Paolo Nutini
www.paolonutini.com
Like many of the great singers, Paolo Nutini doesn't speak in words the way he sings in song. Engage him in conversation, and you'll be greeted with a hefty Scottish brogue, his accent thick enough to spread on bread. But when he sings, something rather miraculous happens: the accent remains (Paolo isn't one of those vocalists who turns American when faced with a microphone), but his voice lifts, lightens and becomes exquisitely mellifluous. Listen to the ribald Jenny Don't Be Hasty from his forthcoming debut album, These Streets, and his vocal cords, a mixture of gravel and honey, bring to mind a young Joe Cocker fronting The Faces. Fair enough, you'd think, if the man was middle-aged, nicotine-addled, and fighting both a weight problem and a lifelong inability to maintain relationships with women, but Paolo Nutini is none of these things. He is Scottish, and just 19 years old. God alone knows where the voice comes from, then, but one thing is already abundantly clear: this boy's a natural.
"Och, I've never had anything as formal as vocal lessons," he says - and what he says next brings slight colour to his cheeks, "but I did sing in the school choir for a while. That was tough. As you can imagine, not a whole lot of guys take to singing in a place like Paisley, and it must be said that there was never a particularly big queue to join the choir."
But there were some benefits to being part of it, not least for a young man with Italian blood running through his Scottish veins: "Basically, it was me surrounded by all these girls. That was fun."
While the choir's choice of songs were hardly firm favourites of Paolo's, one teacher, with a sideline in jazz piano, quickly spotted his prodigious talent, and together they collaborated on more soulful songs.
"Initially, I'd wanted to be a football player," he confesses, "specifically a goalkeeper. But the more I sang, the more I realised it was just something I could do, almost without effort. I was hardly going to walk away from that, was I?"
By 16, he was on the road with his friends band, a short lived Glasgow indie act. Paolo acted as part-time roadie for them: he'd sell the band's T-shirts at tour venues, and get on stage as the support. Music was clearly his abiding love, but at this stage in his early life, he was already staring down the barrel of a familial tradition from which there seemed little escape.
“I always thought I would carry on in the family business in the chippy” But destiny was to intervene here, in a most unlikely manner.
"You remember David Sneddon, right?" he says.
David Sneddon, of course, was the winner of the BBC's inaugural Fame Academy four years ago. The rather earnest singer-songwriter was from Paisley, and so his triumph on the show was very much a big deal back home. For his anticipated return from the bright lights of Television Centre, the local council had booked out the town hall for his first proper concert. But Sneddon, in the way of pop stars, was delayed on his journey back, and the audience was getting restless. A local radio presenter, in the way of local radio presenters, then bounded on stage and held an impromptu pop quiz, the winner of which would get to sing a couple of songs to the crowd. Paolo, almost in spite of himself, won.
"Initially, I was like, no way am I going up there," he says. But his girlfriend, who had dragged him along to the concert in the first place, insisted otherwise. And so there he stood, facing his very first audience. Seconds ticked by and then, finally, he let loose with that voice that, by rights, should belong to someone else entirely. The crowd went wild, and in the audience was the man who would go on to become Paolo's manager.
"And shortly after, I was moving to London to become a singer, and to record an album," he says, still bewildered at this unexpected turn of events. "Of course, I told my dad I'd stay and do what was expected, but he wouldn't hear of it."
The chips and Mars bars would have to be deep-fried without him. But the chip shop’s losswas very clearly music's gain.
Four years on, and Paolo Nutini arrives on the scene as a fully fledged, fully formed artist. His album, These Streets, sounds nothing like a debut should sound. It is rounded and mature, reigned in and robust, and oozes both a subtle poise and a very determined lyrical kick. He sounds like he has been a songwriter for several lifetimes already, and he sings with the welly of a young Joe Cocker fronting The Faces, or like an old Motown troubadour with his heart on his sleeve and sex on his mind.
"Basically, the album is an autobiographical journey, a diary if you like, of my last three years," he says.
It follows his departure from his beloved Paisley to his arrival in the sprawling London (with the title track's aching lament, "Where it takes you about an hour to cross the road/Just to stumble across another poor old soul"), to his experience with women. Rewind, for example, concerns his first sexual experience at the age of 16 ("When I kissed you in the hallway and took you straight to bed"), to Last Request's pleading for "one last time" before he and his girlfriend split up. And then there’s the aforementioned Jenny Don't Be Hasty, about an older woman he met last year in London's 12 Bar.
"She was 23, see, so I told her I was 22 - and she believed me," he grins. "In fact, I was 18."
Things were going well, the sex was terrific, but three weeks down the line he decided to come clean. Imagining the scenario before it happened, Paolo was convinced they would laugh about it, have a couple of drinks and then tumble into bed. It didn't quite turn out that way.
"She told me to fuck off, to get out of her face," he laughs. "A few days later, I got a text from her, confirming my dismissal. I haven't seen her since."
Sexual ruminations aside, he does emotional bruising beautifully, too. The closing Alloway Grove, for example, is about returning home to Paisley wondering whether his girlfriend has been unfaithful while he was away ("Has she been naked in her room since I've been gone?"), while Autumn, perhaps the album's most poignant moment, concerns his late grandfather.
"He was a big music lover, my Nonno. He loved boogie woogie piano, he adored opera, and it was him that really encouraged me to sing. He always wanted somebody in the family to make music their living. He's not around to see it, unfortunately, but I'm doing just what he wanted, and I'm doing it in his honour."
He May Still ostensibly be a new name, but Paolo has been on the circuit for almost half a decade now. Consequently, this young man already has quite a fanbase. His just-completed UK tour, for instance, was all sold out. His debut single Last Request has been picking up plays on national and regional radio stations along with video channels two months before its official release. And he is already scheduled to perform on Parkinson, at which point, we can safely assume, Paolo Nutini will no longer be Britain's best kept secret, but an emergent, bonafide star in his own right, universally hailed the best new singer in the country.
"Everything that has happened to me so far has been really good, really fluent," he says. "There's been a few bumps along the way, sure, but nothing fatal. I feel in a good spot right now, and all I want is for enough people to identify with my songs so I can keep on singing them. I like to think they’re worth hearing."
He's not wrong.