“I did everything I could to get out of Chatham”

What Steven asked musician Pete Molinari

Musician Pete Molinari recorded his first album in Billy Childish’s house. He has gone from Chatham to perform globally with some of the biggest names in music. He now lives in Los Angeles, and Steven caught up with him on the phone whilst Pete was walking his dog in the park. They spoke about what took Pete to the United States, how he came to record with Billy Childish, recording with Yoko Ono, and lots more…

Pete Molinari. Photo: Elizabeth Beristain.

What is your official occupation?
It sounds rather dramatic to say I’m an artist, doesn’t it? But I guess that’s what I do. I don’t do anything other than the music, and I tend to write for a lot of other people too now and find myself in different studio sessions playing for people rather than just myself, which has been interesting in LA. The pandemic got us writing a bit of literature. I’ve started to do a lot more of that, and I’m actually working on a play with an Italian company because I’m working with a lot of people in Italy.
I’m just a... I guess I find these words a little bit over the top, like artist and writer and all of that stuff. But seeing as there’s not many other labels for it, that’s what I find myself doing. I’d be just as proud to be a fisherman in Malta or something as I would to be an artist. But I tend to have gone that route.
I found myself living in Los Angeles. I never planned on it. I got a recording contract about 11 years ago that brought me to America, but I first settled in New York, because I’d been to New York, I knew New York, I knew it like I knew London. LA, I didn’t. I didn’t want to, but I found myself living here, probably because I met my wife, who’s from Brazil, and she lives here. If I hadn’t met her, I’d probably move back to New York or even London.
My point is in LA, if you want to work a lot as a musician, it’s a bit different than the east coast and in Europe, where you can keep yourself really busy live all the time. I do a lot of live work, but in LA, you find yourself either writing for the film industry or in a lot of different studio sessions.

What instruments do you play?
I play guitar. I play guitar, and I play a lot more piano nowadays. I didn’t play piano that much when I started playing and performing. I usually use piano just for writing songs. I’d sit down, and it’s a bit easier that way than guitar for coming up with things in some ways. The piano is broader, and you can have a lot more of a happy accident on a piano than you can on a guitar. When it comes to performing with musicians, if I’m doing a show with a band, because I do both playing solo acoustic dates when I want to and I perform a lot with a band, it still is mostly guitar. But most days if I’m in the studio, I find myself playing piano a lot nowadays. I play harmonica too. I play a little bit of blues, but generally I play in the folky Bob Dylan, Neil Young way. I’ve learned a bit more over the years to play some blues and stuff. It’s a fun little thing to carry around.

What took you to the US in the first place?
It’s funny because I think my obsession with the US, if I need to call it that, wears off when you’ve lived somewhere for a while. I think early on as a kid, before I developed my love for music or anything like that, we had relatives that were from San Francisco. Initially from a Maltese background, because my mum is from Malta in the Mediterranean, my father is from Alexandria, Egypt, and my grandfather was from Italian stock. Me and my siblings all raised there in Medway, and we had relatives that would visit us almost every couple of years from San Francisco and I don’t live too far from them now. I see them every now and again when I’m in San Francisco, but they would always bring us things, books, little toy cars and baseball caps. Me and one of my sisters, we really grew a love for America and American things. I think if I was born in America, I would be living in Europe. I think it’s the novelty of living somewhere else, maybe, and anywhere else could have been Italy or France.
I think for me, I went towards New York initially, before LA, but it was before anything to do with music or the arts. Aartistically, I was probably drawn a lot more to things in England and France and Italy and things like that. But music, obviously, like anyone else in England, we all tend to love rock and roll. I had older brothers that had a big record collection. It was weird because I grew up in a household where my father liked opera. The first thing I heard was Maria Carlass and Pavarotti. Yet my older brothers and I think one of my uncles had rock and roll, a little jazz, a little blues. Primarily, it was Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Roy Orbison. Buddy Holly became a big love of mine, and the Everly Brothers. I think the imagery of America and the brashness of it, as a kid, appealed to me. I think I was a bit idealistic about it. Obviously, when I went through school, it always felt like the British traditions grated on me a little bit. I never felt I was going to do anything that academic. I loved Shakespeare, and I loved literature. That was about the only thing I really liked at school. I loved everything to do with the arts in England, but I guess I probably look towards America as an escape, maybe. I say ‘maybe’ on there because I’m guessing just as much as you are. It certainly held an appeal for me when I was at school. When I got into music, it was the first place I wanted to go. I went around Europe a lot, but reading about New York and Greenwich Village and what happened here was just appealing to me.

How are you feeling about the United States these days?
Like I said, I didn’t plan to live in Los Angeles, and I still feel like Los Angeles isn’t a place of culture for me. It isn’t something that appeals to me very much in a cultural way. There are things as a Brit that I love about it. You can wake up in January, and it feels like July. The light here, more than the warmth. I feel like the light is always positive. It makes me feel good, and I tend to be drawn a lot more to New York in a way, the east coast, because if you want to be busy playing shows, the east coast there’s a lot more going on.
But America, if I think about it, in any other way than I usually do, if I start to think about it politically, yeah, it’s not so appealing. It’s pretty crazy, everything that’s going on. But I guess it probably was in the time of my mum and dad and everyone else too, but maybe not as crazy as now.

You’ve just come back from Italy. Were you there on a holiday or were you there performing?
I tend to feel like I’m still on holiday here. It’s weird, for me usually going away to play and record and do stuff. In Italy, I was playing. The only holiday I really get is since being with Mila that we’ve been to Brazil a few times. She’s from a small island in the South called Florianopolis, which is really tropical and beautiful. I’ve been there a few times, and that is probably a break for me because I don’t play music there. When I go away, usually to the east coast or to Europe, it’s usually to do something with music.
I was there mainly for a thing called the Summer Jamboree, which is in Semigallia, which is near the Adriatic Sea. It’s up near the Rimini Ravenna area on the east coast. We planned some other shows around it, played in Rome and Milan and a few other places. Then I worked with an Italian record label, Blind Faith Records, I was on for the last record, and we started on some new recordings there, which was good. That wasn’t actually planned. I was there to play, and then we started to record a couple of tracks. I guess it’s the catalyst for a new record.
I have recorded a record here in LA earlier this year that we’re getting out at some point, but I am releasing a single pretty soon. I have enjoyed both recording here and over there in recent years. In the past few years, I’ve been recording pretty much between here and Italy. I haven’t recorded in England for a while, which I would really like to do because some of my favourite musicians are there. I’d love to work with them again. I heard that Toe Rag Studios closed down, which is quite sad. That was one of the places I recorded in London with Liam Watson. I really love that studio. It was beautiful, all-analogue place and sad to hear about things like that.

We were saying before we began about that sad nostalgia of things going, and it’s like it never happened.
Yeah, you see things come and go, especially when you’ve spent a few years away, and then you go back and, wow, what happened to that theatre or what happened to that cinema or that’s turned into a block of flats or whatever. I think that’s what we’re supposed to get used to as humans, just to let things go and not be so attached. If you’re here and you drive down Hollywood Boulevard, you can imagine what it might have been like in 1940 or 50 or something. I’m sure it was a lot more sophisticated then. We’ve got all the footage to look at. You look at these places now, and everything’s changed, the culture’s changed so much.