The Hot Press Cover Story: Paolo Nutini

Paolo Giovanni Nutini is sitting in the executive boardroom of the Morrison Hotel on a showery Thursday afternoon, sipping his third Mai Tai of the day and leafing incredulously through his first Hot Press cover story.

“Jesus Christ!” the Scottish star exclaims, pointing to one of photographer Mark Nixon’s atmospheric portraits in which he’s lying languorously on the bed in the penthouse suite of a five-star Glasgow hotel cradling an acoustic guitar. “Wow! I was looking super ginger there. Nice. Thanks, mum! That was a while back, right?”

More than four years ago...

“Look at that fucking hairdo,” he sighs. “Fucking hell, man, what the fuck am I wearing? Funny, funny, funny – what you used to think was a good idea at the time.” He turns the page and yelps. “Jesus! Look at me there!”

That 2010 cover interview was to promote his second album, Sunny Side Up, which went straight to No 1 in the Irish and UK charts, on its release in 2009. He’s arrived in Dublin to play a couple of Olympia shows, kicking off a world tour to promote his eagerly anticipated third album, Caustic Love. The very occasional live performance or TV chatshow appearance aside, he’s mostly kept out of the music and media spotlights in recent times.

Five years between albums is practically a lifetime in contemporary music industry terms. Where the hell have you been, Paolo?

“Emm, where have I been?” he smiles, idly scratching his stubble. “I’ve been all over the place, man. I’ve been all over, wandering around, making friends.”

Now 27, the olive-skinned, almond-eyed singer doesn’t look a whole lot different from our last encounter. His hairstyle is slightly more ruffled, a gelled quiff slept upon. He’s still as strikingly handsome as ever, a walking, talking Athena poster. Wearing a black T-shirt and matching jeans, he has a light gold chain around his neck. A trio of stars is tattooed on his right forearm.

Wherever he’s been travelling, it hasn’t diluted his thick Scots accent. He’s got plenty to say, speaking in a rambling stream of consciousness that can occasionally be difficult to decipher.

“Well.. Jesus Christ... let’s see now,” he continues. “I released the second album about five years ago, toured it for about two. So let’s play with the three years between that. Between then and now, I must have spent about two months in Ireland – Westmeath, Grouse Lodge.”

He had recorded much of Sunny Side Up – which won the highly coveted Ivor Novello ‘Best Album’ gong in 2010 – at the renowned Grouse Lodge facility. Although some of Caustic Love was also laid down there, he had other reasons for returning to Westmeath. Namely, the excellent company. “Some of the time was spent recording, some riding horses. Eating Claire’s heartily home-cooked food, chatting. Lots of stories. And you widen your vocabulary when you go there, because they’re fucking intelligent. They’re fun, vibrant people so, you stay up late, you have a whiskey or two and put the world to right. You chat about all kinds of shit.”

So let's do it, then...

Paolo Nutini was born and raised in Paisley, a large satellite town south of Glasgow, where his family still run a chipper. Presumably he’s a townie: so does he like the countryside?

“Ach, I do and I don’t,” he shrugs. “It suits me sometimes, when the air’s fresh. I don’t like it when it’s too wet. Half of the beauty of that is getting out and breathing the air. But when the weather is like it was maybe 20 minutes ago, then you’re not gonna be wandering around outside.

“I brought my car along," he remembers, "so I’m driving about, going back and forth to Moate and Athlone, here, there. I spent a bit of time in Galway – I’d never been to Galway. I went to Galway, fucking taking it all in, embracing the cultures a little bit more, finding out some of the folklore. Finding out all that and writing about it and taking it all in.”

Were any songs on Caustic Love written in or about Ireland?

“Well, I’m not so sure about that. But there were certain situations that...” He pauses and reflects for a moment. “...that happened when I was there, maybe the last time – because we recorded a lot there for the second album – and, yeah, there’s a good few songs that are not here [on the new LP], that are written about a girl I met over here, a good while ago. I’m sure they will be on something one day.”

Paolo’s complicated relationship with his ex-girlfriend Teri Brogan inspired many of the songs on his multi-platinum 2006 debut, The Street. The last time we spoke, soon after Sunny Side Up was released, he had gotten back together with her.

“Well, we were always getting back together,” he laughs. “I don’t think we were the only ones. That was then. Things go on, things change...”

The Irish press is gossiping about a relationship with MTV’s Laura Whitmore. He maintains that he’s currently single. “Right now, I’m feeling... adventurous,” he smiles, raising his glass.

Produced by Paolo and Dani Castelar, the swaggering Caustic Love blends pop, funk, blues, soul, reggae and rock. Although it all sounds super-smooth, it was actually put together in fits and starts in various European and American studios.

“We recorded all over. We were in Los Angeles for about a month, Sunset Sounds area. We did a bit of recording there, which was good.”

While in LA, he recorded with legendary percussionist James Gadson, who features prominently on comeback single ‘Scream (Funk My Life Up)’.

"James Gadsdon was the guy who played drums on Bill Withers' hits," he explains. "He wrote all those lines, like ‘Use Me’, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, ‘Lean On Me’. Gadson’s a hero of mine! I swear he was always one of my heroes. He shows up, walks in, his kick drum over his shoulder. He’s a man in his seventies. He sits down, he’s playing, the sweat’s dripping off him onto the snare. And I’m wondering if he likes these songs.

“We catch him between takes singing along. And that gives you a bit of indication and encouragement. It was lovely that he treated me like we were two working musicians, doing our jobs. And to get that kind of rapport and, I think, respect going with somebody of his calibre and experience and general fucking coolness is – it has a lot more impact and it’s a lot more encouraging than even a good review. It’s real.”

As his star rapidly ascended, was there a lot of fakery and sycophancy going on around the young Scot? He pulls an awkward face.

“Ach, no. I mean even the people... I mean, if you even see that happening..." He laughs apologetically and sips his drink. “There’s a fine line, because I do tend to see that happening, a fake vibe or there’s something not genuine. You can tell there’s people with good lines to say at good times, and usually you call it out or else you veer away. But I don’t think there’s a lot of it. It’s funny how some people do change. Sometimes some people actually go the opposite way and get a lot more awkward.”

Given his heart-throb status, he’s probably a lot more popular with the female fans than their jealous partners.

“I find a lot of guys get a bit kinda... the alpha male comes out and you get a status thing,” he says. “They feel they have to put you down or something. Some guys maybe have to put on a show. That’s a bit weird.

“You have to call people out. If people have a go at me, I’ll have a go at them. It’s a lot more straightforward than it ever was before. You get guys that maybe, their partner, their better-half, comes up and wants a picture or maybe gets a bit excited or whatever, and they get all aggressive. You have to take it the right way.”

Having said all that, he’s a lot less tolerant than he used to be. “I don’t suffer arseholes that well anymore. I used to kinda shy away from elements of confrontation. Now I’m a lot more kinda, ‘Fuck you!’”

Although he radiates a seemingly effortless aura of cool onstage, he insists he’s not always so confident in his daily life.

“I’m not an outspoken sort of person. I’ve never been the kind that can go and turn his hand to most things and sort of effortlessly do X or effortlessly do Y ? I’ve never been the best sportsman. Even growing up, I was always self-conscious.”

He bursts out laughing. “I’m pretty sure I could go to a psychiatrist and come out with a fucking prescription the length of my arm! Because there’s something not right, man. I know that for a fact.”

How do you mean?

“I’m not the one person,” he says. “Sometimes it takes other people to point it out. I can seem like the most introverted person in the world. Other times I can seem a lot bolder, more sure of myself.”

Paolo sighs and stirs the ice in his glass with the straw. “I don’t analyse it. I don’t try to harness too much of it. And I suppose maybe the position I’m in, there’s more of an allowance, there’s more space to have that kind of freedom and express yourself like that, because, I think in a way, that’s what people want. They want to see that. And it’s nice if you do have, more of a – I don’t know anybody that’s normal, put it that way.”

Could any of your lengthy absence from the spotlight be put down to writer’s block?

“Nah, man,” he says, shaking his head. “There was no writer’s block. I was writing a tonne – but it was more poetry. I was getting into reading guys like Felix Dennis. Reading a lot. Poems and poets. I kinda lost the notion of writing a pop song. I was going, ‘How do you put a verse and a chorus and a middle 8 and stuff to this? I can’t!’”

On the album you sing about “doing the same old shit over a different beat...”

“Yeah, I was writing this poetry that was... I felt that, lyrically, I was unlocking doors. I was reading stuff and writing it in notepads, forgetting about it, coming back months later and going, ‘Did I write that? It sort of reads like a guy that knows what he’s doing’. Surprising me? I didn’t feel down on my ability or that. But it wasn’t translating into music.”

Coupled with this creative detour came a complete loss of appetite for the rock star lifestyle.

“Yeah, I got a lot of stuff out. Mainly there was no desire. There was no hunger. I didn’t have a hunger to try to go back out. I didn’t want to be in public. Maybe there was an element of feeling some growing pains as well. I didn’t wanna showcase them. I felt maybe they would be best dealt with in private, or at least in an environment, or in a reality, that was more predictable. More digestible, rather than something like this (gestures around room). Life can throw anything up at you anytime anyway. You’re more vulnerable to the kind of twists and turns of it when you’re doing this.”

When you’re more publicly exposed?

“Yeah, for some reason there was a part of me that was saying, ‘Do stuff!’ Let’s learn how to do things, learn new things. In my head I was saying, ‘Look what you’ve achieved'. I'd already achieved more than I ever thought that I would.”

He’s struggling to explain himself. “Look, I couldn’t have predicted doing any of what I did, in that sense, in that context, so there was a wee bit of: take a bit of time now to enjoy it rather than keep pushing and pushing and pushing. It was like, slow down a wee minute. And then I was like, ‘Well, I wanna learn how to do a lot of stuff ’. I wanna take time and I learn how to cook a bit better. I wanna learn how to fix things around my house: if things break, I don’t wanna have to make sure I’ve got enough money in the bank to pay someone to do it. Why don’t I do it?”

Paolo grows increasingly animated as he warms to this self-sufficiency theme. “If I need something… I wanna learn how pick up a bit of wood and is it possible to learn how to turn that into something that you can give to somebody? My grandfather worked a lot with wood, and he made me a rocking horse when I was a kid. More and more people I know are starting to have kids; would it not be nice to be able to do something like that, and give them that? Is that so impossible? No, it takes time. And I have the time to do things like that – let’s do them!”

A few exhausting years of non-stop touring, travelling and partying had been taking their physical toll, too. Paolo Nutini needed a rest.

“Yeah, my body was taking a bit of a hammering,” he admits. “I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked like I was worn out. I looked like I didn’t have anywhere near the kind of exuberance that my relative youth should have had. I thought, ‘Jesus, you look tired, man!’ And I thought, take a bit of time... Don’t see all this stuff happening – and then let them all manifest until one day you absolutely lose the fucking plot and resent yourself for whatever it was that happened.”

He starts strumming an imaginary guitar as he continues. “Or begrudgingly show up and say to people, ‘Come and see me play... fuck you guys for coming along to see me playing a show... I don’t wanna do this.... I’m gonna charge you to watch me not wanna do this’. Fuck that! That’s mental! So I thought, ‘Let’s stop, man, take a bit of time!’”

Like Daniel Day Lewis going off to Italy and learning how to make shoes for a year.

“Exactly! He went off and became a cobbler. Not a bad idea!”

You’ve mentioned spending time in Ireland and California. Where else on the planet were you hanging out?

“I was kind of retracing some of my footsteps I’d made over the course of maybe making that record, or touring that record. I went to some cities that I’d seen, or cities that I’d been to and never got to absorb at all.

“It was learning a little bit more about the history of these places, and coming here was part of that. It was a case of ‘let’s embrace the isolation, let’s take it easy, let’s eat healthy, smoke a bit less, drink a lot less and read books’.”

It seems a good moment to pass on the gift I’ve brought – an old paperback 1950’s Olympia Press edition of Glaswegian writer Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (sadly, so heavily stamped by charity shops over the years as to be virtually worthless as a collector’s item).

“Oh wicked, man!” he exclaims, examining the book. “Ewan McGregor was in the film of this, wasn’t he? Wow! Thank you! That’s so nice!”

He leans over to shake my hand. “I feel like I should have something for you. Next time I need to repay the favour. That’s fucking great, man! Thank you so much! But yeah, man, reading, and other stuff amongst all of that. It wasn’t all soul- searching. I mean, I spent time in Spain with friends: Valencia, Barcelona, exploring there.

“I went to Tuscany for three months. I went on holiday with my family for a week and they left and I said, ‘I’m gonna hang back for a few more days’. I wasn’t planning on a few more days. I got a little apartment, a little flat, and I turned my phone off. I was there for about two or three months.”

His Tuscany lifestyle was far removed from the pop whirlwind. “Obviously the climate lent itself to doing a lot more going out – walking, cycling and running. I would sort of go out and find routines. I was also rough working with my hands and getting through the day performing more manual tasks. With that, you build up a physical and a mental strength. Which is again something that I took on from spending a bit of time in the Caribbean.”

He spent a few weeks in Jamaica during his extended hiatus. Did he enjoy it?

“Did I like Jamaica? I don’t know. I certainly appreciated the fact I was there and what I saw and experienced. But whether I liked it... I mean, it was a bit of an eye-opener! It’s not all Bountys and Malibu and coconuts and palm trees.”

I tell him that I visited that island myself a few years back. There were armed guards patrolling the beaches...

“Yeah, it’s dark,” he agrees. “I was in this nice resort and they’ve literally got a wire fence, and at the end of that wire fence – on my side it’s all all-inclusive, people on deck loungers trying to figure out whether they want to go and see a waterfall or go and learn how to snorkel. On the other side it’s absolute, fucking poverty! Extreme poverty.”

He shakes his head, disbelievingly. “Some people have such a fucking arrogance that they’re like (adopts posh voice) ‘Oh, do we have to share a beach with these people?’ And it’s their fucking beach!”

He laughs heartily. “It was an eye-opener walking through Kingston with my ex. That was a fucking experience! Men coming up and going, ‘What are you with him for?’ It was very intimidating. It’s a fucking mad place!”

It wasn’t all bad, though. “We went to Strawberry Hill. Chris Blackwell’s place. A lot of artists spent a lot of time there. Even Johnny Cash. Bob Marley took solace there after the assassination attempt. It’s like a plantation thing. It’s owned by the Blackwell family. People go there and you can stay there and it’s almost like a sort of detoxifying resort.

“We met Chris Blackwell,” he continues. “He was obviously big friends with [late Atlantic Records supremo] Ahmet Ertegun, who was big friends with a lot of people from that era and a lot of that generation that I've got to know well since I started my career with Atlantic.

“So Chris said, ‘Do you want 20 minutes to get ready and we’ll meet for dinner?’ We sit with him, we have dinner, and we chat about, the first two acts on Island, Nick Drake and John Martyn. My heroes. Nick Drake is one of my heroes. A massive, massive talent. I think he should be a staple in everybody’s CD collection. He’s not for all occasions, his music, but Christ, there’s a beauty in it that’s not matched. I mean, both of them have that, but the subtlety in Nick Drake’s music has even more beauty to it.

“It was great being able to talk to Chris and find out how even a guy like John Martyn weirdly influenced Bob Marley along the way. As I said, it’s a way to see the culture, which is one of the biggest blessings I’ve been able to get, along the way. The experience of other people’s cultures which helps demolish the arrogance that leads to what becomes racism. That’s one of the things I appreciate the most. That luxury.

“Some people aren’t malicious and aren’t born racist,” he continues. “Sometimes it’s an ignorance. It’s not being able to understand it or not having an education. I was never one for making somebody suffer because they were different anyway but it makes me sort of think. If you were only educated more about other cultures and about other religions and other beliefs at a younger age then I think there would be more to admire. I think you would find something that inspired you and maybe you'd actually start to let somebody become cool for the thing that they used to be, that the prejudice was against. It’s a funny one. But, yeah, Jamaica was nuts!”

One of his record company handlers knocks on the door and announces that we’ve got a couple of minutes left. I ask Paolo to sum Caustic Love up.

“The album’s about being open, and I mean this...ahhh!” He waves an apologetic hand. “I’ve got to think of what the hell I’m gonna say here! Because I’m not very good at this, but I think that, when you go through the songs, it’s about...”

He stops himself, takes a deep breath, and continues, “For me, subconsciously, it’s been about growing up and not necessarily reflecting too much on that, so it's leaving yourself open and opening yourself up to the extremes of life. That’s what ‘caustic love’ meant for me. It wasn’t a negative, necessarily. It was the idea of falling in love with somebody, the idea of that obsession. Giving yourself over, opening up to somebody like that.”

By his own admission, he’s been badly burnt in love. “When you meet a woman, maybe spend your time thinking about her, a lot of your energy goes to somebody else. And that can sort of dissolve and wash over all of those defence mechanisms and things that maybe put you on autopilot.

“It can leave you vulnerable to the agony and the ecstasy. I said before, you can have the most intense orgasm you’re ever gonna have or you can have the biggest sort of heart wrenching pain that you didn’t even think somebody else could cause you, without physically inflicting it. You never know.

“I think that maybe over the years, if you’ve been burned once, you become a little bit apprehensive about getting out again. You can become a bit of a commitmentphobe, develop relationship phobia or whatever you wanna call it. You believe that everything in your life is gonna be easier if you don’t have to worry about somebody else. Sometimes I think one of the best things we can do, especially in our youth, is find somebody to share the good times with. Inevitably, you have to share the bad times too. I think that’s what ‘caustic love’ means.”

He laughs yet again and smiles his charming smile. “I think maybe the album is a product of practicing what I’ve said there, if that makes sense.”

Is he looking forward to getting back out there?

“Well, it’s important to keep a perspective,” he avers, with a casual shrug. “My dad always says, ‘Keep the head’. You get an inclination that things are going well and you should enjoy it. But you have to maintain the focus, because you never know. I mean, especially when you leave yourself open to different journalists from yourself, Olaf. People are waiting for that fucking ‘in’, to bring you down, burst your bubble. So you never know what’s around the corner but you kinda go... (shrugs).

“I’m starting to feel I’m invigorated by the whole process, and the early response – and I want to have a lot of fun,” he continues. “I want to go out and get some more memories? Get on it and put out more music and do it. This morning we went on The Ray D’Arcy Show and we played the songs a bit different. There’s a lot of creativity going on there. Even with one song, there’s like four versions and I think nowadays you’re sort of – they used to be sort of ‘that song, you don’t wanna mess with it’, but now you’ve got so many opportunities to showcase this music, through the mediums of the internet and everything.

“You’re giving more dynamics, more angles. Some people are very quick to judge – ‘We preferred it the way it was!’. But you’re gonna hear that again as well, we’re not never gonna play it. We’re trying to give you something else. It’s cool, it’s cool. It’s all good.”

Paolo can’t stop talking as we’re both ushered out the door. About how grateful he is for the old issue of Hot Press and the Trocchi novel. About how excited he is about the new album. About his plans to maybe publish a collection of his poetry, and the graphic novel he’s working on with some artist friends.

Most of all, though, about how happy and chilled he in his current headspace. The career break has done him a world of good.

“I’ve learned to take criticism a bit better as well,” he laughs. “Which always helps!”

Caustic Love is out on April 11. Paolo Nutini plays Cork Live At The Marquee on July 8 & 9 and appears as part of August 29-31's Electric Picnic