Carmelo Alfano is a Sicilian-English, London-based singer, songwriter and multi-disciplinary musician whose career has taken an unusually winding path through performance, recording, technology, and the wider music industry. His new single, “Is This You?”, released September 1st, brings together indie, alternative, and electronic influences in an atmospheric, 4:47 track recorded with Sundae Club.
Is This You?
The collaboration carries real history behind it. Sundae Club’s Colin Crawford was previously the keyboard player in Alfano’s own band, which supported James Blunt, shared management with him for a period, and played a string of well-known London venues. Crawford later teamed up with producer George Shilling, building Sundae Club out of what started as casual Sunday recording sessions, drawing on inspiration from acts like Lemon Jelly and a love of vintage gear, including Crawford’s original Mellotron. The project went on to secure a publishing deal, land music placements with GMTV and ITV’s UEFA Champions League Weekly, and co-write a track for French Fame Academy winner Nolwenn Leroy that ended up selling roughly half a million copies. That shared history gives “Is This You?” a sense of continuity that couldn’t really be manufactured from scratch, two musicians reconnecting years after their paths first crossed.
Alfano’s own musical foundation stretches back much further and much wider than any single genre. Introduced to opera as a child by his father, an amateur tenor, he went on to spend two years studying voice in Modena, Italy, under the same teacher who trained Luciano Pavarotti. He also shares a family connection to classical composer Franco Alfano. That formal training sits alongside a genuinely unconventional career path, including an early foray into live-streaming a London gig over dial-up internet more than twenty years ago, an experiment unusual enough at the time to draw coverage from Sky News. Perhaps the most striking story from his career, though, involves a demo he sent to Tom Jones in 1993. A decade later, he received a call from Mark Woodward asking if he was the same Carmelo who’d submitted that recording, since one of the songs on it had actually been considered for Jones, only for the contact information on the cassette to go missing in the meantime. It’s the kind of story that captures just how unpredictable a music career can be, and how much persistence it takes to keep going through it.
Final Thoughts
“Is This You?” fits naturally into that larger story, an atmospheric meeting point between classical roots, decades of London music history, and Sundae Club’s electronic sensibility, built on a connection that had been waiting years to come full circle. It’s available now on Spotify and other major platforms. Follow Carmelo Alfano on Instagram and TikTok.
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