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understand how to bend that note. Then I saw the clock and said, oh, it's 3:00 AM.
It's better to wait until tomorrow morning. If not, my mother was not very happy.

It was hard. You have to have a lot of passion.

BiTS: Did you find it quite exciting to learn to play?

FP: Yes, very exciting because I was really an outsider. I didn't want to go to school,
so at 14, I went to work in a factory. I didn't have so many friends then. I worked in

shifts, so I had a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, and music and harmonica helped me
a lot at that time because music at the time, and harmonica too, really were the

soundtrack of my life in a small town.

BiTS: I don't know what town it was that you were brought up in. Where in Italy
were you actually brought up?

FP: I still live in the same town I was

born and grew up in and it’s 45
minutes south of Milan in northern

Italy. Also, a big city like Milan was
on the other side of the moon, you
know what I mean? Well, we all

discovered blues music through the
British musicians, Rolling Stones,
Eric Clapton. Maybe a little later John

Mayall. It took me years to discover
Muddy Waters and years to discover
Robert Johnson and so on. So it was

very slow, everything, but in some
ways, the fact that it was really step
by step, my passion grew a lot

because you have this dream in some
way to emulate these musicians that
you were listening to on the records. So maybe the fact that it was really slow to

learn everything, make you grow up in a better way, not only as a musician but also
as a human being.

BiTS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

FP: I don't know if you know what I mean, because sometimes my English can be
very, very, very poor [chuckles].

BiTS: [Laughs] It sounds okay to me. Tell me something about the first band that

you recorded with. Chicken Mambo, I think it was called.

FP: Yeah, yeah. Well, at that time, all the bands have important names, so The
Fabulous Three, Lil Jim, and The Thunderbirds. So I wanted to stay humble, so I say

why not Chicken Mambo? It sounds very musical as a name, and it was something