There is a tea room near his flat he insists we have to go to in order to have the right kind of conversation. It has the perfect ambiance, he says, and when I meet him there, I understand what he means.
Tessaro's charming good looks draw attention immediately from men and women alike, but their quick dismissal is a keen indicator that this place is part of his routine. When he introduces himself, he does so with a mischievous smile and a disarming warmth that makes me think I may actually get a real conversation.
At 26, Tessaro is releasing his third album, Caustic Love, and is already being hailed as Scotland's biggest musician at the moment. With a family so rooted in film and fashion, the obvious expectation was that Tessaro would follow into their footsteps one direction or another. (His grandparents are actors Sir Boyd Darrow and Dame Emilia Bishop, while his other grandparents, Vincenzo and Mara Tessaro, founded Max Mara. His mother is model Olivia Darrow.)
"In truth, I am a lousy man on film," Tessaro says. "I hate to follow with no aim and let / them put my heart and words into a cage. / I am no man except the man I am."
It takes about a minute before I realise the odd cadence in our conversation is because Tessaro is inexplicably speaking only in iambic pentameter and rhymes. I stumble through my next question as I come to this realisation, which only seems to delight Tessaro further. It's his idiosyncratic sense of humour that keeps him feeling grounded in his silver spoon world.
By the time Tessaro was 17, he'd moved to London to pursue music as fulltime career, doing exactly what his parents didn't want him to do. His mother had hoped he might become a plumber, and his father hoped he might take over the chain of restaurants he'd opened in Glasgow. He tried, at first, to be fit into the moulds he as given, but he would often get bored and find more trouble.
"The man who wants to have it all will find / that life is hard to grasp when you are but / a lie. I say be true, be free, be kind," he advises. "I am no man except the man I am."
He followed his own dream instead, and that dream came with excessive drinking and drug usage. His story of addiction is well documented across every major paper in the United Kingdom. Tessaro will be the first to admit he may have grown up too quickly, but the experiences he had shaped him into the person he is today and for that, he would change nothing.
"Is truth a thing that should be smooth or should / I fight to own? I think I ought to be / the one I say the one I am for good," Tessaro admits. "The truth: I did the worst and maybe worse."
The lifestyle he'd kept up for several years soon began to collapse around him. He stopped making music, he stopped being productive. Tessaro doesn't shy away from his mistakes, nor does he try to hide his faults. By late 2012, he checked himself the private Capio Nightingale clinic in London and eventually moved to a secluded family home in Scottish countryside to focus on his recovery and relearn his love of music
It's important, he says, that people understand he'd fallen and hit the bottom at the height of his career. He walked away from the momentum because the momentum was walking all over him. In the end, this self-discovery brought him to Caustic Love, written for old lovers and about his former life, after a five year absence from music. His new philosophy is to be a little more careful and find new ways to express his love of life.
Caustic Love is available on 14 April, 2014.
