Arts Diary: Nutini's at home back in the 'Old Country'

Published on Wednesday 8 April 2009 19:32

THE artwork for Paolo Nutini's forthcoming album, Sunny Side Up, will have a distinctly Italian flavour to it, according to our man in Tuscany. Earlier this month, the Paisley-born pop sensation spent a whole day having his photo taken in and around the medieval hilltop town of Barga – ancestral home of the Nutini clan – and a snap like the one below will likely find its way onto the cover of his new record when it is released on 2 June.

With his last disc, These Streets, selling in excess of two million copies worldwide, you might expect the celebrity crooner to be mobbed by fans wherever he goes, but in Barga he's treated like one of the locals.

"Paolo and the photographer were more or less left alone while they were working here," says Keane, editor of the excellent local website, www.barganews.com (Keane's just got the one name, for reasons far too complicated to go into here).

"Paolo's been here every summer since he was a small boy, so he's well-known in the area. A few people stopped to say hello, but other than that they let him be."

Locals in Barga joke that anyone who speaks English in the town does so with a Glasgow accent, such has been the degree of emigration to the west of Scotland. It is estimated that some 60 per cent of the town's population have relatives over here, mainly in Glasgow, Paisley, Largs and Saltcoats. It's a two-way process though: among the ex-pat Scots with homes in the town are the artist John Bellany and Dunkeld pipemaker and piper Hamish Moore.

Locals hope Nutini will be back in town in July to perform at the Lake Angels Soul Festival – an event to raise money for an irrigation project in Rwanda. The singer has said he'll see what he can do.

"They need 20,000 Euros to set this thing up," says Keane, "and for Paolo to come over for the festival… well, that would really sort them out."

Pants for McCall Smith

THE musically challenged members of the Really Terrible Orchestra are back in Scotland after giving a triumphant performance in New York as part of this year's Tartan Week celebrations. Not only did the RTO sell out Manhattan's 1,500-seater Town Hall and receive a standing ovation, their bassoonist, a certain Alexander McCall Smith, who we're told also dabbles in fiction, evidently made a big impression on some of the female members of the audience.

Our source in the RTO tells us: "Not only did we get a standing ovation at the end, two pairs of white knickers were tossed on to the stage.

"We suspect they were for Sandy. I don't know who threw them – it was all a bit chaotic afterwards so I didn't really notice."

First Minister Mikado?

The RTO players were somewhat miffed that nobody from the Scottish Government made it to their big Manhattan gig, but apparently the First Minister has plans to make it up to them.

In advance of the performance, several members of the orchestra were invited on to The Andrew Marr Show and found themselves sharing a studio with none other than Alex Salmond. The RTO's conductor, "Sir" Richard Neville Towle, took the opportunity to ask the First Minister if he'd consider performing a turn from the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire with them at some point in the future, and Eck gallantly offered to sing something from The Mickado. Could the diary humbly suggest a drag/falsetto version of Three Little Maids From School featuring Salmond and a couple of his colleagues? Under the circumstances, it's surely the least they could do.