre or style that I feel part of,” he explains. “I skip from Djhango Reinhart to Cab Colloway to Canned Heat. It’s a bit of a random mishmash. I honestly wanted it all to come out, and not harness it, not manipulate it. I just wanted it to be organic, and so immediate it’s in your face and you can’t help but take it all in.”
Did you get much resistance from the record company when you delivered Sunny Side Up?
“Ach, resistance?” he shrugs. “I think there’s always an element of that. When you first go in they don’t really know much about you, and I didn’t really know much about them either. So it’s obviously who you are and how much you’re going to bend, and how much you are going to compromise, I should say. And I’ve realised that one of the main things to get out of your head is that you are obligated to do anything.
“You know, if the record company have made money off you, they’re doing alright,” he continues. “If your album does shift over, let’s say 500,000 – even if it goes into the six figures – really, you know, they’ve made [money]. So that idea that you owe them anything kind of goes. And when that goes, all of that compromise, and all of that coming and going, it gets less and less and less.”
Having said that, Nutini insists he’s not a diva and is generally fairly open-minded and easy to work with.
“You kind of establish a mutual relationship with them. There’s some things that I don’t understand why it would be good to do them, and after maybe two or three conversations – we’ll call them ‘conversations’ even though they’re arguments – I then realise their value, I realise what the whole point in doing it was. I always leave myself open to being brought around, you know.
“I’m not going to pretend I know what drives them to make half the decisions that they make. You try to give respect to anybody that you are sort of in this with. And I think as long as I’m doing that, as long as I’m not acting like a prat for no reason, I think we will be able to maintain that. And if not, then it’ll be back to my day job [laughs]. So right now …nobody’s complaining.”
Paolo Nutini may be forging ahead, following one success with another even bigger one – but all around him the industry is changing, to the extent that it is hardly recognisable as the business he signed up to.
“It’s a totally different thing now,” he acknowledges. “To be honest – the way things are going – I think people are getting less and less of an inclination to try to farm their music out to a big label. Because I think the benefits of that are getting lower and lower, you know. More and more, it’s a time to be able do it yourself, and get noticed through the internet or through however many of these sort of Facebook/Bebo/MySpace things there are. At that time, playing small gigs just seemed like the way to go about it. That’s what I was getting advised, and I think it worked. It certainly has made this whole trip from writing the first record to now, a humane one. I have been lucky, you know.”
Were you part of the Glasgow music scene while you lived there? Did you hang out with the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Glasvegas, Snow Patrol, Belle and Sebastian, or any of those bands?
He shakes his head. “I’ve always found with bands – as far as me trying to get on a scene – I’ve never really found my feet anywhere really. Even in high school, most of the guys that were playing drums or playing electric guitars or bass, they all either wanted to be Metallica or Slayer or Guns ‘n’ Roses. They weren’t really on the same wavelength …I never really found a lot of musicians in school I could work with. Mostly, it was our music teacher who was a jazz pianist, he knew a lot of old songs, bluesy songs and stuff that I really liked. I would usually jam away with him, and then slowly met some guys that were a bit more broad-minded as far as their taste.
“As far as the arts school vibe, when it gets sort of uber-cool I don’t really know a lot of the time, to be honest. I bumped into Alex Kapranos [Franz Ferdinand singer] not long ago in Canada at this festival. We were on the same bill, and he’s a gentleman. He seemed quite enthusiastic about maybe making some kind of music in the future. It’s good when you meet musicians that you have respect for, and they don’t just sort of humour you. It’s nice when you genuinely feel like you’ve got something to talk about.”
Have you started work on your third album yet?
“Yeah, I’m just trying to collate the songs,” he nods. “I’m trying to get the next album together. It’s bare bones for the most part, but there’s two or three ideas that are more advanced. I like the sound of a little bit more electric guitars, it seems. But then again I’ve got a couple of songs that are veering a bit more on to kind of Squeeze territory. Perhaps. And there’s other ones where I’m sounding more like Allen Toussaint/kind of Dr. John type thing…
“I never write one song after the other that you would conventionally stick on the same record. So I usually have to wait for them to collect into little piles. After I’ve wrote about six songs, I find the sixth goes with the first, and the fourth might go with the third. And I need to sort of try to get that cohesiveness – it’s one of the biggest challenges.”
You’ve got this song called ‘Coming Up Easy’ on Sunny Side Up which is about trying to give up marijuana. Do you smoke for musical inspiration?
“Do I smoke for inspiration?” he muses. “I think it’s more… a lot of people find alcohol can be inspirational in moderation, and I’m not just talking about musicians, I’m talking about – I’ve known some people who were coming up as architects and when they’re trying to think of a creative idea, some of their best ideas, they come home and stare at the box after a couple of pints. You know, everybody’s different. It all depends on how you feel beforehand.
“I think that’s why, really, giving something like marijuana a label and saying – ‘this is why it’s dangerous, you are going to go and kill your granny after a joint’, you know – I think is part of the problem, it’s part of the ignorance to the whole thing, the generalisation. It all depends on your frame of mind. If your mind is focussed on a negative before you smoke, or before you have a few drinks, then the chances are that it’s going to magnify that and keep you there. So I think the main thing is you get the idea. You get on to something, you try to open the door at least, to the idea or to the piece of music you’re making, and I find then afterwards that yeah, it can inspire, but not if …you can’t just smoke a load of weed and then all of a sudden be writing, you know? Be a reggae star!
“I think that sort of thing is interesting, even marijuana, you know – a lot of the smoke that goes about now, a lot of the hydroponics-grown stuff, the THC levels are so high that you can’t really …it’s not inspirational, you know, some of it can really knock you out. So I think over the years, from the Sixties up to now, it has all changed. So I certainly wouldn’t depend on anything for inspiration.”
Not that he hasn’t ‘experimented’. . .
“I suppose there was a wee while where I was convincing myself that if I had two or three shots of port then my voice would sound great,” he laughs. “And then I realised it was just ‘cos I was getting a bit drunk! And I was just convincing myself I was sounding good. So I wouldn’t depend on anything to make me write. Not for me, other than getting in my creative space, and feeding off good musicians. And then, you know, whatever makes it fun, man.”

Time for the photo-shoot. While snapper Mark Nixon sets up the lights, Nutini strums the Gibson and starts to play ‘My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean’ in the style of Ray Charles. He’s an extraordinary, natural talent. As he poses for the camera, Nutini reflects that he’s really looking forward to playing at the Meteors in Dublin next month.
“I’m looking forward to playing at the Meteors, man,” he says. “To be honest, a lot of the fondest memories I have of making the last record were in Grouse Lodge, where we kind of built the foundations of it, in Co. Westmeath. I feel very kindred with Ireland after these last few years. I mean, I’ve always had such a good time in Ireland, and actually I’m glad we could get the chance to do this interview, I was really happy to do Hot Press, because I’m not very good at communicating with fans.
“I don’t do the internet thing. I don’t go into the Twitters, and I don’t write anything. Because I’m not really that great with computers, to be honest. I’m not that way inclined. I think once I start blogging or whatever, then people will expect one daily. And a lot of people do that – they sit down daily and blog and twitter or whatever. You know, ‘That’s me out of the shower now’; ‘Just warming up now.’ And I don’t really want to get into that circle. So I’ll just use you to say the people in Ireland have been amazing. Thanks!”
Consider it done, sir...