Pulling on Threads: Paolo Nutini ruminates on Caustic Love

Paolo Nutini’s been listening to a lot of Arab Strap recently. “I was out in Glasgow and saw that album on the shelf. Monday at the Hug & Pint. The first song is a song called The Shy Retirer and I’m absolutely… I’m buzzing off of that song. I’ve got it in my car, blaring. In my house.” If all you knew of Nutini’s music was New Shoes, the jaunty 2006 single which helped shoot him to daytime radio stardom whilst still in his teens, this could sound an unlikely pairing.

Yet, as the Paisley-born singer-songwriter tells it, his musical path so far has been introspective, digressive and punctuated by “wanders” – much needed time and space away from the industry and his own creative processes. “My whole life before... it became a little bit insular,” he says, slowly. “Musically, it made it really hard to write anything I was in any way comfortable singing to people. I like the idea of music being a product of the life I’m living, and not the other way around.”

So, after releasing two enormously popular albums (as in, certified quintuple platinum) – These Streets, and Sunny Side Up – over the course of three years, Nutini took a hiatus of sorts. After a five year absence, he re-emerged with 2014’s Caustic Love. It shot straight to number one, and it’s the record for which he’s been SAY nominated, seeing him bypass the longlist courtesy of a fan-vote straight to the final ten. He has a huge, passionate fanbase, does Nutini. Yet, Caustic Love is darker, broader, far more brooding than any of his previous recordings.

Was he anxious about returning, and with a largely different collection of work in tow? “Erm. When I go on stages, I’m not even sure my brain knows I’m doing it. It’s never been the most natural thing, for me to go out in front of an audience, to put myself on the line. And coming back to it, I wanted to make sure I was really happy, that I was able to put forward what I’ve got with conviction, you know? Because I knew that whole reality would come back again. And sometimes, yeah, I’m sure I overthink things, but it’s really, very, nice to see that people were open. That they weren’t going to hold it against me, that I’ve taken time to make it, and to live my life. The way I see it, that’s how I was even able to make another record.”

He’s a hard man to pin down in more ways than one – talking to Nutini about his music, and the music that he loves, makes for extraordinarily tangential conversation. Warm, enthusiastic and fizzing with anecdotes, he runs The Skinny through his companions on the SAY Award shortlist: His favourites are Kathryn Joseph (“so haunting”) and The Amazing Snakeheads (“an exciting, great thing”) with honorable mentions for Young Fathers (“unbelievable”) and Happy Meals (“there’s a tune on there called Le Voyages; wicked”). His interests are broad, namechecking both J Dilla and Ivor Cutler over the course of fifty minutes, and this magpie-like curiosity that he’s termed "pulling on threads" is reflected in the sheer scope of the journey it took to make Caustic Love.

"There was just no plan. We didn’t know what we wanted, or if I actually wanted to make a record" – Paolo Nutini 

He reflects, “it was all very different from the albums before. There was just no plan. We didn’t know what we wanted, or if I actually wanted to make a record. I just said, what I wanna do is write, and try to realise these ideas a little bit more than I had.” The writing and recording took place, slowly, over several years, navigating a reported eleven studios between Scotland, England and America. Nutini is quick to emphasise, though, that this wasn’t a case of indecision – more a case of a purposefully unstrategic strategy. “I’ll try and sum it up for you,” he laughs.

Starting in Glasgow, with his usual band of “boys I've known for years,” they “pulled ideas out the hat” in the Berkeley rehearsal studios. After sparking a friendship with Leo Abrahams (renowned producer and guitarist, noted for working with Brian Eno, Imogen Heap and Jon Hopkins amongst a galaxy of others) the band, with Abrahams in tow, relocated to an old police training facility in the Gorbals, owned by Nutini’s friend’s father. Nutini describes exploring the facility as a treasure trove of unique acoustics: “an old court room, a massive, massive gym hall – you get a drum kit in there and it does its own thing! Little conference rooms, ceiling to the floor, all carpeted. A classroom, an old shooting range.” 

After recording there, the party moved to RAK studios in North London “not far from Abbey Road.” With the guidance of Abrahams: “He doesn’t pressurize, but he really helps you move along,” Nutini invited Seb Rochford of Polar Bear, “a great Scottish drummer,” and his regular collaborator bassist Tom Herbert down to join in the experiment. Legendary session musicians Pino Palladino – bassist extraordinaire who’s played with everyone from The Who to D’Angelo (via Nine Inch Nails) – and Chris Spedding (Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music, Elton John) called in, too; “We were just like, let’s see who wants to play?” With a hit squad enough to render any muso weak at the knees, Nutini enthuses, “there was something really encouraging about it – number one, if they even wanted to come down to the studio. Makes you feel like you had something that was going on, you know?”

Then, although they’d “basically made a record” after a quick stay in SARM studios – once home to Island Records, Bob Marley and Grace Jones – Nutini hopped the pond for Los Angeles, “to get a change of scenery, get some heat.” A prescient move, as, while working out of renowned Sunset Sound, he managed to persuade seminal drummer James Gadson to lend a magic touch to what would be the opening track and lead single Scream (Funk My Life Up) and the angular, sass-heavy Fashion. Still star-struck, Nutini says “these guys… they are on a completely different level. I hold them as being otherworldly, somehow. But when they show up, and [Gadson]'s got a kick drum over his shoulder… Wanders in, sits down, like ‘give me another take, give me another take.’ He’s singing ‘funk my life up’ between the tracks – and if he’s singing it, it’s just an idea, but maybe we should pursue it.”

After LA, the outfit moved to Brighton. Experimenting in a “little studio called the Toy Room,” playing “wall to wall synthesizers – they didn’t come off the wall, so if you wanted to play the one at the top… a lot of the time you were up on ladders,” Nutini describes how the “sound and ambience” of the record’s mammoth Iron Sky came to pass. An expansive, cinematic slow-burner, it’s indebted also to Nutini’s friend and bandmate Dave Nelson, who’s “developing a peddle collection that would make the Edge jealous.” 

Straying from “real-life” collaborators into the world of sampling, Caustic Love features guest spots from Charlie Chaplin, Gladys Knight and Margie Joseph. Influenced by Dilla’s gaps and track links on Donuts, Nutini tells how, actually, he’d made “three-quarters” of an “er… very different kind of record” before debut These Streets was ever released. “So this is what I’m saying about threads that don’t go away,” he asserts, laughing as he recounts how he chased after a “monologue from a sixties movie called Ride The High Country,” too, but was flatly turned down: “Every day’s a school day.” 

With such a complicated map of names and places, it’s a wonder that the record feels as cohesive as it does. But “atmosphere” is invaluable to Nutini, and he credits long-term co-producer Dani Castelar for acting as a “backbone”: “It works, somehow it works.” He’s keen for his live shows to reflect this coherency, too – rather than sounding a patchwork of very different materials. Admitting that “I don’t tend to do much New Shoes any more” but that “we do little bits, with a bit more irony, have a laugh,” he talks of negotiating expectations: “I think the best audiences are there to see what kind of show you’re going to do, not coming with a checklist and preconceptions, a list of demands. You can’t please everyone, man. If I tripped up over everybody who didn’t like a track I’d never get out of bed.” 

Yet, it seems he’s doing a pretty good job at pleasing a hugely diverse spectrum of people. Fresh from playing a charity fashion ball organised by Samuel L. Jackson and attended by Alice Cooper: “We slipped one of his tunes in there, he was digging it” – Nutini’s only a few hours from headlining a massive show at the Eden Project before embarking on the Isle of Wight. Keen to “adapt, freshen up, try a few things” when the band plays live, it’s clear he doesn’t consider his music in any way static or concreted – by the recording process, or by an audience’s assumptions. Caustic Love seems to have marked a new self-assertion in Nutini, establishing him as a collaborator, a curator almost – rather than a solitary poster-boy for stadium-sized indie. “You get ideas,” he says, “that won’t ever go away. And it won’t disappear, even if you don’t stick it on your record. You’ve got threads to pull up. And I’ve been pulling on threads… You’ll always find them again."