Malahide Castle: Paolo Nutini Puts The Rain In The Shade In Triumphant Style

Dateline Malahide, Dublin – Paolo Nutini is on the way. Are you ready to be wooed? Are you ready to be won? To see what a very special word really means?

To create a debut record such as These Streets, replete as it is with absolute pop bangers like ‘Jenny Don’t Be Hasty’, ‘Last Request’, ‘Rewind’ and the title track ‘These Streets’, you need to possess a rare kind of moxie. You need quite another type of moxie to headline Malahide Castle and not air any of those four irresistible songs.

Paolo Nutini possesses both, in spades. I suppose it helps when your subsequent three records went on to seize the No. 1 chart position in both Ireland and the UK. That there is another grade of moxie entirely. Those weighty endorsements don’t come easy – far from it.

Indeed, for his spectacular set, performed on a fine Bloomsday evening in Malahide, he visits his debut collection of songs just the once. ‘New Shoes’ receives such a rapturous reception that you get the sense that he may well have been executed on the spot if he had left it on the bench.

Proceedings open with ‘Afterneath’, the first track off 2022’s Last Night in the Bittersweet – his first record in eight years. Nutini plays the ponies in a field crammed with his adherents. The song's curious stew of Zeppelin howl, Arab Strap-like vocal and the sample of Patricia Arquette’s closing speech on Tony Scott’s True Romance, courtesy of Quentin Tarantino, make it a sure thing with a crowd who are cocked and ready to have a good time. He romps home.

Wearing a simple T-shirt, blue jeans and brown boots, with shoulder-length Steve Marriott Humble Pie-era barnet, and singing “I could not seem to find a way out of my worried mind” – a line from ‘Lose It’ – with his dynamite six-piece band fanned about him, Paolo looks every inch the 24-carat 70s rocker. He sounds it too. His vocal on ‘Scream (Funk My Life Up)’ is James Brown-good as he lets loose a howling “Makes you wanna scream hallelujah!”, and the entire crowd beg “Funk my life up.” Oh yeah!

After a week of sun, we have, of course, almost forgotten that it rains in Ireland. Now, the skies open. What matter? Dedicating ‘Heart Filled Up’ to the late Christy Dignam of Aslan is class. As is serenading a beautiful woman sitting on her hubby’s shoulders when singing ‘Acid Eyes’, a Kurt Vile-sounding cut which is a helpful indicator of the band’s direction.

Pat Carty in his Hot Press review of Last Night in the Bittersweet, offered the opinion that “‘Through The Echoes’ is a lovely, gentle thing that could have slotted on earlier records with Nutini’s rough as a badger’s arse yet smooth as silk voice centre stage. At some point in the future, many people, stood in festival fields, will weep into plastic beakers as Nutini throws that chorus at them.”

I guess, the maestro can add soothsayer to his extensive and illustrious array of competencies because this evening, when Paolo sings it, mortals shatter. Paolo’s Otis-gilded vocal would thaw ice-cold dead hearts. Even the rain gives it up. Paolo informs us that when he drinks Guinness it never rains, lifts his pint in salute and gulps.

‘Coming Up Easy’ is a rare foray onto his second record, Sunny Side Up: the refrain – “It was in love I was created, and in love is how I hope I die” – delights the crowd. Paolo sings a Fontaines D.C. ‘Boys in the Betterland’ couplet, and segues into ‘Petrified in Love’, sounding like Damn the Torpedoes-era Tom Petty. That will have been the intention: Nutini confessed to Jess Murray in a fascinating Hot Press interview last year that when he’s writing he likes to start simple. “A lot of the time now it’s on the bass,” he said, "which really led me to that Tom Petty vibe.” It’s mighty. As is the Ramones-singed, 50s doo wop breakdown, accompanying The Wild Angels/Primal Scream ‘Loaded’ sample and ensuing rugged psychedelic jam.

That eight-year gap between albums has been the subject of much curiosity – even more so, when people hear that Nutini was kicking up his heels, in – of all places – his hometown of Paisley. But you know, home is home. Also, being on the doorstep of mighty Glasgow, it is hardly the sticks. And when he covers ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’, I recall that Paisley was also the patch of Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan of Stealers Wheel, who wrote the song.

A mizzle of drizzle falls, Paolo performs his Guinness rain hex, it quits and he takes into the lead single off his sophomore album, a song about a deluge, ‘Candy’. Man, I swear the crowd – with hundreds now on the shoulders of willing partners and unwilling strangers – collectively lean into the stage like a gorgeous gigantic beast to hear all the clearer Paolo’s incantation...

“All the angels and their halos
All they do is keep me waiting and waiting
All the cutthroats and their jagged ends
All of them have got me waiting and waiting
All the cheap and the sugary philosophies
Have got me on the fence just waiting and waiting
All the angels and their halos
All they do is keep me waiting and waiting”

The power of it and its melding with us – the mob – is splendid heaven.

For their encore, the band serve ‘Cherry Blossom’ Krautrock style, with a squirt of desert stoner rock. Paolo opens ‘Iron Sky’ acapella, which is wondrous, moxie incarnate; then the band slides into a Jason Pierce Spiritualized workout complete with a Joe Tex matching vocal, which may be the Everest of compliments, but believe me is well earned.

The song brilliantly samples Charlie Chaplin’s speech from the final scene of The Great Dictator, during which Paolo goes wandering down the steps of the stage, greeting the hardy front-liners pitched at the rail for hours, shaking hands that reach out to him: sparks fizzle through the rapturous audience as if at some messianic happening.

Paolo gears up for his last song with talk of new material so we can all come and do this again, which is more than fine with everyone in Malahide Castle. He praises his support acts Julia Jacklin and NewDad – who were indeed fantastic – and kicks into the anthemic ‘Shine A Light’. Cue giant disco ball and delirium.

A triumph.

Main pic: Paolo Nutini in Dublin at the time of the launch of his latest album, Last Night in the Bittersweet.