search.noResults

search.searching

dataCollection.invalidEmail
note.createNoteMessage

search.noResults

search.searching

orderForm.title

orderForm.productCode
orderForm.description
orderForm.quantity
orderForm.itemPrice
orderForm.price
orderForm.totalPrice
orderForm.deliveryDetails.billingAddress
orderForm.deliveryDetails.deliveryAddress
orderForm.noItems
41 f T


he official video for Vergine di Fine Agosto features Flo in a couple of roles, and it’s playful and sweetly sexy in that surreal Italian way. In it she is charm-


ing like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holi- day and seductively in control like Sophia Loren in, well, everything.


Like Loren, Flo was brought up in Naples and she too got her big break in the city, but Flo still calls it home. She was working on her final dissertation for her economics degree at Naples University when there was an open audition at a the- atre in the city for what became a hit musi- cal – C'era una volta ... Scugnizzi. Flo was in a crowd of three hundred hopefuls who’d turned up dreaming of landing one of only five parts.


Rehearsals coincided with her finals and straight out of uni, Flo was on a two- year tour taking in four hundred shows across Italy. She says, “I wanted to be a singer, but didn’t know how to make my dream come true. I was very good at my studies and would have found a job – though I believed that a stroke of luck would come.”


Whilst on tour, Flo started thinking seriously about her own music. She began writing down ideas, and started singing and playing with other musicians in Naples when she got the chance.


One of these was multi-instrumental- ist and celebrated saxophonist Daniel Sepe, for whom she sang on two albums and toured with across Europe for about four years. In turn Sepe collaborates on La Mentirosa and is credited as producer, although as good friends they worked closely on the project together.


It was whilst singing with Sepe that Flo started working up her own ideas with a couple of guitarists and began gigging around Naples, the trio appearing simply as ‘Flo’. In 2013, a tango that she’d writ- ten, Ça Ne Tient Pas La Route, appeared on a compilation album (Milonga Madre), put out by Agualoca Records. For this she per- formed with a larger line-up which, along with guitars, included horns, a double bass, charango, cello and percussion, fore- shadowing the wide sound palette of her later recordings.


On hearing the track, the label boss rang Flo with a deal to release her own album. Continuing to work with Ernesto Nobil, who had produced Ça Ne Tient…, her debut, d’Amore e di Altre Cose Irre- versibili, was released the following year, garnering that aforementioned critical acclaim. She soon added widespread pub- lic approval to that when, taking a percus- sionist and cellist on board with her two- guitar gigging line-up, she started touring in her own right.


Having added more strings and a har- monium to her recorded sound, these were joined by bouzouki, harp and man- dola on her next release Il Mese del Rosario (2016), also with Nobil in the pro- ducer’s chair.


Looking for more freedom and pro- duction input, Flo struck up a deal with SoundFly records for 2018’s La Mentirosa and listening to the magical eclecticism of her sound world (now embracing, but not limited to, male and female choirs, flutes, saxes, oud, sitar, accordeon, piano, a string quartet and a bass tuba as well as her tried- and-tested line-up and the glockenspiel she’s taken to performing live), you realise she’s in control of a remarkable musicality.


From the slide into rock guitar on the opening track to the pizzicato strings on the closing number, La Mentirosa takes us on a trip that suggests the rhythms and sounds of Latin America, Africa, India, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean – the gorgeous Quando Verrai sounds like it’s reaching out from the back streets, or perhaps the bay, of Naples, from a sunny summer’s day circa 1956.


The sheer skill of the arrangements reins it in when occasional folk rock ele- ments threaten to go ‘prog’ and the track sequence takes us from sweet charm one minute to something happily mad that Tom Waits might have imagined. The sub- tle simplicity of some tracks suggests time- less ancient tradition and is, she says, part of the reason for the title. “Mentirosa means liar in Spanish. The lie is that these sound like traditional songs, but really I’ve recently written them all.”


L


oving the traditional music of Southern Italy, “Like the taran- tella,” she says, “It’s the place I start from when I write. But I love, too, fado and Balkan and Brazilian music, the bossa nova, and I’m influenced by the traditions of these and many other places, but really it all comes from the same place, they flow from the same place when I write.”


She says, “I never considered what style I’m writing. I just write, it’s only when I’m being interviewed that I think about it.” For her, sound and landscape are inex- tricably linked, in a 3D, synesthesia kind of way that incorporates colour and smell. Mentirosa, she says, “Made me think of turmeric, ginger, it’s spicy – a spicy word!”


She listens a lot to traditional music, saying, “The head has to fly, you travel with your head,” and wants her music to be as borderless as the travels in her imagination – adventures that began when she was a child – and the travels that she has physical- ly undertaken, touring all over Europe, per- forming in Latin America and Africa, and studying at the University of Tarragona for a year as part of her degree course.


Growing up with a brother and sister in Naples, most of the music she heard in the house was “Pop from the TV.” She loved music and would sing, like her father, whom she says “had a small compa- ny building doors and windows, but he loved to sing.”


When she was still a child, she says, “My father died and my mother who had been a housewife started working as a maid and a carer. It was very hard for her


and for us. We could not afford too much leisure and entertainment. We had to work and study. I was very shy and worked hard, but I always believed that music could give me a chance to get out of life’s periphery and it’s difficulties, and luckily it was like that.”


Flo has “very tender” memories of singing at parties and weddings, as she was already doing by the age of 14. “I was singing ‘international light music:’ Whit- ney Houston, Maria Carey.” And then at 16, when she took private piano lessons, “I was singing in clubs, with a band where I sang soul, R’n’B and rock.” She lists Aretha Franklin and Burt Bacharach, and later Miriam Makeba, jazz and great Italian singer-songwriters like Domenico Modug- no, as amongst her teenage inspirations. It was on the piano that she started to com- pose, “Playing badly my own songs.”


Now she says a composition always starts with the melody. Then some words might come to her as she thinks about it whilst out walking, perhaps, and when she gets back, she’ll build the song with the words as she works on the stories and the music to realise them. She’ll then take the idea to rehearsal and work on it with the band as they improvise and play with what she has in mind.


Her lyrics are, she says, “full of thoughts about women and how we should value that we are different from men, we have a different way of living, but we are equal. We should have equal rights.” Brought up in a Catholic family, in a Catholic country that gave her a “totally Catholic education,” her songs unsurpris- ingly reference Catholic rituals.


She says, “I’m fascinated by the collec- tive religion, the rituals that involve peo- ple. In some songs I wrote about the hope that lies behind faith. The hope that some- thing exists and that there is a reason for the faith.” She says she is not religious, is no longer a practising Catholic and doesn’t believe in religion per se. But “I have faith in hope. And I hope that something exists, more than I have faith.”


Flo continues to work as an actress, “taking on a theatrical job every year” and tells me she has an upcoming role in a musical comedy in Paris is March 2019. We’re speaking via WhatsApp. She is in a music studio looking effortlessly beautiful in a sweatshirt and jeans and is warm, smil- ing and relaxed.


She’s with a friend of hers, who’s trans- lating, and they’re exploring a possible music project. She says, “When I write a new song, I like to record it and try to understand what it can become; I like to work with musicians and producers, and then let things mature in my head.” But for now, “I want to dedicate myself to La Men- tirosa. We have upcoming gigs all over Italy and Europe and from next February we’ll be in Austria, Germany and England.”


Until then, click on YouTube. She’s fab. youtu.be/Y9PepVgL9jM flo-official.com


F


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148