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Piro was originally called Andrea Bruno Giovanni Archangelo Pirovano and was born circa 1910 in the suburbs of Rome.
Under the fascist regime of Mussolini in the 20’s and 30’s, Piro trained as a Shoe specialist and worked for the army at the Department of Good Shoes. However, after a few years, he decided that Mussolini was “not very pro” and quit the job. After World War II, he launched a new career as a conceptual artist. Piro made horrible-looking abstract sculptures and a series of piss-takes of Caravaggio’s paintings – which earned him the nickname “Pissovano”, and later “Pissing Boy”. Success was to be met, and by the end of the 1960’s Piro owned a massive villa on the Adriatic, 8 pedigree dogs, half a dozen sports cars and a wine company. His work had become hugely popular and extremely boring – the Tate Modern bought his “Lighter in an Ashtray” for 179,000 pounds, and a painting called “unfinished artwork” for a hundred thousand pounds. This is when Piro himself got bored of it all, and started playing music. He hired the most expensive music teacher in Europe, a certain Telgei Casteloff, who taught him punk rock strumming and advised him to start a band. Predictably, it took Piro 33 years to take a decision, and when he met Graham Mushnik, Luke Warmcop and Juste Voyant, the 3 men already had 17 bands. They accepted to form 2 more with Piro, “Pissinboy” (in homage to the horrible conceptual artist he once was) and “Orchestre du Mont Plaisant”, with the condition that they would only rehearse once every 18 months. Piro went with it, although in his opinion this was “not pro enough”...         |
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