1

Beginnings

I've not been one for looking backwards so much, nor for explorative contemplation. I'm more the locomotive type, but I'm in my mid-sixties now and it's perhaps inevitable to gaze back at my life and its achievements, successes, disappointments, friendships, opportunities taken and those missed, and try to piece together the puzzle that helps me figure out how I got to this point. It feels as if I have been living in a whirlwind these last thirty years. So I am thankful that the enforced stop that Covid-19 imposed on us (certainly those of us in the music business) gave me the rare opportunity to think about things calmly: the past, the future, and of course the fraught present.

I've thought a lot about my unusual childhood. I was born to Italian immigrant parents on 30 December 1959 at the Epping Forest Hospital in Essex. My parents, having made their way to London, were working as domestics for a well-to-do family in the area. They had been childhood sweethearts and were engaged for ten years before marrying in London at the age of twenty-four. They came from a tiny farming village called Castelfranco in Miscano in the province of Benevento in the Campania region, a relatively remote community surrounded by astounding natural beauty - not the Tuscan kind of perfectly manicured beauty, but something rougher, more primitive, burned yellows and browns rather than lush green. The village is 760 metres above sea level, the air fresh and invigorating, the views heart-stopping. Today the population hovers around 800, way down from the 3,000 or so in the past.

My mother, Carmela Maria Scinto, was born on 5 January 1934 to Fedele Scinto and Incoronata Pomarico, two of the strongest characters I have ever met. They were carved out of stone. Impossibly hard-working; she quite stern in demeanour, suffering ill health for much of her life; he a chain-smoker with very strong opinions and a mischievous look in his eyes. They lived only a few metres from Antonio and Antonietta Pappano, both families owning and working pitifully small plots of land. Antonio was an intelligent and gentle man. He could read and write and often helped the villagers when they needed to fill out documents, especially when asking for disaster relief following the earthquakes that would occur every so often. Interestingly enough, he never submitted an application for himself. Antonietta was a force of nature, proud, ferocious even, in the way she was protective of her two sons. To this day, the memory of her scares the living daylights out of me, yet I admired her greatly. She worked herself to the bone to nurture her family as best she could in a very poor environment. Antonio and Antonietta made for an incongruous but fiercely united couple.

Antonietta had made it quite plain that Carmela Maria was not good enough for her handsome older son Pasqualino, her golden boy with the gorgeous tenor voice, especially after my mother had to have surgery for a stomach ailment, rendering her damaged goods in Antonietta's eyes. My mother, though desperately in love with him, felt compelled to escape the heartache and torment while Pasqualino was away doing the compulsory military duty that was the norm back then. Her enterprising younger sister, Luisa, had already decided she wanted more from life than the village had to offer. Through the sponsorship of friends, some distantly related, she made her way to England, taking trains and finally a boat across the Channel. London in the late 1950s was one of many immigrant destinations, but the place most favoured by many of the young people from Castelfranco making their inevitable escape from the hardships of cruel winters, poverty and a crushing feeling of stasis. My mother followed - escaped - not long after and received the welcoming embrace of the Castelfranco contingent already established in London.

You will have worked out that my father, after finishing his military service, rushed to London to try to salvage the relationship, which now seemed doomed. He was dumbfounded to find a newly independent young Carmela Maria. At their first encounter, he found her smoking - a cardinal sin in his eyes. It took a while but love finally won out and they were married at St Anne's Swiss Church on Old Pye Street in Westminster on 3 August 1958.

My late arrival caused another familial car crash. After a few months of marriage my father received a letter from his father asking where the fruits of matrimony were. (Those were the words used; many years later I saw this letter.) Naturally the letter was instigated by his mother. Carmela Maria was understandably devastated and became worryingly insecure. I did finally arrive, and my parents decided that they needed to move back to London from Epping, fortuitously having been informed there was a chance of a council flat being available for us. In this they were aided by my future godparents, Paul and Anne Schembri, a Maltese couple who with their son Joey befriended my parents early on and who were determined to help them in any way they could. This gesture will never be forgotten by my family. May future immigrants find such compassionate people as we did to aid them in their quest to survive. My father was restless to be in the big city and both my parents missed their Italian friends, so this opportunity was a godsend. We moved into what would be the first of three different flats in the Peabody Estate Buildings on Old Pye Street, just off Victoria Street in Westminster, but not before I had mastoid surgery in Epping for a chronic ear infection - another shock for my mother.

The concept of work was something sacred to people like my parents: the grit they possessed was somehow from the earth itself. Castelfranco is situated in a region called the Sannio, its people the Sanniti. Very different in character from the vivacious Neapolitans, these people are austere, proud, and will break their backs to scrape a living. I knew nothing of this until about fifteen years ago, when Paolo Baratta, the then capo of the Venice Biennale, instructed me on my people's history, telling me that they even fought back against the Roman onslaught on two different occasions before finally succumbing. Everyone I have known from that village has been imprinted with the idea that through blood, sweat and tears anything can be achieved, or at least a dignified existence. It is written on their faces. This life weapon was most definitely passed on to my younger brother Patrick and to me. He was due to be born around St Patrick's Day, so he was baptised Patrizio, but that handle didn't last long in London town.

By the time I was eight years old and my brother six, both of us were working with my mother from six in the morning, helping her clean offices. She held down several of these jobs, and on the side moonlighted as a receptionist for a homeopathic doctor specialising in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. My mother had only a third-grade education and very little English. However, with her winning personality, she quickly learned how to deal with people and make herself invaluable. My brother and I accepted that we had to be little work horses and follow her example. Of course, we didn't love it, but we got on with it and then went to school. Front and centre was our mother's determination to fight for a better life, no matter the hardships, and in this the united front of Pasqualino and Carmela Maria was awesome to behold.

St Vincent's Primary School in Victoria, next door to Westminster Cathedral, was run by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. I remember being very happy there. I liked all subjects, but football and music appealed to me the most. Ann Walsh, one of the teachers, played the piano beautifully, and she would occasionally put together a small choir of children's voices to sing in the cathedral next door. I would sing my heart out for her, even going off piste one time, singing the wrong verse of the hymn, more loudly and more emotionally than everyone else, ruining everything. At least music was in the air at school; the rudiments of notation were taught, a little keyboard work was expected from each of us, and we sang!

Let's go back to Castelfranco .

When I was five years old, Patrick and I spent an entire year in Castelfranco. I lived with our paternal grandparents, my brother with our maternal grandparents, who had moved to another part of the village, still only a stone's throw away. At the time my parents were simply overwhelmed with so much work that they couldn't take care of us properly. One might ask why they didn't take life a little more easily. I've been asked that question myself hundreds of times over the years, but one must take into consideration that they came from nothing, and something like that marks you for life. This attitude was certainly genetically and psychologically transmitted to my brother and me, becoming close to an obsession: the need not only to survive but also, for my parents in particular, the need to acquire material possessions, the smallest luxury a sense of achievement.

I have memories of running around the village with my school chums (yes, my brother and I had to enrol in something called an asilo), getting into all kinds of scrapes - one time leading to a bad fall that left a serious dent in my forehead. As there was no doctor in the village, I was carried, bleeding profusely,...