Paolo Nutini

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 as music took over at a racing pace.

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.

www.paolonutini.com