24-04-2025
The poshest man in Britpop: ‘There's aristocratic musicians pretending they grew up on council estates'
This is the ballad of the Honourable Louis Eliot, former Britpop pin-up and heir presumptive to Earldom of St Germans. He was taught to play guitar by a member of Hawkwind, ran festivals at his ancestral home in Port Eliot, played guitar for Grace Jones and, for a brief, shining moment in the 1990s was poised to be the next big thing.
'If you had made it, you would surely have been the poshest rock star in history,' I point out. 'Well, I still might be,' he dryly responds.
Eliot is staging a belated comeback with his critically admired band Rialto, returning after a 24-year absence with Neon and Ghost Signs, a sparkling, brittle collection of pop gems about lost nights and bittersweet dawns, released this week. 'It's basically a middle-aged man searching for a youth he missed out on but only finding the bruises in the morning.'
Let's deal with his title first. 'It's an anachronism, isn't it?' Eliot laughs, softly. He cuts a dashing figure at 57. Leonine and handsome in a mod jacket and smart jeans. He looks every inch old Britpop royalty, but there is little to suggest he is a scion of one of England's most venerable aristocratic families. 'Can you imagine expecting anyone to address you as The Honourable? There's an inherent contradiction in calling yourself that.'
Eliot's upbringing was equal parts bohemian and eccentric aristo, 'kind of free range, benign neglect.' His late father, Peregrine, the 10 th Earl of St Germans, was described at his funeral in 2016 by poet Heathcote Williams as 'an unusual mix of hippie and stiff upper lip.'
His Countess mother Jacquetta Eliot (born Lampson) was a noted beauty who partied with the Beatles and modelled naked for Lucien Freud, with whom she had a tumultuous affair and featured in nine of his most famous paintings. Eliot spent his childhood between Ladbroke Grove, London 'playing music in the kitchen with my mum's boyfriend' (Duart Maclean from short-lived punk band Bank of Dresden) and summers at Port Eliot, an enormous mansion of 'dilapidated wings and 200-year-old wallpaper peeling off the walls.' His father's biker friends camped out on the 6000-acre estate, where Eliot and his brothers would beg for rides on Harley Davidsons. 'There were no real rules, apart from lunch at one and clean shoes indoors.'
His parents staged the Elephant Fayre, a music and arts festival that featured Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and the Fall, from 1981 to 1986. 'My dad and Michael Eavis were friends. If he'd held it together it could be as enormous as Glastonbury, but dad didn't have those ambitions.'
Life in London wasn't much more regulated. Eliot remembers Freud in 'paint-spotted chef trousers jangling with coins, notes falling out of his pockets. His attitude towards money was that if he had it, he would gamble it away. He was very anti being comfortable.' Louis received guitar lessons from Huw Lloyd-Langton of Hawkwind 'an inspiring, lovely man.' His father once tried to pay for lessons with a lump of hash, which didn't go down well. 'Huw had forsworn all drugs after a terrible psychedelic experience.'
By 19, Eliot was at Chelsea Art School when he was roped into performing at a working men's club. 'I had a fear of getting up on stage. I nearly bottled it.' But he 'gave it my all' singing country standard Heartaches by the Number. 'It was a cathartic moment.' He was walking home when 'out of the shadows I heard this voice saying, 'Nice singing, Louis.' I looked up, and it was Joe Strummer.' The Clash frontman had been in the audience. 'He was one of my heroes. I stood there speechless while he walked off. But it gave me a boost of confidence.'
Handsome, personable, talented and well-connected, Eliot seemed destined for success. Noel Gallagher was a fan of his early 90's indie glam rock band, Kinky Machine. They morphed into Rialto who scored some smart hits, with Melody Maker predicting a 'future of Oasis -like proportions.' But it all suddenly unravelled during a record label shake-up at the end of the decade. 'You've gotta have the goods, and then you've gotta have the luck,' says Eliot. 'And there's not that much luck to go around in this business.'
He insists he never became despondent. He moved back to Cornwall, where he raised two children with long-standing girlfriend Murphy Williams (daughter of poet Hugo Williams), released solo albums and co-wrote Will Young's Leave Right Now, which won an Ivor Novello in 2004. 'That's the dream, writing a song that sticks around.'
He acknowledges privilege. 'I always knew I'd have a roof over my head, which is an incredible gift. It meant I could keep making music.' He ran a literary festival at Port Eliot that came to an end with the pandemic and played pubs with a punky Celtic Cornish band. 'I've played some of my best gigs in front of 20 people at the Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I just love to play.'
Playing in a functions band led to his next break, when Grace Jones turned up as a guest at a wedding. 'We played Pull Up to the Bumper and Grace wound up on stage at a marquee in the countryside, the tent was jumping, and I was beaming, that one riff going round and round and round. It was the most fun I'd had playing guitar ever. I said afterwards, if you ever need a guitar player, I'd love to do it.' When the call eventually came, 'I was literally jumping for joy. I didn't have to audition. It was straight off to Australia for some shows.'
Eliot tells amusing tales about Grace at a 'gritty techno festival' in Serbia making the seven-piece Grace Jones band play a 37-minute outro to Slave to the Rhythm whilst hula hooping topless. 'Physically she is in incredible condition,' he says of the 76-year-old star, recalling a time she fell off a 12-foot platform mid-song. 'I spot her between the drum kit and bass amp, and she mouths 'Keep playing!''
'Grace's rider is to be admired,' he smiles. 'She's always got the best suite in the best hotel in the city. There's a party after every gig. I've left her suite at seven in the morning, thinking I'm finished, but she's in her leotard with her tennis racket out ready to destroy someone.'
In 2019, a medical emergency almost ended everything. Eliot collapsed on a family holiday in Spain. 'I was delirious, but I knew I was dying.' In the hospital, they removed part of his intestine. 'It was touch and go, quite traumatic, but I had this incredible will to get better. I had the feeling, 'I need to get out of this'. And this was everything.'
Eliot feels he received a second chance. 'All those cliches about life not being a rehearsal were resonating very deeply.' His 25 year on-off relationship with Murphy Williams came to an end, their children were at university, and Eliot was suddenly back in a world he thought he had left behind with Rialto, a man about London town, late nights and regretful mornings. 'I had a sense of switching off the autopilot and grabbing the wheel.'
Our interview started in the Groucho Club, scene of many Britpop hijinks, and wound up at the tiny Royal Exchange pub in Paddington, where members of The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite have been known to play DJ sets. Eliot seems to know everyone, from old rockers to young hipsters. When someone cheekily asks if Eliot is 'the oldest swinger in town' he shoots back 'No, but I'm gonna be!'
I've known the Honourable Louis a long time. He has a certain sweetness, a shy smile and easy wit, with a sensitivity that adds weight to his beautifully formed songwriting. I was a fan of Rialto in the 1990s, and their new album recaptures that same spirit of nightlife drama with an added yearning and pathos that comes with age, the feeling that everything is slipping away. I ask him what his expectations really are, this former contender, emerging from the shadows to give it another shot.
'I had a plan once, I was going to go to art college, then get a record deal by 24, and all of that happened,' says Louis. 'When I started making this record, I really thought I'd be happy with a few good reviews and a spin on 6 Music. And I've had that, we've got gigs coming up, and people seem excited to have Rialto back. That's really all it's about. To receive validation for your poetic self, that's the reward. To be heard.'
So will he ever be the poshest star in rock and roll?
'Oh, I could out a few others,' he smiles. 'There's definitely musicians from the last gasps of the aristocratic families out there pretending they were raised on housing estates. But I'm not naming names.'
