The small, white room smelled of hardboiled eggs. As he spun the stem of a wine glass filled with green Odwalla juice, 20-year-old Paolo Nutini recounted his hyper-accelerated rise to fame, starting in his parents’ fish and chip shop in Paisley, Scotland.
“I’ve been playing lots of stuff since I was 12 or 11,” Nutini said before his show Saturday night at the Orpheum. “I think I wrote my first song at 15.”
Odd preshow hankerings aside, the Scotsman-by-way-of-Tuscany isn’t your typical UK platinum-selling artist. Sleepy-eyed and dressed down, his low-key demeanor is immediately disarming.
“I don’t know the ins and outs of what made this record successful,” he said. “I’m not that great a writer. I’m just trying to prove something to myself, see what I’m capable of.”
Nutini left school to pursue music and eventually caught a big break: After correctly answering a trivia question at a local show in Paisley, he won the chance to perform a few songs on stage. The crowd’s warm reception impressed a particular audience member, who offered to be Nutini’s manager.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In the time it takes an average kid to earn a high school diploma, Nutini has sold over a million records worldwide, opened for the Rolling Stones and Amy Winehouse and played to audiences of thousands — not to mention building a rabid fanbase of young girls who yearn for his syrup-thick, scotch-soaked accent and boyish good looks.
But this doesn’t faze Paolo too much. As the size of the venues increase, he strives to maintain an intimate atmosphere. “The crowds [at the early shows] were quiet and they came for the music and they came to relax,” he said.
“I find myself talking a lot less between the songs,” he said with a wry smirk. “But that’s probably not a bad thing since they can’t understand what I’m saying anyhow.”
Nutini’s even-keeled personality translated onstage, especially to a crowd ready for something less mass-produced than uninspiring opener John McLaughlin, who pounded the last Something Corporate-aping piano chord with all the grit and edginess of The Fray, or VH1’s next “You Oughta Know” artist.
Despite Paolo’s upbeat folk sound, he sang with his eyes closed and shoulders hunched over like a jumbo shrimp, holding the microphone like a warm cup of tea.
The set list included gems from his sole release, These Streets.
Each feathered falsetto floated over the audience like smoke rings, filling the Orpheum’s massive domed ceilings with a restrained cool, moving middle-aged women and teenage girls alike.
“By the time you finish what you’ve been working on, you’ve got a lot of different ideas of what you want to do,” Nutini said of reworking his songs. “You usually want to go back and fix it.”
And onstage, Nutini does exactly that — each song seemed slightly retooled from Streets and fueled by the muscle of his backing band. On a stripped-down rendition of “New Shoes,” Nutini transitioned from pop to coffee-shop chic and whatever else he felt like.