Two nights at home, then London: Neapolitan disco puts a full stop on its tour

Neapolitan duo Nu Genea are wrapping up the European tour behind their third album People of the Moon — on Saturday, 19 September, the live band plays the Roundhouse in London. It is the tour’s only UK date and its final stop.

The concert is listed on the Roundhouse’s own programme.

The home finale has already happened: on 11 and 12 September the duo played two nights at Arena Flegrea in Naples. But the true full stop on a route that began in Milan in May will be placed abroad.

The album and the tour

People of the Moon came out on 1 May on the duo’s own label NG Records: ten tracks, with guests including Spain’s María José Llergo, Britain’s Tom Misch, Fabiana Martone, Celinatique and Gabriel Prado. The vocals are in Neapolitan, Arabic, English, Spanish and Portuguese; the sound draws on Afro-Cuban and Anatolian rhythms, highlife and bossa nova.

The tour stretched across twenty-one dates in eleven countries — from Albania and Serbia to Sweden and Finland — and everywhere the duo performs with an expanded live line-up. Back in May, Massimo Di Lena promised that Tom Misch, with whom they recorded the track Onenon, would be invited to the London show.

“That’s how it was at New Morning in Paris: in the toilet I saw posters of Miles Davis and Chick Corea. Cold sweat: ‘And what note am I supposed to play now?’ I thought,” Lucio Aquilina told L'Espresso when asked about the finale in a venue where Led Zeppelin and David Bowie once played.

The record’s title is not about outer space. According to Aquilina, the Moon here is an earthly reality, a space free of social pressure and convention; Di Lena adds that the “people of the Moon” are the part of us that, in a lifetime, we manage to let out for only a few moments.

The album was written at a distance: Aquilina moved from Naples to Ortigia in Syracuse. And Tom Misch wrote to the duo himself after seeing their clip with a bassline in the spirit of Pino D'Angiò — and they flew to London to make Onenon. So the London finale has a backstory of its own.

“In Northern Europe they are crazy, they dance like maniacs. When it comes to music, the stereotype about coldness does not exist,” Massimo Di Lena said in an interview with Rolling Stone Italia.

Who are Nu Genea

Nu Genea are Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina, two keyboard players and producers from Naples. They started out in techno and minimal, moved to Berlin and reinvented themselves there: the project, founded in 2014 as Nu Guinea, changed its name in 2021. The album Nuova Napoli (2018) became an archaeology of Neapolitan funk and seventies disco, while Bar Mediterraneo (2022) was a journey across the Mediterranean.

The Roundhouse calls them “Italian groove innovators” and promises “a show that explodes with colour, rhythm and shared celebration”. For a duo that deliberately sailed “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” on the new record, a finale away from home looks less like chance than logic.

Earlier we wrote about how Grace Jones took to the Amnesia terrace at Glitterbox — another story about disco that never gets old.