‘I’d rather be boring than mysterious’: Bar Italia on anonymity, originality and disliking Pulp
Bar Italia are tired of being a mystery. The trio – who have spent their brief existence breathlessly feted as London’s most exciting new band, as well as its most enigmatic – are very much over their early inscrutability. “I’d rather be known as boring than mysterious right now,” says Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, who founded the outfit alongside Sam Fenton and Nina Cristante in 2020. “It was fine for a while but it’s got to the point where everything that’s written about us is caveated with the word ‘mysterious’.”
There’s a reason for that: until this spring, the band had provided no names, no photos, no background information at all. In fact, there was just a stream of dissonant yet irresistibly hooky rock released via cult hero Dean Blunt’s World Music label, which led to the kind of hype traditional guitar bands rarely experience nowadays. But as they prepare to release their new album The Twits – mere months after May’s Tracey Denim (they admit to being prolific, but “no one’s Ed Sheeran here, being like: four chords, loop, done – it’s not thatquick”) – the trio are ready to break their press moratorium.
That silence was down to the fact “we had nothing to talk about”, says Fehmi. “What’s interesting about hearing a band’s origin story when that was last week?” It was almost four years ago now, though, so let’s hear it. Gathered round a table in a cafe on Old Kent Road (in person they are neither boring nor mysterious, but rather in possession of that compulsively mickey-taking – but in a nice way – energy you always hope a band has), Londoners Fenton and Fehmi recall how they met in 2018 at a “bad” open mic night. They began collaborating – channelling industrial pioneers Coil “slash whatever pop we were listening to at the time”, says Fenton (when pressed: “the Sugababes”) – before moving into a flat together. Living upstairs was Cristante, who had at that point been working on her eerie, sample-based solo material with her then-partner Blunt for a number of years.
The trio casually joined forces in late 2019, and when holed up together during the pandemic, threw themselves into making “catchy, good songs”, says Cristante (“we were not interested in making experimental, challenging music”), rendered via the medium of sleety, crepuscular guitar music. Although: “We don’t use the term guitar music,” says Fenton. “But we did want to use guitars,” counters Cristante. Fenton clarifies his position: “We wanted to use guitars but we wouldn’t call it guitar music.”
Cristante – who moved to the UK from her native Rome in 2007 – came up with the apparently still internally divisive Bar Italia name (it immediately elicits a groan from Fehmi), a reference to the storied Soho cafe popular with the post-club crowd. It is not, they clarify, a nod to the lugubrious, comedown-themed Pulp track of the same name. Fenton says he’d never heard of the song – and even if they had, the band aren’t exactly falling over themselves to pay tribute to the Britpop giants. “I don’t think any of us like Pulp particularly,” says Fehmi. “Jarvis once came to a gig I did and disliked it audibly in the crowd.”
Not to worry – nowadays they are racking up celebrity fans. Italian basketball star Gigi Datome attended a recent Milan gig, they tell me, and during a June appearance on cult US comic Tim Heidecker’s madcap web series Office Hours Live – their only public interview, if you could call it that, at the time of writing – they were informed that Bob Odenkirk was an admirer. Heidecker had mentioned the band over dinner with the Better Call Saul star the evening before, and “Bob said: ‘I know those guys – those guys are fucking great!’”
That endorsement is slightly less surprising once you understand Bar Italia’s success across the pond, where they routinely sell out venues. “We got hold of our Spotify details a year or so ago, and that’s when we were like: ‘Oh shit, it’s like double in America what it is anywhere else,’” says Fenton. Why do they think that is? “They always like British bands,” says Fenton. Fehmi looks at him askance. “It’s famously hard for a British band to break America. I’ve just finished watching the Busted documentary about them trying to break America – they’d had three No 1s and they couldn’t get a gig!”
Whatever the Yanks are digging, it’s working here, too: Bar Italia have never had much trouble finding an audience. They are open about the instant leg-up they got from releasing on the trailblazing and beloved Blunt’s World Music: “As soon as they put it up people started listening, because everyone checks what [they’re doing],” says Fenton. But Cristante is also keen to point out that World Music had never released anything not credited to Blunt himself “that had got so much interest”.
Reddit was soon alive with adoring threads (and detective work – their anonymity clearly helped stoke online fandom) and at their initial post-lockdown gigs in London and Manchester – Cristante’s first foray into live performance – they were playing to crowds who already knew all the words. Now the band are flattered (and amused) to discover that listeners are getting inked in their honour. “Anyone who gets a tattoo of us, we give them the time of day,” says Fenton. “Oh, you’ve scarred yourself for life for a buzz band,” Fehmi joins in. “We’re going to be gone in a year. You’re going to have that tattoo for ever.”
It is not hard to understand how Bar Italia could inspire such devotion. Over their four albums (the most recent two released on connoisseurs’ indie label Matador), they have repeatedly demonstrated that magical combination of impeccable cool – in Bar Italia’s case that comes courtesy of the scuzzy, moody, insouciant grind of late 20th-century guitar music (sorry!) – and melodic accessibility. Their USP is the interplay between their three distinctive voices: Fenton’s breathy, conversational croon; Cristante’s pretty but slightly flat tones; and Fehmi’s harsher, sometimes vaguely hardcore howl – a Pitchfork review of Tracey Denim complained that vocals weren’t the band’s “strong suit”, which seems to miss the point.
What is trickier is deciphering why Bar Italia have become the band of 2023. It’s incredibly difficult to make music in the conventional rock model that sounds current or new, something the trio are fully aware of. “If you pick up a guitar you’re engaging in the past, inherently,” says Fehmi. “You have to think about it and not think about it at the same time, in my opinion.” Fenton thinks striving for novelty is a fool’s errand: “We know a lot of people – friends of ours – who write stuff that doesn’t really feel compelling because they’re so worried about sounding like something before and they’re so desperate to be original. I think there’s an arrogance in that,” says Fenton. Fehmi agrees: “Stop making music if you want to be original.”
“Do you think we just sound like 90s alternative rock, though?” asks Fenton with concern after I mention the genre a second time. “If that’s the main thing you hear then you’re missing a lot, in our opinion.” It is a top note in their music, but to listen to Bar Italia is a wider exercise in remembrance. Goth, shoegaze, grunge, country, post-punk, punk, 00s indie, 60s folk-rock, numetal, even Britpop – a jumbled rush of nostalgia so broad it completely undermines the very prospect of homage or pastiche.
I wonder if there’s any self-conscious irony involved in making music that is so aware of its own relationship with the past. Fenton and Fehmi don’t seem to think so, but Cristante believes the past “can be approached with irony. Not irony that’s funny – or sardonic or cynical – but it can become playful material. There has to be a level of intuition and subconscious understanding of that.” That said, Bar Italia is “not overly conceptual, we’re not overthinking”.
Whether you care about this postpostmodern approach or not, Bar Italia clearly don’t require any extra intellectual context to win listeners over – or, for that matter, any mystique. Even so, they can’t help but keep some things under wraps. That becomes apparent when I ask them how old they are. “I’m 45,” says Fehmi (he’s clearly not). “I’m going to be 50 in August,” says Fenton (he won’t be). “Can we not put our ages?” Fehmi pleads. I get the same avoidant circling when I ask about their influences. “You name it, probably that,” shrugs Fenton. “Even Pulp.”
The Twits is released on 3 November.