Making up for injury time

Folk artist Pepe Belmonte says music has helped him rebuild his life after a horrific bicycle accident, writes Carl Dixon

FOR the London-based Irish/Italian singer-songwriter Pepe Belmonte, it seemed like the pieces were finally falling into place. After years of slogging on the live circuit, the former West Cork resident had recorded his debut album, The Hermit’s Waltz. Film director Sebastian Michael had commissioned him to soundtrack his feature, The Hour of Living. He had even directed a music video for the trip-hop artist Tricky.

His prospects could hardly have been brighter. Then, in the spring of last year, Belmonte was knocked from his bicycle by a speeding police van in London. “My injuries were pretty dramatic,” he says. “I was on the critical list for three days and they really didn’t know if I would pull through. There was pressure building in my brain, my back was broken and my spinal chord was nearly severed. Now there are plates in my face where they reconstructed my right cheek bone, and there’s a huge pin in my right knee where the ligament had become completely detached.”

For the next year and a half, Belmonte put his career more or less on hold as he dealt with both his physical pain and emotional trauma and began re-learning basic motor skills. “I feel like a different person now; even walking the dog I feel like an old man,” he says. “I try to stay positive and concentrate on healing but there are times when you get completely fed up and wonder why it happened.

“Or you think that if you had made a few different decisions you would not have been in that particular place at that particular time. I suppose the last year has been about healing, whereas now the ramifications of how this has impacted on my life and how it will affect my future life are starting to sink in.”

Belmonte has played a handful of gigs in the past year, most notably when Rumer asked him to support her in a tour that culminated in a sell-out show at the Royal Albert Hall. But it’s only now that he’s returning to promoting The Hermit’s Waltz in earnest, with plans to perform in Ireland as well as in Britain.

Belmonte spent much of his teens in the Beara peninsula in west Cork. “We emigrated when I was 10,” he says. “I went from a class of 35 in England to a school of 35 in Adrigole, but as a child you think that this is just part of life and you get on with it. My father had bought one of those cheap tin whistles and there was a harmonica in the house, and I started trying my hand at those. I remember standing up to sing at about the age of nine in McCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere. It was quite graciously received and that stuck with me, that respect for someone getting up and having a go whether it was good or not.

“That passion for music that still exists in Ireland certainly rubbed off on me. A friend began to come around with a guitar and I would strum along. I would hitch 20 miles to Bantry to get a lesson every weekend. Then, after transition year, I returned to the UK to do my A-Levels and formed a sort of bluesy rock band with an old friend of mine.”

Being in a band was fun, but Belmonte was already getting the first inklings that for him music was becoming more serious. At university he studied literature, which would later influence his writing style, and met a whole new group of acoustic musicians, some of whom had received considerable critical acclaim.

“It made me realise that I could make a career in music,” he says.

Belmonte began to carve out a niche with his distinctive, acoustic blues-folk style, thoughtful imagery and technical proficiency.

His love of live performance is part of what has sustained him since his accident. “Being able to express my emotions through music has been very cathartic,” he says. “I am starting to write again and although I haven’t sat down to write about this experience I feel it seeping into my songs. I believe there is good music and bad music, independent of genre, but I love artists like Neil Young and Bob Dylan and old blues artists who came into the studio and just sang around a microphone. It gives it a live, less contrived feel, which I really love.

“Being on stage has been such an important part of my life and now I really need to get back gigging. Hopefully when the dust settles I can distil all those negative experience and pain into something positive for me and for the audience.”

* The Hermit’s Waltz is available now.

www.pepebelmonte.co.uk